Can Be Possible? ATI RADEON 8500 OEM Engine Clock 230 Mhz!!!

[tico_21]

ATI RADEON 8500 OEM

Powerstrip shows me that the engine clock is 230 Mhz.
Can be possible?, Some error or something?

[tricktx]

The 8500 my brother has clocks at 250/275 and with powerstrip can be pushed to around 285/305 with some extra cooling. 230MHZ seems a bit low but check with your board maker because there are two types of ATI card. Build By.... and Powered By... Built by. means it has come straight from ATI while Powered By... means that a company like Jetway or Supergrace has but the Ati chip in their own board resulting in varied results from the original card some are better some are worse

[bigparsnip]

Yeh, unfortunately, only the cards whech ATI sells as retail box sets come with the 275/275 bus speeds. You should be able to bump up the speeds, but you may need to alter the voltage to the chip and memory, as it has been lowered for the LE and some third party cards. I remeber seeing somewhere how to do it, I'll have a look and post the URL.

[bigparsnip]

here it is, jow to mod a 8500 and it explains about the speed settings and limitations too, http://www.xcl-clan.com/articles.php3?id=29

[BobyJo]

Remember ATI builds the hi-end cards, Hercules will be building them in the future. Starting Feb 2002, The OEM market is selling the cards that the core has a fault in it and because of that fault, will not clock at 275, or 250 so they are clocking them at 230/230. This 230 card does not perform nearly as well as the other two. The 250/250 performs well and is sold as ATI made, (or at least some of them are) They are ATI OEM rated.

Then you have the top of the line, 275/275, these core's passed all tests and will perform at this speed without any problems. They have 3.6ns memory also which is very fast. Some of the aftermarket vid cards also have the 3.6ns memory but are clocked in thier bios at 230/230. Some of these cards can be flashed to the 250 or 275 bios and work great, then some will not work at all.

[RussianBlue]

this is another interesting article.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/pmradeon2/index.html

[JeffD]

Hi tico_21,

This is my first post to this forum. I'm a longtime member of http://www.rage3d.com...THE place for information on ATI products.

I also own a Radeon and a GF3 Ti200 running right now in similar systems.

What you have is the lowest end 8500 available. As some other posters stated, Powerstrip is likely reading correctly.

I would be cautious about trying to bump up the 230 to retail speeds. This is because simply overclocking doesn't seem to cut it with these cards. It seems that default voltages are low, BIOS settings are changed and with slower memory chips are used on these cards.

Consequently, these cards are the least friendly to overclock. Yes there are BIOS flash tricks and ways to bump up default voltages (see rage3D for details) but BEWARE....these 230 cards are touchy. I know of three people who have ruined their cards attempting to do this so YMMV.

Keep in mind a 8500 at 230 is still a fine card that can run any game out there today....and look very good doing it. Sure, you may not be pulling in the fastest framerates.....but who can tell the difference between 120fps and 160fps?

Finally, your only real issue I see is if you thought you were buying a retail (275) or LE (oem, 250) card and got the 230 card instead. In that case I would RMA it and get the correct one.

Good Luck

Regards,

JeffD

[tico_21]

Thank you for all the information you gave me.

[thehandler]

Does this mean that in all cases where you have an ATI 8500oem version running at default 250, that it is set up with a different bios than the retail? If so, what exaclty is accomplished by flashing to the retail bios. I mean what does that get you in the way of performance? Likewise, what is or how much is gained by increasing the voltage? And finally, would you say that a person must flash the bios, mod the voltage, and oc the engine and mem speeds for a synergistic affect in order to get retail performance from the oem? Thanks, Mike

[JeffD]

Hi thehandler,

First, according to many posts on Rage3D there are pretty big differences between a oem 230 and a oem 250 card. The 230 card generally uses slower memory so as to cut costs even further (partly why a oem 230 is the cheapest of the Radeon 8500s). Also, folks have much better luck overclocking a oem 250 than a oem 230 whether they are able to get as high as 300/600 depending on a few variables such as memory quality.

To give some information on the questions you posed.

--BIOS flashing is generally needed since it seems ATI has changed the bios from retail to oem in such a way to make it hard for people to simply overclock a oem and get retail. One assumption is ATI changed the RAM-timings in the oem BIOS. Another assumption is is ATI somehwat locked the bios using a lower voltage so if you attempt to overclock a oem to retail speeds you get artifacts since there's not enough juice to power the card at high speeds.

-- So as you can see modifying the bios alone may give you an opportunity to hit retail speeds but if you're weary of this activity than just using a overclocking tool with the voltage mod trick may get you some overclocking capability as well.

Finally.....remember that all the tweaks in the worlsd won't get you far if your card has slow, inferior memory. Example is some 230 oem cards have 5ns memory (500 rating). This means the card is already near max speed so any overclocking is sheer luck. If the card had 4.5ns or 4ns then your overclocking overhead is much higher if default speeds are 500.

Hope this helps

Regards,

JeffD

[thehandler]

Very big help and thanks Jeff. My question is this, how do I tell which memory mine has? Is it listed somewhere? Also I assume I will know the defualt speed as soon as I fire it up and run my Radeon Tweak utility to see where it defaults too? THanks Mike

[JeffD]

Hi thehandler,

Determine memory by physically checking your card. Look at the memory chips and read the markings. Example:

Hynix 134a
bunch-o-numbers- 36
Korea

In this case we have Hynix (formerly Hyundai) memory with 3.6 ns speed chips. 3.6 ns memory is rated to 554 Mhz speeds. The higher the number...the slower the memory.

Regards,

JeffD

[thehandler]

Hey Jeff, Just looked at my new 8500 and it says Hynix 144A instead of the 144A HOWEVER, it does in fact have the long number ending in a -36. I am really thrilled about this. My only problem now is that my Radeon Tweaker program is giving me and error message every time I start it and it will not let me set the clock speed. It tells me there is an error in the set_clock.
It also shows a speed of 140mhz. But the heck? It worked great with my 32DDR??? Mike

[JeffD]

Hi thehandler,

That's good news indeed since your card has the capability (at least from a memory perspective) to be overclocked quite a bit.

Now for overclocking.

It sounds like the rage tweaker you're using is not capable of identifying and overclocking the 8500. Maybe it's an older version. Let me suggest getting:

--Powerstrip

or

--Go to Rage3D and get the latest version tweaking/overclocking utility for the 8500

That should do it. Just remember if you start overclocking and start to get artifacts, snow, etc. AND you're well below retail speeds then it's likely a BIOS flash or the upping the voltage trick will be needed.

Regards,

JeffD

[thehandler]

Thanks Jeff for the info. I will go to that site asap and get the right utility. Say just as a matter of interest. On my old system with a 32DDR radeon and an overclocked 600 Duron CPU, I had Mark 3D 2001 Benchmarks of 3054. Last night I installed the new 8500 and without any tweaking and without even knowing how it is set up or running because of my lack of a tweaking program, I had a new bencmark of 5700. ALthough that is not up to the 7-8,000 range that many people are getting, it is a heck of an increase over what I had. I am looking forward to tweaking the card and installing my new xp-1700 that also came in the mail.
If I can get a bench in the 7000 range I will be happy. Take care and I will keep you posted, Mike