ok, now i have the radeon 8500 le. i have read about the pencil trick, but where do i get the software called "powerstrip"? is that what you guys use to oc your cards?

....the birds seemed to be calling him, thought caw....

Well you can get all kinda of overclocking utilities off of rage3d.com, which is a purely ATi site bsically or you can get some off of guru3d.com. Do you have the retail or OEM version? And what is it clocked at now? And what speed RAM does it have?

My firewall tastes like burning.

aahhhh yes, i remember that site. i have the "bulk" version. the speeds are 250/230, which i know is the slow one, but i just found that pwrstrip thing and oc'd stabally to 290 core and 340 mem. what other settings should i use? i have not tried the pencil trick yet.... should i bother? in pwrstrip there is an option to run the mem at max, should i? what about the smoothvision and aa settings? what do you suggest?

....the birds seemed to be calling him, thought caw....<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by tdean on 05/28/02 11:21 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Well do you know what speed RAM you have? Knowing that you'll know a general speed that your mem can run at. An overclock to 340 makes me think that you have 3.3ns RAM (1000/3.3=303) 340 mem is very good. If that's the fastest speed you can get to stably, then don't go any further. As for the pencil trick, I've heard of it, but don't know what it does or how to do it. The Smoothvision and AA settings will deteriorate FPS in games, but I'm sure that you'll be able to run games at 100-200FPS so a bit of that won't hurt. Just test and see what gives you the best performance/quality ratio.

My firewall tastes like burning.

Check your voltages before you do the pencil trick. If you're getting those high OCs with no problems, you probably don't need it. The Core should be around 1.75V, mem around 3.65V.

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