What do you guys use to overclock processors and graphics cards etc?

Ronaldo7

Are they programs like Radeonator or do you need to know voltage and all that crap?

Also, if about voltage, where did u learn it?

Eurorunner

Try speedfan for overclocking

whosurpaddy

ive never really overclocked properly, and one thing im a little unclear about is stability. when someone is overclocking and says they tested for stability is this just booting into windows, monitoring temps, what. also what is a burn in test?

Creamy Goodness

people use Prime95 to stress their components to the max they leaev it running for about 10-24 hours to check for stability. then they play games to see if anything is wrong on the graphics front.

if not they go higher

if there's problems they lower their overclock.

quarryman

Originally posted by whosurpaddy
ive never really overclocked properly, and one thing im a little unclear about is stability. when someone is overclocking and says they tested for stability is this just booting into windows, monitoring temps, what. also what is a burn in test?

its important to know the difference between overclocking and booting into windows and stability. you can overclock your system and it may boot into windows fine. but if you stress the setup it may crash or reboot due to overheating etc.

for instance you could overclock the CPU and gfx card just fine and boot to the desktop. the gfx card is not being stressed by this. but after a few hours gaming it can go belly up.

as cr3mo says, you need to test the system by playing games or using prime95 (cpu and ram) or 3dmark (cpu, ram and gfx) for long periods to guarantee stability. its not uncommon to see people leave prime95 run for days. it gives a good guid to temperature highs and fan settings.

generally when overclocking its best to go as high as it will go to allow it to boot. drop down slightly below this and do a stress test. this is the area that is best stability vs speed.

whosurpaddy

got it now. thanks

Big Chief

but after a few hours gaming it can go belly up.

would putting the clock settings back down to manufacturer defaults get rid of this problem?

friend of mine had the following symptoms -

Picture is garbled and flickering when gaming. And randomly throws up pink dots and flickers some more (also noticed sometimes that it would just go crazy and show older menus and alphabets, although this was only seen a couple of times) with black lines appearing aswell, although it seemed to happen a lot more in the game menus rather than the actual games themselves. Never seen much problem on the desktop wise just when it came to rendering videos/games (games primarily, UT2k3, pro evo soccer 3, halo etc)

or is the gfx card screwed because of this?

think he tried putting it back down but still got the same symptoms, not entirely sure though...

Caliden

Originally posted by Big Chief
would putting the clock settings back down to manufacturer defaults get rid of this problem?

friend of mine had the following symptoms -



or is the gfx card screwed because of this?

think he tried putting it back down but still got the same symptoms, not entirely sure though...

well depends wat kind of card he has as those games are pretty recent and required a pretty up-to-date graphics card to get decent res on them.
i have halo and i can only run it in 800x600 with the details set to low, and shadows/decals turned off.
its a radeon 9200 btw

Big Chief

Originally posted by Caliden
well depends wat kind of card he has as those games are pretty recent and required a pretty up-to-date graphics card to get decent res on them.
i have halo and i can only run it in 800x600 with the details set to low, and shadows/decals turned off.
its a radeon 9200 btw

That card

quarryman

Originally posted by Caliden
well depends wat kind of card he has as those games are pretty recent and required a pretty up-to-date graphics card to get decent res on them.
i have halo and i can only run it in 800x600 with the details set to low, and shadows/decals turned off.
its a radeon 9200 btw

generally though gfx issues as mentioned be Big Chief are related to software and hardware problems. a weaker video card will more likely cause performance hits (lower framerate, resolutions etc)

or is the gfx card screwed because of this?

think he tried putting it back down but still got the same symptoms, not entirely sure though...

as a rule stability should be tested at stock speeds, for everything. only when you know that there's no issues at these speeds can you push it. best thing to do is to clock the card back. make sure the drivers are up to date. get dx9.0 and if necessary, re-install the games. run them again and see what happens. if the problem persists make sure all the advanced graphics settings are at minimum (AA etc).

if after all that there's no joy its probably more a hardware issue.

Mutant_Fruit

try getting newer drivers. Unless he was stupid enough to overclock it too much, and left it like that for a long time, i doubt he damaged his card. I know i overclocked my GF3 too much, but all i had to do was quit playing the game, lower the overclock, and start game back up.

Big Chief

Originally posted by quarryman


as a rule stability should be tested at stock speeds, for everything. only when you know that there's no issues at these speeds can you push it. best thing to do is to clock the card back. make sure the drivers are up to date. get dx9.0 and if necessary, re-install the games. run them again and see what happens. if the problem persists make sure all the advanced graphics settings are at minimum (AA etc).

if after all that there's no joy its probably more a hardware issue.

all he did was click the enhanced settings which left it at the speeds above, he thought the green bar indicated that it would be safe to do this and ran all games since he got it at this (which was only a few weeks ago), he did make one mistake where he put the core clock setting upto 500mhz by mistake but after getting system freezes and a few problems managed to get it back to the "enhanced" setting... its only in the past few days that he got the problems with it in games etc

any ideas?

oh yeh he reinstalled the latest gfx drivers (53.03 dets i believe), and directx9.0b. FSAA and anistorpic filtering are both set to off. It isnt a overheating issue as the GPU hasnt went above 42 degrees, and the system runs at a constant average of 30 degrees

quarryman

so is it at enhanced or safe settings now? i wouldn't worry too much about having set it high and getting crashes. if its clocked back to stock speeds again there should rarely be a problem. very unlikely there could bo anything permanent.

leave the settings at the safe point and get him to run some programs (try 3dmark2001) again. since the problem happens on a good few games its not a software issue being caused by the game. also since the drivers etc are up to date there's prob very little left to do software wise. do a search on gainward cards with this problem and email the manufacturer. if its a hardware fault its quite likely that it has happened to others, bad batch etc.

Big Chief

formatted and put back on win2k, and the problem seemed to have ceased but there was a performance decrease which i noticed. When going into dxdiag i noticed that AGP texture accelaration was "unavailable", it had been enabled in win xp fine (funnily enough the problems only started after xp was put on clean install and this setting was put to enabled.. i had noted that it hadnt been available before the first install of xp when it was on 2k either but performance wise it was very noticable) but 3d wise there was a performance increase (which was noticable) while on but the flickers in menu etc were there...

win2k was put back on and ran an "upgrade" to winxp instead of clean install and its showing up as "not available" still and had no problems (so far) with it doing none of the symptoms from before... but the problem is the performance decrease which is pretty noticable to say the least..

How could you fix this exactly?

bios update? latest VIA 4 in 1's?

need some pc guru help

system specs are -

Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra Mobo
AMD XP3000+
Geforce FX5900

there is also alot inside the machine but i imagined that the 400w psu would give enough power to run that -

CD-RW
DVD rom
80GB hdd
120gb hdd
2 case fans
floppy drive
cpu fan (cooler master aero 7)
GFX card
(think thats all)

www.gigabyte.com.tw is the mobo site but i couldnt see anything on there for bios updates for it? or maybe im looking in the wrong place...

someone said something about the AGP miniport driver to me last night, but unsure of that..

also someone asked me to check for the "AGP Fast Write" option in the bios settings but couldnt see that? the gigabyte site mentioned something of it but dont know if it was talking about my board, but it was an older board than mine it mentioned about it so i imagine its there somewhere (defo sure i never seen it though!)

please help!

astrofool

http://tw.giga-byte.com/Download/Download.asp?DownloadPath=/MotherBoard/FileList/BIOS/bios_7vaxpa_f3.exe

thats the bios for your board.

Install the via 4in1's, via AGP isn't recognised by default in win2k, it is in winxp.

Big Chief

Originally posted by astrofool
http://tw.giga-byte.com/Download/Download.asp?DownloadPath=/MotherBoard/FileList/BIOS/bios_7vaxpa_f3.exe

thats the bios for your board.

Install the via 4in1's, via AGP isn't recognised by default in win2k, it is in winxp.

would i be best to do a clean install of xp with that instead of just the upgrade that i ran? or would putting on that stuff solve that..

also how is it that you flashed the bios that time you were down ?

astrofool

www.viaarena.com <- download the hyperion drivers from there, they should fit on a disk.

The bios file should have instructions within it on how to install.

Big Chief

yeh downloaded them earlier today and put them on a floppy to take home with (the updated via drivers)

as for the bios file all it has inside it are 3 files -

"7VAXPA.F3"
"autoexec.bat"
"FLASH872.EXE"

no details on how to install it

astrofool

get a floppy disk (get two).

go to windows explorer, right click a:

click format

tick the "make disk bootable" box (not exact wording but something like that).

after it is made, copy the files u named above onto the disk.

boot the computer up and let it boot to the floppy disk.

Use the second one as a backup (i.e. do the same with it).

some gigabyte boards have a bios option to flash them, others u have to set to allow bios updates or not.

update the bios

then install the 4in1's

see what the results are like.

Big Chief

got 2 discs and put the files on, i did format them before hand but there was no option for "make disc bootable" or even anything remotely similar

my work computer is on win2k, should i need to do that yeh?

When i first power up the computer at the bios screen there is an option to "press f8 to flash board" or something like that, is that what your talking about?

OfflerCrocGod

Yes but if your MB is new enough you should not need to go into DOS to flash your BIOS you can do it straight from Windows. This should the trick the Live BIOS thingy.

astrofool

do that one^

Big Chief

ok d/l that programme to do it, gonna give it a try tonight when i get home from work

gonna do a clean install of xp aswell or is that not worth my while?

astrofool

can give it a go, u have no net access tho, so will be missing loads of patches and **** for it. MAKE SURE you have service pack 1 installed at least, and directx9b, as well as via 4in1.

I reckon it could still be psu related however, Caesium had exact same problem with a 350w psu and bought a new one which solved it. He was going mad with motherboard/graphics card etc. as well

Big Chief

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&sku=117905&p=&t=635&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=13&GrpID=10&cks=PRL

is the psu i have, i thought 400w would have been strong enough when i bought it, you reckon i need a more powerful one then?

[edit = all the stuff that has to power in my machine =

2 hdd's (80 gb & 120gb)
dvd rom
cd-rw
XP3000+ barton 512k
FX5900u
SB Audigy 2
illuminous lights at front of case
Floppy drive
2 case fans
CPU fan
ISDN Card (useless yeh i know with no telephone line )

think thats all

i got the 400w one for the purpose that i thought it would be able to run all that

astrofool

I really don't know, has anyone else had experience with q-tec ?

heh, tho looking here:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Q_Tec_139.html

they do seem to be cheapies

antec true blue here:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Antec_103.html

would probably be the best bet.

Ones with an adjustable fan control have some issues in supplying power, there was a big review of loads on them on anandtech a while ago.

gurramok

is the psu i have, i thought 400w would have been strong enough when i bought it, you reckon i need a more powerful one then?

Check the wattage total here

Yours looks ok, around 330w max.

My psu is the Antec 550W Truepower.
I need it as i use 7 hard disks with room for more among the usual stuff in a pc