Hi! Has anybody ever overclocked a GF FX 5500 w/ 256MB (on AGP8x)? How far can I go? and does staying within the 'safe' overclocking zone give any noticeable results? Well, I know that some FX5500s come without any active cooling. I have one fan there + a fairly big heatsink. And since the 5th series doesn't have thermal sensors, it's hard to navigate in the dangerous world of overclocking... especially GPU overclocking. Any experiences with this?
That's really going to vary from card to card. Company A may not use the same RAM as company B. The best way to OC is just to go up in small increments, test it hard, such as looping 3DMark overnight (if not longer) at a high resolution to make sure there's no artifacts (RAM clocked to high on card) or lock ups (GPU clocked too high). Basically, it's a bit of trial and error. You should start to notice problems long before you run into temperature issues.
I don't think you'll notice major increases in performance but I'd shoot for 310/450MHz and see if that's stable then you can keep chipping away until you have some issues. I wouldn't worry about 3d mark, I'd just run some games right off the bat. If you see a lot of weird occurances, usually in the form of tearing/sticking textures or "patchwork" and discoloration you know you've gone too far. RivaTuner is a good program to download to get a hold of a lot of gpu related tweaks.
Thanks for the ideas! I'll try that RivaTuner out, Exfoliate! Thanks also for the opinion, Big B! And by the way - how much better is the X1300 over the FX 5500? And I saw that the (Club 3d) X1300 had the same (even a tip higher) specs than a (Club 3d) GF 7600 GS. Could that be true? :dry: Thanks!
The X1300 is ATi's budget card, and nVidia's competition for it is the GeForce 7300. The next step up is the X1600's which seem to be retooled X700's. The sole exception here is the X1650 XT. Unlike the rest of the X1600's, it actually goes up against the GeForce 7600GT (and typically will hang in with the GS at worst). The X1300's may have a similar clock speed to the 7600GS, but they have 4 pixel pipelines instead of 12, which the 7600's have. The GT just is clocked higher than the GS. Additionally, half the X1300's I saw had a 64-bit memory bus. Some did have 128-bit, but that still won't bring it up to speed with 4 pipelines. The 7600's both have a 128-bit memory bus.
