More woes with the X1950Pro

You know... I regret switching from Nvidia now. I should've bought a 7900 GT. I loved the X1950Pro when I first got it (replaced my 6800GT), but ever since the 7.1 drivers came out, I've been dissappointed with the card.

I used to be able to overclock it as fast as the ATI Overdrive would allow with the 6.12 drivers. But 7.1? Any changes I make I get screen flicker. So I tried ATI Tool. I had spotty results with it, but then I read on their website about version 0.26:

Well, crud. No biggie. I just bought an MSI 965 Platinum motherboard that supports Crossfire. Oh... there are different flavors of Crossfire, and the X1950Pro requires the 975X chipset, not the 965.

I know the 1950 chip is a ground up new chip, not just a retuned one. But seriously... what the heck is so different about this card that it seems like everything about this card blows when it comes to tweaking it!?

Big shocker that the newest 7.3 Cataylst drivers still give me screen flicker in any overclocking increment. Is it just the Sapphire flavor of this card? Do any other vendor X1950 Pro (256MB PCIe) cards do this?

*sigh* I just needed to vent...

Dont use catalyst control center for overclocking. It actually reduces performance due to loosening of memory timings. CCC got my memory up to 786 MHz and my performance dropped.


I overclock manually using:
- ATI Tray Tools low level overclocking for the core and mem.
- Patched version of ATI Tool to change memory timings


Results of F.E.A.R ingame benchmark

Stock
FPS
Min........36
Avg.......68
Max.......171
<25.......0%
25-40....13%
40+.......87%

Overclocked (648 / 722 ) + tight timings PCI-e bus @ 109MHz
FPS
Min........41 (+13%)
Avg.......76.2
Max.......195
<25.......0%
25-40.....0%
40+.....100%


My card doesn't OC as good as others. Some HIS and Sapphire users have reported hitting 660 + on the core and 800+ (1600 effective) on the RAM.

Ouuu... nice. Didn't know about that. Thanks yadge! I'll give that a shot tonight.

And looks like I'll need to look for these Omega drivers???

The newest ATi Tool beta should work fine. Just tick the "driver level overclocking" in the settings for x1xxx overclocking. Also, do you go into your registry to delete the old gfx card drivers?

All the 7 series drivers do this drop back to the 6.12 version these have been giving better test results than the 7 series(fps) and you wont have an issue with over clocking either.


This link i found on the forum has the old drivers



http://ati.de/support/drivers/xp/r [...] us-xp.html