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Radeon 9600 Pro Overclocking

Good things come to those who wait, and there is no doubt that the ATI 9600 Pro is not clock locked.

Introduction

Looking back on our latest review of the Radeon 9600 Pro, we found that there were some issues regarding the utilities necessary to test this card's overclocking ability. Mainly, the issue was the lack of any utility that could properly recognize and alter the default core and memory speeds for this specific graphics card.

The Utility

Yesterday we received an email from one of our readers that contained an interesting bit of information. In his message, he asked if I had tried using the new RadClock utility. This wonderful bit of software is currently only available for Windows 2000/XP users and provides them with a convenient overclocking tab within the traditional ATI driver screen. Those who are intrigued can check out the utility's website for more details.

The Results

With the new utility installed and ready to go, we began pushing the slider skywards. Initially, we approached this card like we would any other. The core frequency was raised in 5MHz increments and then initially tested for stability by running through 3 consecutive runs of 3DMark2003. Before long, we were jumping upwards in 10MHz increments to hit 500MHz with no hint of strain on the part of the graphics card. At this point, some serious doubts as to if the utility was actually working as advertised began to form. A few runs of 3DMark2001's Fill-Rate test were completed and examined. Sure enough, the fill-rate was increasing as the slider was raised. Incredibly enough, we were looking at a 100MHz core overclock and we felt as though we had certainly not hit the ceiling yet.

A couple of hours later, we were able to find the limit of the 9600 Pro's core. In the middle of 3DMark2003, the benchmark finally froze. Backing off by 5MHz, I was able to successfully complete a run of 10 loops of 3DMark2003. Now, the question of the day is, "What was the highest stable frequency?". A picture is worth a thousand words...

Needless to say, we were shocked by the incredible overclocking ability of this graphics card. With a stable core frequency of 567MHz, we were operating the card no less than 167MHz above the default frequency! With a simple movement of the slider within the drivers, the card was suddenly given an almost 50% increase in core frequency. Given the card's already high frequency, this is certainly an impressive accomplishment.

In terms of memory frequencies, it seemed as though the card had ample room to improve here as well. By default, the memory on the Radeon 9600 Pro was running at an effective frequency of 600MHz. As we saw in the review, the memory modules seen on this card are rated for 700MHz. Therefore, we were not surprised to see the card easily reach 700MHz and continue onwards. In fact, the memory modules ran completely stable up to a final frequency of 716MHz! With these memory frequencies combined with the insane core frequency, we were sure to see some dramatic improvements in the benchmark results.