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overclocking radeon 9550 256mb?

K

karmasore

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 1, 2005
Messages
68
hiya everyone,

i went out to circuit city the other day and picked up a radeon 9550 256mb. i know its not the greatest card but it was open box so i couldnt pass up the price (100 bucks even). now, after owning the card for a few days and reading reviews on other cards, im kinda wishing i wouldve just bought a 9800 Pro or something...but since i'm stuck with what i got, i might was well try to make the best of it so im wondering how overclockable the 9550 is...i'm a newbie at this type of stuff so any information would be appreciated...

thanks in advance!


-jeff (karmasore)


edit: oops, i suppose i should ask if i should just ditch this card and go for a 9800SE and try to overclock it to 9800 Pro speeds?
 
I wouldn't ditch the card. You spent your money, now play with it until the next generation of cards come out!

I don't know much about the 9550, but I think they are pretty good overclockers, once you "unlock" them.

Here is some information, including some modded Catalyst drivers:
http://www.techpowerup.com/softmod/
 
IIRC, the 9550 is just a lower-clocked 9600, so there's not really anything to unlock - you just keep bumping your clocks until something stops working right.
 
ooo that's such a great deal...a 9550 pro for 100 bucks?? hehe...newegg has 9600PROS for 90 bucks :) but hey it was @ local I guess hehe
 
ameoba said:
IIRC, the 9550 is just a lower-clocked 9600, so there's not really anything to unlock - you just keep bumping your clocks until something stops working right.
Click to expand...
Supposedly this is locked with all official drivers from Catalist 3.4 and up. The 9600 I had something like a year ago was the Pro though, so my experience with ATI's locking methods is rather lacking...

A friend of mine is about to be stuck with one of these for a good while (well, the 128MB "SE" model, but, on a card like this there isn't honestly much difference IMO.) I'm curious, just how overclockable are these and how much of a fight is it to get them overclocked? From what I've read, the core itself is the 9600 non-pro running at something like a puny 250MHz and the memory is usually designed for 400MHz or so. There's no way this person will be doing a bios mod, it has to be only software, so this limits things a bit more. However, they'll be needing all they can get out of it because one game in particular they play all the time isn't so great on ATI cards -- especially the 9600 series, I have direct experience on that. And upgrading the video card won't be an option for a good while at least.

I have a suspicion it will be a simple matter of getting the Omega drivers and then using ATI Tool to overclock, right? Is the core about as overclockable? I have a suspicion the memory is going to be a limiting factor here though. Is it slow enough to bring down the GPU regardless of it's overclock?

Sorry for the 20 questions. Just, it's hard helping out someone when I don't have direct experience with the particular card, only one that's vaguely close. I was going to start a topic just for that, but, it seems like it does kind of belong here.
 
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