Review/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

Doing the overclocking section already - WTF?

Well yes I am, the reason is simple, we see alot of reviews with millions of benchmarks and people tend to skip over alot of them just to get to the overclocks and the conclusion, I guess if you havent read this then ive still messed up but if you are then my theory is right ;)

The people who will buy the 9800 XT wont be running with low IQ settings, they will want the maximum image quality the drivers can provide and they will also want it at either 1280x1024 or more than likely as I do at 1600x1200. Lets get this very clear right now, there is absolutely no point in spending the money on one of these cards and running games at 800x600 or 1024x768. Go pick up an older 9700 pro or even a 9600 pro and save yourself the money. The more educated amongst you reading this will probably be aware the main reason for buying a 9800 XT is to up the eye candy at the highest resolutions. Ill show you the maximum clock speeds I was able to push out of the Visiontek at the bottom of this page but for now im going to dwell a little on an often overlooked part of gaming and testing - the driver.

When im benching over the coming pages ill be giving you results from the tests at the performance driver settings and at the quality settings - you will of course want to be playing the games at quality setting.

Are you a noob and dont have a clue what im talking about? nothing to be ashamed about, we all had to learn somewhere, and if you dont know the driver panel then you arent going to be getting the maximum performance from that new hardware. This is a breakdown of the ATI driver panel circa V3.9. If you find this boring, then scroll down to the overclocking section at the bottom of this page.

ABOVE: This is the driver panel set for performance settings (above) , these are the settings most people will benchmark at to get those high scores, so ive used this as an important part of the benchmark result settings. No one should be playing games at these settings on a 9800 XT and if you are then its either a: about time you changed it to the settings below or b: its time to think about upgrading the rest of your system - if your framerates are bad.

 

ABOVE: This is the driver panel for "quality" - this is the one you will be wanting for games. Of course there are certain times when for example playing an exceptionally taxing game at 1600x1200 these settings might even be too much for your hardware. Therefore if you click the "use custom settings" you can play with texture settings, mipmap levels and even try running anisotropic filtering at performance to gain a few FPS - its generally not that noticeable and a worthwhile modification if your rig is struggling. Dropping to 2 AA (or off entirely) is another option available, and at 1600x1200 sometimes its not that obvious when its off. Its pretty much game dependent.

 

 

Overdrive - what the hell is all the fuss about?

After playing with it I have absolutely no idea. In theory its a great addition, a self overclocking driver component that reads the temperatures on the card and overclocks higher when its cool and downclocks when things start to heat up, but does it work? well yes, and no.

Yes It works, but it doesnt work particularly well. After spending several hours running tests - none of which incidentally are even worth posting, ive came to the conclusion as its stands right now, overdrive is a waste of control panel space. I never saw more than 1-3 frames extra more in most of my testing and only scored around 100 points more in 3dmark2001se and about the same in 3dmark2003- and ive 7 case fans and system temps of under 30c even with all the hardware in the case.

Sure I can hear ATI saying "well its easy to use, you just click a button". But I could argue that the results are so poor that even clicking that button is a waste of time. I would rather spend an hour working out the exact safe maximum overclocks for the particular card with a well established solid application such as Powerstrip or Rage3dtweak. Perhaps 5% of users who buy a 9800 XT wont have a clue about overclocking at all and find the overdrive option useful, but im sorry I just cant see that happening. Thank god for powerstrip.

 

Overdrive in the best setting available: "off"

 

Overclocking, the traditional way:

Powerstrip, what a great application. easy to use, versatile and great for overclocking. very similar to Rage3dtweak but with more options. Only nagging thing is - if you dont pay you get a very irritating popup. Thankfully ive paid for it long ago so my hair loss was minimsed for the purposes of this review.

The stock speeds correctly reported on the XT: 412 Core and 365/730 for the memory.

After spending much time testing the card pre-review and running endless loops of 3dmark2003 nature test and certain online artifact testers, the maximum overclock the card would hit was 473 core and 404/808 ram. At these speeds the card would safely run for hours on end with not a single glitch, dot or artifact whatsoever, actually alot higher than I expected, especially considering this is straight from the box. Is this safe? well it depends, ATI wont tell you "sure fire it up to 480mhz" , nor do they condone it, but you are increasing the risks with your hardware if you push it to its absolute limit. I play it a little safe, so I backed off a little to 470 core and 400/800 ram. It gives the card a little "play" and the minor drop shouldnt effect the overall scorings. Those of you into water, ive seen some insanely high speeds with XTs, but for now im happy with this.

Great overclock for stock cooler: 470 core and 400/800 ram

Its also worth mentioning that these figures arent a given, meaning you could buy one of these cards and it could overclock alot lower, its a luck of the draw when you purchase. some guys on the driverheaven forum have only had 425/370 overclocks. On a more positive note you could get lucky and get one that overclocks even more.

 

Next: 3dmarks