9700 overclocked, cooling question

River

if you overclock the 9700np to 9700pro speeds, there should be no reason for additional cooling, right?

and, if you can overclock even farther, what would be the maximum one could go without adding additional cooling?

thanxz
River~

Zardon

this is a very open question really. it depends on some factors.

firstly, case cooling, the temps inside your case and the quality of the ram on the card.

Every card is also a little different, some non pros just fail the pro status by a few mhz, others fail by a more considerable margin.

a few friends I know have non pro 9700s and one can hit 330 core 330 ram (higher than a stock pro!) and the other can only hit 315 core and 310 ram, both with approximately the same rig cooling.

when attempting to overclock, increase both core and ram timing by 5mhz increments and test with 3dmark2001 nature test. if it hard locks you have pushed the core too high, and if you see sparklies, dots or lines or any other kind of graphical corruption you are pushing ram too hard and either need to downclock back to your previous setting or mod the card with extra cooling.

have you got a 9700 non pro, and have tried overclocking is that why you ask or are you just curious?

River

i have the 9700tx (nonpro) and have already flashed warp's 9700nptx bios, and took the card up to pro speeds 325/310 and had no problems but did not run 3d mark on it yet.

naturally am really concerned about cooling/damage to card, that's why I asked if I took my non pro up to pro speeds, would my cooling be ok?

and another question, when I flashed the bios and got back some info via RadEdit it said this:

R300 Infineon DDR bios, does that mean my memory is the 3.0 Infineon?
thanxz
River~

River

have overclocked my 9700tx, ran 3dmark2003 tests, and here's what I have.

at stock speeds (original bios-core and memory both at 263.25), then after flashing bios with the 9700txnp bios the stock speeds showed core at 270 and memory at 263.25.

i then raised both speeds up to stock 9700Pro speeds (core 325, memory 310) and started 3dmark2003, but right away in Wings there were good sized flashing triangles, so stopped 3dtest and started lowering both speeds till no artifacts with 3dtest. then played around with lowering memory speeds and upping core speeds till I found what was stable. core speed now at 339.75 and memory speed now at 288.00. I also ran 3dmark tests with reg tweaker controlling the graphics settings; and ran original bios and tweaked bios tests, testing "optimal performance" "optimal quality" and "at default" settings. Surprisingly to me, the ati default settings provided me the highest overclocked scores, as compared to original bios scores below.

results of original stock bios results of tweaked bios
core speed 263.25 core speed 339.75
memory speed 263.25 memory speed 288.00
3d score 3968 3d score 4614
cpu score 430 cpu score 431
fill rate single 1269.1 fill rate single 1468.5
fill rate multi 1909.0 fill rate multi 2322.8

So my questions:

is this a good score after OCing? and can my stock Dell Dimension 4550 (P4 at 2.4ghz, 512m ram, Radeon 128 9700tx) handle the cooling at these speeds?

I've read here where core speeds are more important than memory, if you want higher scores. is there are formula or another way to know how much to lower memory speeds and up core speeds to find the best setting?

thanxz much
River~