Underclocking the videocard on the 9600

[plucky duck]

Anybody tried using the Omega driver's Radlinker to underclock the videocard? I tried to set it all the way down for both core/mem and the screen went crazy with random blocks everywhere. I shut down and rebooted. Didn't think underclocking it would cause such a reaction.

Does underclocking it help to prevent heat and conserve battery? Or does it do nothing at all?

[hmphargh]

because the gpu is designed to operate w/in certain specs, i doubt underclocking would significantly reduce heat for non-gaming applications (and gaming would just suck) additionally, i'd think that reducing the clock below the minimum powerstep setting or whatnot would not cause a great savings in battery power.

[jamesmccain]

is it possible to overclock the video card? if so what program?

[hmphargh]

it is, but i wouldnt reccomend it on a laptop...heat problems will kill your machine. i think the omega drivers can (not sure) if not, you can use a program called atitool (http://atitool.ocfaq.com/) i used it on my desktop (8500LE>8500+) not sure if it'd work on a mobility chip though

[nenarek]

I have played around with underclocking a little bit. If you don't set the clock speed extremely low the system will still work. I didn't do any tests to see if I would get better battery life but I would imagine that you would definitely generate slightly less heat.

I have also played around with overclocking. The tools that I used were radlinker and atitool, which comes with the Omega driver set. You can also get the utilities separately. If you download radlinker it will install a tab in your display properties.

The stock clock speed of the 9600 in my Thinkpad T42 is 320 Mhz and I was able to clock it to over 400 Mhz. I didn't see any immediate problems with stability and it definitely boosted my Doom 3 frame rate by a few frames per second.

The best way to overclock would probably be with atitool. It can automatically increase the clock speed in small increments while it tests for artifacts in a 3d image that it generates. It can do this for both GPU and memory speed.

Another post in this thread listed a link for atitool and radlinker is available here: http://www28.brinkster.com/chrisww1942/