ATI X1800XL Video Card Overclocking Guide

[killswitch83]

hmmmm.......the temps sound a bit high to me, but normal for stock cooling.......personally, and I am an overly safe OC'er, lol, the highest I would like to see my temps on a gfx card around the mid to upper 60's, low 70's at highest......but I'm pretty sure I'm about to be corrected because I've not been able to do as much OC'ing as others in here, lol. Remember, heat is your enemy!! Just like everything else in a PC.

[-mogwai]

awesome review, as usual

i was wondering, what was the vapochill hooked up to during the tests? i'm curious, because i probably never plan on buying a vapochill and don't want to get my hopes up on overclocking this card if i buy it at some point in the very near future.

[smartguyjosh123]

hey dragon... this should help you out.

The x1800xl ships with three memory types... 1.4, 1.6 and 2.0 ns. I guess I got lucky with the 1.4 ns.

1.4--- 1400 mhz rating
1.6----1200 mhz rating
2.0----1000 mhz rating

You must have gotten the 2,0 ns somehow. Its up to the board manufacturers as to which is shipped with the board. I'm pumping 2.25 to the core, and if I go above that atitool warns me that the voltage is too high. So i back off...

But yea, I cant even pump more than 1.150 to my core or my computer freezes... Idk why it does that.... it sorta goes hand in hand with what killswitch said, that noo two are alike and that we both got screwed on the cores....

I do remember reading that the very first x1800s shipped with regular R520 cores, and the later ones shipped with the faulty core which coulnd't get above 550 or so without leakage problems...

We must have gotten the bad cores....

But yea, pump your memory voltage to 2.2 or 2.25 and do some stress testing... You should be able to get to 1200 or 1250.... : )

[smartguyjosh123]

I'm about to hit submit order on newegg for this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835118117

Should I?

[sbohdan]

I'm about to hit submit order on newegg for this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835118117

Should I?

nop. gvblake is doing a mod on his card that came to him with the alu. version of this cooler and it's pretty much worthless. this is the copper version so there might be 1-2C difference at most. not worth it.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopi ... 8&start=40

[smartguyjosh123]

I bought the fatal1ty version of the all copper zalman cooler, only because it runs at 3500 rpm opposed to the cheaper one's 2800 rpm...

I personally despise paying extra money for the name, but it is actually better performing.

Old IDLE temps with the stock x1800xl--- 62-63C (OCed)
New IDLE temps with zalman fatal1ty---50-51C (OCed)

Old LOAD temps with stock x1800xl--- 87-88C (OCed, NO LIE)
New LOAD temps with zalman fatal1ty--- 67-68 (OCed)

It truly impresses me how much lower my load temps are... many times its lower than 68... for those of you with an ati card and atitool you know how stressful that artifact tester really is... the results of load temperatures are after 30-40 minutes of staight looping of the artifact tester, at essentially complete max temps...

Whomever doubted aftermarket cooling... check this one out, I love it...

As a reference, I'm pumping 1.125 to my core for 570, and 2.25 to my memory for 738 (1476 effective). These numbers, if you haven't read my other posts, grant me 9100 on 3dmark 05 and 53 fps in the FEAR test at 1280x1024 4X AA 16X AF.

[gvblake22]

WOW, nice results you got there with that Zalman josh!

Getting back to the article, I just got time to browse through it. Very nice writeup. I thought it especially interesting to see how increasing the core overclock gave more performance improvement than increasing the memory overclock. At least in the synthetic 3DMark benchmarks.