ATI OVERDRIVE: Not in This RADEON!

ATI’s OVERDRIVE technology can cause your graphics card no harm, but it can hardly make you happier. Practice suggests that RADEON 9800 XT and 9600 XT VPUs rarely receive any perceptible performance gain from this technology (it dynamically adjusts – overclocks – the frequency of the graphics chip depending on its temperature). It’s much simpler and more efficient to overclock the VPU manually (i.e. using special utilities) rather than hope for any bonuses from 13MHz higher chip frequency.

People at The Inquirer found out that ATI OVERDRIVE needs a special chip from National Semiconductor, the LM63, to work on RADEON 9600 XT-based cards. This chip is installed on graphics cards “Built by ATI”, but it is missing in RADEON 9600 XT solutions from other manufacturers (we didn’t find it in our GeCube RADEON 9600 XT “Extreme” either). Anyway, do you really need OVERDRIVE if you’ve got faster memory instead?

Just take a look at the diagram above to make up your mind about OVERDRIVE: if it matters to you more than the advantages of fast graphics memory.

Overclocking, Noise and 2D Quality

GeCube RADEON 9600 XT “Extreme” graphics card sped up to 640MHz graphics chip and 400MHz (800MHz DDR) memory in our overclocking tests. The memory did work at its nominal frequency, which is a rare thing with many RADEONs. The system worked stably at those frequencies, without any visual artifacts, but another 10MHz above that resulted into an inevitable crash. As you see, the new PCB design is absolutely perfect. I think the overclockability of this card will draw the attention of those overclockers who are looking for a mainstream product in order to squeeze the maximum out of it.

The noise from the cooling system was not too loud, but anyway you can hear it against the noise produced by other system components. As for 2D quality, the image was sharp in all resolutions including 1600x1200@85GHz. Overall, we found no problems with this graphics card at all. There is only one thing that should be checked: how fast is this card with its 700MHz memory?