Would it be safe to overclock my video card? (1 Viewer)

[ChuckM]

I have a radeon 9500 non-pro card that looks just like the powercolor radeon 9700 pro card. They have the same pcb, heatsink and fan. My question is considering the are both esentially the same would be safe to overclock my 9500 to a 9700 pro without adding any fans or heatsinks.

 

[Tekara]

it is always safe to overclock as there are always a certain amount of overhead built into the chips manufactured. the best route for a good reliable overclock is to overclock the video card by a small amount to either the core or the memory (one at a time) and then run a iteration of 3dmark or play a very intensive (low framerates) game for about 15min.

what you will be looking for in these games is texture corruptions and artifacts. corruptions are easy to spot and you'll know one when you see it, artifacts are a bit different, it will look like "snow" small glitches only a few pixels big that pop up on the screen. the harder you overclock your card the more of these two things you'll see.

if your 9500 is on a red PCB I would try looking into a soft-mod for it to mod it into a 9700 non-pro.

yes overclocking does reduce the life of your video card, but by the time it dies if you did a safe overclock and treat the card well. . . I'm pretty sure you'll be dead too

 

[NickSo]

Are you overclocking it, or doing the 9500-to-9700 software mod? if you're doing the mod, i doubt you'll need extra addons to it to keep it cool.. its not running the chips or anything at a higher frequency or higher than it can handle, its just opening up additional pipelines so data can flow better...