Overclocking and getting "grainy" results

[Bonksnp]

Ok, so my friend got this new laptop that runs everything noticably smoother then mine and it makes me want to cry, so what's a guy to do? Overclock.

I have a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1.8 Ghz & a ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (128 meg) running in my laptop.

I OC'ed my proc to just over 2.0 Ghz with ClockGen. I ran Prime95 to test stability and it seemed to be holding fine. Although I'm not sure how long I need to test it, I left it on for a little over an hour and got no errors. I decided this was good enough for the proc so now I want to get my videocard up to speed. I downloaded ATItool and found max core/memeory timings and set those. Although I'm not completely positive I did that right either (I got a message saying something about making sure the core doesnt get any artifacts, otherwise it will be inaccurate; so I brought the core back down to stock speed then found max memory)

Anyways, After OCing both proc and videocard I ended up with 2.01 Ghz and my 9700 running at 505/222. According to ATItool I should be seeing about 10 more FPS. So I loaded up Quake 4. Menus and everything looked the same, but the gameplay was starting to look "grainy" and I didn't notice any diffrence in FPS.

Am I wishing upon a star here hoping that I can get games to run smoother?

 

[taqueso]

I'm not sure what you mean by grainy exactly, but if it doesn't look the same as it did before you overclocked (besides more fps) - something is not right. Back down on the speed.

 

[Talonz]

Back that video card down if you're having trouble like that. ATI Tool should give you a reference, it's not perfect.