Abarbarian
Acruncher
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2005
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I decided to see what my graphics card is capable of as I would like to have the best graphics possible for gaming. I know that I will probably not need to overclock it for HL2 and such but I wanted to play around with it before I started playing more modern games.
The card is a PowerColor HD 4850 512MB. It has a nice ZeroTherm copper cooler which seems to run pretty quietly.
OS is XP PRO SP3.
Initially I started using the ATI Catalyst Control Center that came with the 9.4 driver. Seems that the newer 9.5 driver actually degrades performance. The automatic overclock function gave a nice little bump but I could not fathom out how to get control of the fan speed. When I exited the program I left it set with the higher clocks, this may be important.
So I downloaded ATI Tray Tools and had a small play. I stopped the overclocking facility as I was running out of time. So the higher clocks are not maxed out yet, I'll see how far it will go another day.
Q1) Do my fan settings look ok ?
Q2) How do I change back the BIOS GPU/MEM to the original clocks of 500/750 and does it matter if I don't ? As you can see I have manually set the current clocks to standard and set them to run at startup.
Q3) This is as far as I went oc'ing, will I get a better gaming experience in HL2 with these rather than the standard clocks ? If it makes no difference I'll go with the standard clocks.
Temps look ok to me at those settings. However as the testing was going on I was getting temps up to around the 61 C mark. The test has a small window with a rotating plane in it and runs for 20 seconds or so then increases the clocks, runs, increases, runs, increases. Overall it was running for half an hour or so so the card was reasonably warmed up. I guess I could have started at higher clocks but I wanted to take things one step at a time.
Comments and advice welcomed.
The card is a PowerColor HD 4850 512MB. It has a nice ZeroTherm copper cooler which seems to run pretty quietly.
OS is XP PRO SP3.
Initially I started using the ATI Catalyst Control Center that came with the 9.4 driver. Seems that the newer 9.5 driver actually degrades performance. The automatic overclock function gave a nice little bump but I could not fathom out how to get control of the fan speed. When I exited the program I left it set with the higher clocks, this may be important.
So I downloaded ATI Tray Tools and had a small play. I stopped the overclocking facility as I was running out of time. So the higher clocks are not maxed out yet, I'll see how far it will go another day.
Q1) Do my fan settings look ok ?
Q2) How do I change back the BIOS GPU/MEM to the original clocks of 500/750 and does it matter if I don't ? As you can see I have manually set the current clocks to standard and set them to run at startup.
Q3) This is as far as I went oc'ing, will I get a better gaming experience in HL2 with these rather than the standard clocks ? If it makes no difference I'll go with the standard clocks.
Temps look ok to me at those settings. However as the testing was going on I was getting temps up to around the 61 C mark. The test has a small window with a rotating plane in it and runs for 20 seconds or so then increases the clocks, runs, increases, runs, increases. Overall it was running for half an hour or so so the card was reasonably warmed up. I guess I could have started at higher clocks but I wanted to take things one step at a time.
Comments and advice welcomed.
