help a lifetime nvidiot get the most out of an ati

[lumper]

your an ati regular who has used there cards for a while.

ok, lets say you just got home with your new 9700 pro
you installed it, it works.

no where do you go?

as an ati person i mean what is the process?
as an nvidiot i know what to do , here im lost.

what drivers? cats/omega, what are omega drivers? pros cons?

these mods regarding "mod your 97 to a 98" any good? easy to do? worth it?

what have all you ati owners been doing with your setups in terms tweaking?

like ive always owned nvidia cards, i know how they work what to tweak which settings and where they are, all without thinking about it.

but i am not familiar at all with the new 9700 pro i just bought.

i like it, and it is a nice performer in dx9 and d3d, just that i feel like an 80 year old lady who just put one in.
it works but i bet it could work alot better if i knew what i was doing.

so if you would please take a few mins and maybe list starting with what to load after install all the way to which settings to apply to benmchmark i would find that information timesaving and invaluable.

each time i try something on my own i get varied results from blue screens to low scores.

is there software to look at clock speeds and overclock?

heres what im lookign for:

1. drivers?
2. any other software ?
3. bios settings?
4. display properties settings?
5. overclocking techniques and warnings?
6. mods to soft mod a card to another cards performance or driver structure?

again lets say your a veteran ati consumer, had many ati products, you just went out and got the 9700 pro after owning say an 8500 since they came out, what would you be doing first last and in between?

thanx so much and i hope the ati's can help the nvidiot turncoats like me learn to appreciate there new hardware.
i kinda feel like a spy/traitor, lol only true loyalty is to performance.

i actualy went from all amd and nvida/mushkin combo's, to p4 ,ati, corsair, lol complete turnaround.

so far im happy. a little confused but happy.
thank you for reading

 

[coolsquirtle]

lol hope you have fun in the OTHER side of computers hardwares

Proud Owner the Block Heater
120% Nvidia Fanboy
Athlon 64......nForce 3, it sure sucks when you can't afford things. One day Operton Servers will cost less than $4000 so everyone can get one

 

[Willamette_sucks]

Some people like the Omegas, some don't. Some people will tell you they improve visual quality (fact or fiction? who knows.)
I would recommend you stick with the ATI drivers, the Catalyst 3.4s specifically, which yield the greatest performance for the 9700 Pro.
9700->9800 Pro "mod" was simply a tweak that gave the 9700 the 9800s driver optimizations, it dosnt change hardware or give you smoothvision 2.1 etc. (although it will say it in the menu). I heard that these optimizations were included in the Catalyst 3.4s for all cards, but that could be wrong.

The latest build of Riva Tuner includes this "mod", although I'm not sure Riva tuner will work with the Cat 3.4s (or 3.2s), it didnt for me.
For tweaking/overclocking I use Rage3d Tweak, which pretty much all ATI users do. Its got some good tweaks, and can oc ur card for you. One nice thing about it is that it has profiles, so you can have different tweak settings and different gpu/mem speeds for different applications by default.
Best BIOS settings would probably be the same as the best BIOS settings for your nv card.
OmegaDrive recommends turning OFF BIOS caching and Video BIOS shadowing and caching, but that just seems completely stupid and makes no sense at all (if someone coud explain it, and why it increases/decreases speed please do so, but it seems like it would decrease not increase performance).

Use the same overclocking stratagies as you would with any card, and as always additional/aftermarket cooling is recommended.

As far as BIOS updates for the card, from what ive heard dont bother, unless youre having problems that a new bios is supposed to fix dont get em. No performance increases should be in a new BIOS.



Long live ATI.

 

[lumper]

well i read the mod and see that it supposedly optimizes driver paths for the card, and the bios i looked at claims to allow you to run at higher clock speeds.

i still dont know if it is worth the trouble for little gains so i will probably pass.
i am grabbing omegas new drivers now, based on the 3.4 cats, they say tey too have optimazations to run a faster driver path.

i will try them and see what if anything is gained.

it says to uninstall your ati coontrol panel as it has its own, other than that i guess it says to select 9800 when given the choice and the optimazations will be loaded.

again there diffeent hardware cores etc.. so it isnt changing anything other than the driver paths.

thanx for the info, im like it on the other side.