ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking
by Derek Wilson on October 8, 2003 3:02 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Turning up the Heat
With any system that involves overclocking (factory regulated or otherwise), we are going to want to know it’s stable. To try to push the system, we ran the Final Fantasy XI benchmark on a loop for about 2 hours, followed by a run of X2 at the highest settings possible, then we hit it with GunMetal and finished off with TRAOD.
Tomb Raider is our most intensive test here, as when all the options are set all the way up, with no compression on anything, 6x AA, at 1800x1440 we squeeze out just about 9 frames per second.
Everything ran smoothly and beautifully. There were no stability issues or problems with the graphics.
Of course, that brings us to the next question we have to ask. Since the card overclocks itself based on heat, how does it respond when we heat it up?
To test this, we ran our "kill -9" TRAOD test a couple times to raise the temperature of the card as high as we know how to get it without a blow torch. We then reran the Aquamark3 and Unreal benchmarks. Here's what we saw:
The Aquamark3 score dropped from 47.62 to 46.78
The Unreal score dropped from 135.42 to 132.47
Of course, the performance should never drop below that of the stock clock speed, as the chip will never clock it self that lower than that. What this does mean is that as you are playing a graphically intensive game, your cards performance increase from overdrive will degrade over time.
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Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
BFG Asylum nVidia FX 5950 Ultra 256MBGrab it @
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&...
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 14, 2003 - link
From a technical / technological aspect I find the Overdrive technology very interesting.I equate it to my background in automobile tuning. Carburated engines had a set timing. You set that timing sso the car would not knock and ping. Electronically controlled fuel injection allowed using different timing / fueling at different load point to extract the most from the engine. Same engine could maybe get 10% more power. Now you see very detailed EFI, where the engine computer advances and retards timing dynamically depending on octane, load and many other inputs, always giving near maximum possible output.
I see this as the beginning of the same trend in graphics cards. It makes sense.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 14, 2003 - link
This review was done with stock cooling. Those cards get hot real fast.Since Overdrive stops overclocking when it gets too hot, I would have like to see some form of ultra cooling on some cards like (at least) water-cooling.
The way I see it, Overdrive it pointless.
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
ahaha @ 57Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
How long before we can buy a XT watercooled out of the box? I think that's the question remaining now.Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
cause your an idiotAnonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
why i cannot run halo i have a radeon 9000Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
52 - That is exactly what Anand did. They ran a benchmark - recorded the results - then ran another benchmark, and so on. That sounds like they did let it cool every 10 minutes or so. Unlike a real user.50 is partially right. The bus speed improvement when OC is enabled would give much better indication of what the XT is doing over some statistically ambivalent fps count.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
The HL2 stolen code setback seems to be perfect timing. Nivida has to be loving it, the bastards!The only good Dx9 game that should have been out with the Radeon XT would have put a nail in Nvidia.
Now Nvidia has breathing room. Lets see if they squander it.
Right now the clear winner for Dx9 is the ATI XT. That is if you are comparing the XT to the 5900 and not some vapour hardware.
You made the charts, take a look at them. ATI is clearly better at DX9 PS2.0. All the new DX9 games are not going to run better on Nvidia. The benchmarks for HL2 were already shown.
I don't see why you can't recommend a card at this time?
If you had 10,000 to bet which card would you pick to be the best dx9 card? If you bet on Nvidia your gonna be 10,000 poorer.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
I agree, its much better than the last review. Thanks for the Fps in Tomraider.Do you know what the cap is for the XTs auto overclocking?
Wonder what it would do if you put water cooling on the ATI?