ATi Radeon 9600 Pro Overclocked!

ATi Radeon 9600 Pro Overclocked! - Page 3

The ATi Radeon 9600 Pro
Overclocked & Ready To Rock...

By - Marco Chiappetta
April 18, 2003

Head-to-Head / Performance With Serious Sam: TSE
Kill Some Aliens With Croteam's Shooter!

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter tells a similar story.  When overclocked, the Radeon 9600 Pro outperformed the 9500 Pro at 1024x768, with and without AA enabled.  At 1600x1200 with AA disabled, the 9600 Pro was again able to surpass the 9500 Pro, but once AA was enabled at this high resolution, the 9500 Pro held onto a small advantage.

These overclocking results certainly cast the ATi Radeon 9600 Pro in a much more positive light.  With no modifications made to the card whatsoever, we were able to raise core clock speeds by 119MHz, which equates to a 30% increase.  The on-board memory also overclocked very well, climbing 22% from a stock speed of 300MHz (600MHz DDR) to 366MHz (732MHz).  If these results are typical with boards sold at retail, ATi is going to win over the hearts of many "tweakers" out there, who live to tinker with their rigs.

So, why would ATi release this card at "only" 400MHz / 300MHz when there seems to be so much headroom left with this product?  The answer: Yield.  The Radeon 9600 Pro should be a very high yield part.  We don't have any solid numbers from ATi, but we would bet that the vast majority of cores coming out of TSMC will run at 400MHz, or below, like the parts that will eventually be used on the Radeon 9600 "non-Pro".  Having more useable parts, means less wasted cores and faster production of boards...which means higher profits for ATi and increased availability for the consumer.  If all this holds true, prices should drop relatively quickly, which would make the Radeon 9600 a much more attractive product.

There are a ton of folks just like you in HotHardware's PC Hardware Forum...Go There Now!

 


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