Archive for June 25th, 2003
A few interesting things…
Wednesday, June 25th, 2003
Star Wars Galaxies comes out tomorrow… but my dad HAD to get the free 5-8 day shipping from Amazon and not next-day air… geez…
Well, no matter, because we don’t have DSL yet anyway. The modem and router package comes tomorrow (theoretically). That should be nice.
I bet you think my life is nothing but computers… not entirely true. Half my life right now is also these darn puppies we have. I have to take care of them when my parents are at work… which is most days. And yesterday we had this sick little girl… the total intestinal flu type thing. We thought it might be parvo, so we had to quarantine her and watch her and wash everything with clorox… but today she’s doing much better, and upon taking her to the vets, we found that it wasn’t parvo, but probably this poison plant she might have eaten, or just coxidia, which is bacterial and stress-induced. She’s fine now, though, thank God. And the pups are leaving next week! Woohoo! (yeah, they’re cute and all, but after 8 weeks, you want to see them leave and get your life back to normal (lol) again).
Okay, back to computers. I installed PowerStrip (really really cool video card overclocking, setting, optimizing, and tweaking utility) a while back with my old video card (ATi Rage Fury Pro 32MB), and I didn’t find much use for it. Probably because I could only overclock that card about 10 MHz before it started corrupting the display and such. Well, with this new game coming up, I was all over the video card and system tweaking thing, and I remembered PowerStrip and installed it again.
First, a little about my new video card. Well, not new exactly; I’ve had it for six months, and I bought it when it was old, so really, it’s old. It’s an ATi Radeon 8500LE 128MB DDR. I got it for 99 bucks; a really good deal at the time. It’s been a great card ever since, playing everything at smooth framerates, and it’s even got a nice score of ~ 8100 in 3DMark 2001 (as opposed to my old card, which got a measley 1252). One of the coolest things about this card is that it is identical to the regular (non-LE) Radeon 8500 except for the clock speed and memory speed. So, theoretically, if the card can be clocked at the non-LE clock speed, then you have yourself a regular Radeon 8500 128MB for just $99. But I had never tried it before…
So, I installed PowerStrip, and I went to overclocking this card. The card is defaultly clocked at 250MHz GPU/250MHz Memory (DDR => 500MHz). I read somewhere that the card uses 3.2ns DDR memory, which should really be capable of 333MHz speeds. So first thing I tried was 250/300. That failed miserably (resulted in a wonderful flattened-checkerboard patterned display corruption). So I started from the bottom as I should have in the first place, running a JediKnightII Botmatch to test each clock. 260/260 worked fine, then 270/270, and 275/275, which is the default clock speed of the Regular (Non-LE) Radeon 8500. So, if I had stopped there, I would have had the same thing as that card. But I kept going, because it was perfectly stable. I hit 280/280, and 285/285, and 290/290… I didn’t think it would go any farther, but I tried 295/295 just for kicks, and it worked beautifully. So I decided on a happy medium of 285/285 to keep as the default. A full 35MHz overclock… not bad for a graphics card.
So that was fun. I’ve already OC’d my CPU (AthlonXP [palomino] 1700+) from it’s default 1.47 GHz to 1.67 GHz stably… but I don’t really have the cooling to keep it that way. So I’ve been running it at default. Besides, I hope to get an AthlonXP 2400+ sometime in the future (they’re down to about $80 now). The extra 512MB of RAM I got was definately the best computer investment I’ve ever made; I’m still amazed at how much faster everything runs. Well, that and I keep my Windows squeaky clean 
Okay, that’s enough. I think I’ll go try to hit 300/300 Who knows? It might just work when the clocks are synchronous… ::