Couple of simple questions

[fantomfreq]

Hey guys! I'm sure you can answer my questions simply and without problems. I just acquired a compuer (this is the first one of my own, others have been family computers) so I can finally screw around with settings. The computer is pretty nicely loaded with everything except the graphics card. The stock card is only a Radeon 9200. I'm currently overclocking it to play the Doom III alpha fairly smoothly until I can upgrade to a 9800 Pro.
Anyway, will overclocking too much damage the card? How much is too much? Currently the card is overclocked from a 200 core and 165 memory to a 220 core and 185 memory. Does that sound like it will work alright? (It seems to make the Doom III alpha run A LOT smoother.) What in the world is artifacting? I have seen this mentioned before but have had no explanation. If this is happening to my card, will I know fairly obviously that this is happening? Lastly, I'm thinking about the MSI Radeon 9800 Pro which comes very highly recommended off of newegg and I was told can easily be overclocked to a 9800XT. Does anybody have experience with this card that they can share, good or bad? Thank you very much for your time and I hope to be a contributing member of this forum in no time.

[danrok]

Your current overclock on your 9200 looks fine to me.

Artifacts are something you would see on screen during 3d games when the video card is operating just out of its limits. You might see a few white pixels where they shouldn't be - just small amounts of garbage on the screen.

When overclocking it is very important to keep an eye on hardware temperatures. Anything which is running too hot is likely to fail over a period of time. Increasing voltages will increase heat output, so great care must be taken when adjusting voltages.

[Aedan]

Artifacts can show up in all sorts of ways, but as Danrok points out, it's generally pretty obvious when they're appearing. I've tended to find that they'll show up in a couple of different ways. The first is odd coloured dots appearing in random places, and they look clearly out of place. The other is where 3D surfaces have been drawn into wrong places, as the GPU core has corrupted it's working data.

[karbon86]

i have a 9800pro right now that i bought from newegg and it has worked wonders for me. After hours of testing incraments of overclocking I finally got to my best performance of 452 core and 770 mem. I also run this at 1.8v or i will get artifacts. I noticed if you don't max out the mem on the 9800pro you can really get the core alot higher. Now i have added OCZ heatsinks on my mem chips and artic silver5 on the stock hsf(which sucks). I am going to the store today and will problly buy a waterchill kit and will be able to maybe push it to 500 core. It all depends on how well cooled you can keep the core and memory and it will work. Also some boards simply overclock better than others of the same exact kind, its all up to you to find the limit for your board and then back it off a little to be safe.

[fantomfreq]

Thanks a lot guys. When the processor is overclocked just that little bit it makes a world of difference in the Doom alpha. I assume that it will allow me to get more out of the final game (when it comes out next month) until I can scrounge up enough money to get that new card I'm eyeing right now. I'm thinking that maybe the situation will be right next month, but I may have to wait until sometime in September. Anyway, I'll be back then (assuming I don't get hooked on this informative forum as it is.)

[Pitch]

Remeber, the final version will more likley be smoother and more stable than the Alpha.

[fantomfreq]

Oh yes, I'm not doing this because I don't think the final version won't run on my PC. I'm doing it because I don't want to wait for the final version to play and the thing was unplayably slow before overclocking that little bit. Also, you cannot change settings in the alpha version and since it was an e3 demo it is probably running at the best graphical settings that ID could produce at that time in production. As a side note I HOPE it's smoother and more stable than the alpha version because the version I'm playing is two years old and has lots of little glitches. Man I can't wait for that game to be released.

[Pitch]

Well they've had plenty of time to optimize it

[mandro]

Originally Posted by karbon86

i have a 9800pro right now that i bought from newegg and it has worked wonders for me. After hours of testing incraments of overclocking I finally got to my best performance of 452 core and 770 mem. I also run this at 1.8v or i will get artifacts.... .

What are you using to change the core and memory clock rates?

[fantomfreq]

It's an easy to use program called RivaTuner. It's got all kinds of options that you can change to your liking. Before I used it I needed to update to a modded version of the ATI drivers because ATI apparently made it so you can't overclock 9200's. Good luck!

[fantomfreq]

You guys have really done it now. I'm trying to see just how far I can push my processor before it maxes out. I should have figured that I would do this eventually, but not quite so soon. I'm doing this in conjunction with 3dmark03. I now see what you're talking about with the artifacting. I got a lot of it when I first tried to push it (and I pushed it waaay to far) but now I've got only a few and I believe it's getting to the point where I can run the card dependably at this speed. I'll update when the final results come in. It's actually looking like the highest speed I can push it will be fairly close to the speed which I initially picked out when I first visited these forums.

Edit: Whoops! I pushed it so hard that it restarted the whole dang computer. I think I'll give it a rest tonight seeing as though it's already 1:15. Good night forums!