![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , April 17, 2003
- Author:
- Sean Pelletier
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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.
Test Setup
Seeing that this article focuses on mid-level and mainstream cards, we did not think it wise to benchmark them on a 3GHz system, but to rather instead benchmark them on something more "mainstream", such as an nForce2 motherboard featuring a new Barton 2500+ processor...
Platform for all the cards: MSI K7N2G-ILSR, Barton 2500+ (166Mhz FSB), 2 X 256MB Corsair TwinX XMS3200 C2 (Dual Channel DDR333), Maxtor 40GB ATA/133. Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0a.
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro - Operating at default clock speeds (400/300) and overclocked to (567/358) using WHQL driver version 7.84.10. "Quality" settings selected within drivers for all options.
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro - Operating at default clock speeds (277/270) using Catalyst 3.2 drivers. "Quality" settings selected within drivers for all options.
Gaming Benchmarks
With such impressive overclocking results, it would seem that the Radeon 9600 Pro should be able to easily defeat its competition in each benchmark in convincing fashion. Since there is no need to carry the same depth seen within the full review, we will sample three of the top benchmarks to see how our overclocking efforts translate into performance increases. Keep in mind that the review sample used here is a sample production card and not a true off-the-shelf product, your mileage may vary. From what limited knowledge we do have of these VPUs, it does look to be very possible that many of these 9600 Pro's are going to be solid OCers.
3DMark03
Viewing the results from this benchmark, we see that the Radeon 9600 Pro has received a considerable boost in performance from the overclocked frequencies. Whether it be in the polygon-rich game tests or in the shader-specific benchmarks, the overclocked 9600 Pro easily walks away with the performance crown in our comparison.
As one of the most critical areas with regards to performance, the large increase we see in the card's fill-rate is a welcomed sight. In terms of single-texturing fill-rate, the overclocked settings provide a boost of over 200MTexels per second. However, the area which receives the most profound increase from the overclocked frequencies is the mutli-texturing fill-rates. Here, the number jumped up by almost 600MTexels per second.
Splinter Cell
Within the review, we found the Radeon 9600 Pro to be the clear-cut winner in Splinter Cell's benchmark. Once we raise the frequencies of the core and memory, the Radeon 9600 Pro's performance is taken to a whole new level. To simply say the card now wins the competition in convincing fashion would be an understatement.
Previously, we found the Radeon 9600 Pro running away with from the pack in this specific map. If that is the case, the overclocked Radeon 9600 Pro has jumped in a taxi and is now a few miles ahead. Hands down, this particular benchmark illustrates the largest performance gain of all as the overclocked card can even outperform its competitors running at 1024x768 when it is running at 1280x1024!
Unreal Tournament 2003
As was the case in the review, the numbers illustrated within these graphs was collected using HardOCP's UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1.
In a benchmark which was earlier dominated by the Radeon 9500 Pro, the overclocked Radeon 9600 Pro is able to level the playing field and take a slight lead. Referencing the plot-line for each card, we find the two are almost the same as they nearly lie on top of the other.