How far can u overclock a radeon 9800 pro

i have a 9800 pro which i want to overclock. could i possibly overheat/damage it because it has the stock heatsink/fan on it?

 

If I o/c my 9600np to the max limit with stock cooling, it would fry in about a second. The thing about overclocking is that there is a high chance that you will damage a component. You do it at your own risk, although you can get substantially better performance from overclocks. To determine whether you would damage the card with stock cooling, I'd need to know which brand it was made by.

 

all cards overclock differently
maybe a specific make of a card is known that on average it overclocks more but it is by no means definite

the best way is to just take it in little steps, as with all overclocking
if at any point you experience any instabilities it has gone too far
unfortunately (i may be wrong though) i dont think that 9800pros have a on die temp sensor like the GeForceFX cards do, so just be sensible

 

its the real ati card, made by ati

 

only the XT Ati cards have temperature sensors. You can always rig up a thernal probe onto the heatsink though

 

I've had 2 9800pros... One MSI, and One Hercules. One could do 440/420, and the other 450/380.

 

download ATi Tool : http://atitool.ocfaq.com/

it'll tell you how far you can overclock, artefact free

 

What a great little program!!

 

ok i have the program now how far can i overclock it?

 

Dued.

 

by using the program... where it says "find max core" and "find max mem"

not hard really, c'mon man you could have worked that out by just opening the program and having a play around with it.

 

is there a nvidia version of this program?

 

the nVidia drivers can do an auto overclock for you, from 52.16 onwards i think
the newest 56.56 drivers will auto overclock on the fly for you

 

Hey, I'm sort of in the same boat as this guy, same vid card etc, when I'm running the test, for the vcore, the number goes down..shouldn't it be going up if its testing how fast it can go, correct me if I'm wrong please.

 

It depends if you're starting from default timings or not.. PLUS.. it goes up until artifacts are present.. then backs off.

 

I understand why it would go up, but I ran it for 1:20 hours and it still was going down, I guess I'll just leave it running overnight and see what it did, also just to make sure, I click the 'set clock' button to enact the settings I was just testing right?

 

It's because errors dont show straight away. It will up the clock until it finds errors.. then repeatedly run tests for longer and longer periods until it finds more... then lowers the clock. It will run forever.. it's up to you to decide when it's done it's job. I ran it for an hour and used the figures it gave me after that time period.

If it's lowering the clock after 1 hour still... then it's still finding errors.

 

that's correct, it basically scans for artefacts on the small image, and as soon as artefacts are found it resets the timer and lowers the clocks down slightly

 

Oh, ok I get it now, but how do I know when its done scanning and at the right number, will it just stop going down? or tell me something?

 

Just go til you feel it's run for long enough for your satisfaction, 1 hour is enough I'd say