Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

[madstokie]

Presently, because of financial reasons, im having to stick to my old
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis 256MB. Can anyone advise me on how to get the best out of this aging card?

Presently I'm running:-

Windows XP SP2
ASROCK K7S8X motherboard
Athlon XP2800+ (2.17 Ghz)
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis 256MB Shader 2.1
Soundblaster Audigy
768 MB DDR 333
80GB Hard Disc.

This system has been tweaked using the guides on here, and most unnecessary stuff disabled or removed.

One thing in particular I can't understand is on DXDIAG under display.

The section "AGP Texture Accelerator" is either disabled or not working because it's grayed out. Does the graphics card have this feature? Or how do I activate it, ive already gone down the motherboard route and recently patched it.

Lastly, how can you tell the AGP Aperture of your motherboard?

Any help on any of these matters will be greatly appreciated :D

Thanks

Madstokie

[mangle-u]

Re: Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

i think i am having same prob w/my sysytem. c my post 4 system spec's. maybe 1 of us will get an answer huh? i will chk back w/ya. good luk

[madstokie]

Re: Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

Well best of luck to us both then :D

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

Make sure you're using the latest video drivers, however not the ones from ATI.com. Use the latest softmodded ATI drivers. These will allow you to overclock your 9600, which is normally locked. Make sure you uninstall your current drivers before installing the softmods, and make sure you reboot after every installation/uninstallation of any video drivers. Since you have AGP Texture Accelerator grayed out, you'll want to reinstall your motherboard/chipset drivers. You can find them here. Uninstall your video driver, sound driver, and chipset existing drivers; then, install the updated drivers, followed by the softmodded Catalysts, followed by the Creative sound driver. And again, reboot before and after each installation/uninstallation.

From the same web site you got the softmodded Catalysts, download and install ATI Tool. Open it up and start overclocking. You can use the automatic feature, which will take forever but find a good spot (from which you should clock down 5-10MHz). You can also overclock manually, taking small jumps until you see artifacts (yellow dots) in the 3D rotating cube to the side (the program will also tell you when there are artifacts). Clock down 5-10MHz from whatever spot you find you can run without artifacts. Also, be sure that you have a stable setting on the core or memory, respectively, before moving to the other.

You can find your AGP aperture in the BIOS.

[madstokie]

Re: Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

Thanks very much for the help! :D

Would you recommend updating the bios too?

Ive checked the differences between my 2.3 version and their 2.7 version, it only seems to be processor changes theyve addressed.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Please advise me about my Radeon 9600

It couldn't hurt, but it probably won't help much.