[SugarCoat]

Found this little hidden peice of news.

Several weeks ago, ATI sent out a few product advisories claiming that AIB partners were free to overclock any GPU in the the ATI X1000 series. Last year, ATI made a similar statement about the X1800 cards, but this is officially the first time ATI has openly sanctioned overclocking any current generation board.

ATI's memo claims manufacturers who "creatively brand" hardware to reflect overclocked values may risk getting cut off from ASIC allocation -- so we shouldn't have to worry about X1650XT Super-Extreme-Edition cards flooding the market anytime soon. However, like with NVIDIA cards, we may see more batch-by-batch overclocks on specific cards. NVIDIA has an open policy on manufacturer overclocks, claiming that the manufacturers are responsible for RMAs. On the other hand, they are also are allowed to push clocks as far as they want.

ATI will still impose partner specific "Shipping Clocks" on all of its cards. For example, your PowerColor card may have a higher Shipping Clock than a GeCube card from the same ASIC. The end user may still use tools like Catalyst Control Center to overclock to a maximum clock specified by ATI. Of course, using a third party tool like ATITool is not sanctioned by the company yet, but there is nothing that would prevent you (the end user) from using that either -- yet.

Interestingly enough, the documentation claims that ATI partners are not allowed to underclock ASICs -- those attempting to get creative with passive cooling will still have to underclock on their own.

ATI claims thermal damage is strictly not covered by RMA and that blown internal fuses in the GPU will notify RMA teams if the GPU has been stressed too hard.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1528

ASIC : Application-Specific Integrated Circuit

[nintenho]

Is it even worth it to buy fans to overclock and risk the video card? You could just buy a better card. A few of my friends have fried their computers doing that.

[martrox]

I've been overclocking both CPU's and videocards since the the original Pentium days....and I've never lost a cpu or videocard...... If you use a little bit of commen sense you shouldn't ever have a problem.

[IgnorancePersonified]

Yeh ditto on the cpu vid card failures. Haven't had one and Whilst I don't push stuff as much these days everything I have owned has been overclocked if it's possible.

I was going to raise a seperate thread but this one will suffice.

How Low can you go with underclocks? Reason I ask is I have an x1800xl: default is 500/500 but that's a joke so I use Atitools to underclock in 2D mode to 250/250. I tried 200/200 and then watched an avi and the screen went blank so much so that the monitor reported no signal then 5 secs later the machine rebooted Maybe just a coincidence but maybe not.

Is thier a minimum speed in watch a vid card, in this case an x1800 derivative, ceases to be able to do it's stuff? I still would have thought 200mhz was fast enough to do normal 2D work?

[superguy]

I have noticed 3rd party overclocks is becoming less an advantage for Nvidia lately.

For one the 7900GTX max overclocks from a third party is 50 mhz. this keeps going down as a percent versus 7800GTX (430>490). In fact, they seem to struggle to hit that. Most 3rd party overclocks of 7900GTX are less. Only one that I know of hits 700 mhz.

Basically Nvidia is having to push the "official" clock so close to the limit to stay competitive, it's limiting the AIB overclocking right now.

That said, it's still great stuff in the 7900GT range..

[OpenGL guy]

Originally Posted by IgnorancePersonified

Yeh ditto on the cpu vid card failures. Haven't had one and Whilst I don't push stuff as much these days everything I have owned has been overclocked if it's possible.

I was going to raise a seperate thread but this one will suffice.

How Low can you go with underclocks? Reason I ask is I have an x1800xl: default is 500/500 but that's a joke so I use Atitools to underclock in 2D mode to 250/250. I tried 200/200 and then watched an avi and the screen went blank so much so that the monitor reported no signal then 5 secs later the machine rebooted Maybe just a coincidence but maybe not.

Is thier a minimum speed in watch a vid card, in this case an x1800 derivative, ceases to be able to do it's stuff? I still would have thought 200mhz was fast enough to do normal 2D work?

Since these are high speed transitors, it is possible to clock it too slow. For example, I believe the memory chips can't be clocked lower than one half their rated speed.