Vostro 1400 overclocking, its crazy.

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?projectType=14&XLID=0&UID=11564172

wow. thats without overclocking. i applied artic silver 5 to the cpu and gpu.
installed xp and the newest drivers. i cant seem to over clock through drivers. im going to try ocing with bios. i wonder what score i am going to get if i score 1543 without overclocking

 

guys I'm having a really f-ed up problem with my vostro1500's 8400m GS.
I upgraded my stock drivers to 158.22 for XP,
(uninstalled the drivers, ran driver cleaner in safe mode)
Now I cant overclock with RivaTuner or ATI Tool at all, it keeps going straight back to default clocks right after I shift the clock sliders.
WTF IS WRONG??!!
I've checked some other threads and people are having the same problem.
There's got to be another option besides a complete reinstall of the OS.

 

how do I do that? also, how do i view your 8400GS BIOS?

 

try a different driver?

 

That's a zip file, just unzip it and read the bios file (.rom) with nibitor.

Regarding saving your BIOS, you can try nibitor or ATItool. But others had problems with reading the graphics card BIOS in Vostro 1400. Can you please try and post your experience here?

Thanks!

 

WARNING TO ALL XP USERS:

You Cannot overclock if you upgrade to any of the 15xx or 16xx series drivers without flashing Bios. In my opinion it is better to stick with the stock 10xx drivers and overclock, than it is to upgrade to newer drivers without overclocking:

3DMark05 Scores:

158.22 - 2576

156.66 - 2587

163.16 - 2579

163.76 - 2642

101.28 (stock) overclocked from 400/400 to 425/460 (barely any overclocking) - 2722

I'm not sure if the overclocking problem applies to everyone on XP, but I know it applies to most people based on extensive forum research on my part.
If anyone has found a newer driver thats overclockable please let me know.

 

mrg666, what clocks have you reached in your vostro that you are comfortable with that do not push temperatures too high? I've been fooling around with ATI Tool and it seems like I definitely won't be able to reach anywhere near >700 mem clocks, same problem as you. Last night I put my clocks at 440/500 and got 3dMark05 of about 2850, not much temp increase, definitely looking to go higher.

 

I set the 3D clocks at GPU=600, RAM=550. GPU can go a little further to around 620 but 630 gives artifacts. So I settled at 600 to be safe. Temperatures reach maximum ~65C while 3DMark06 runs several times (Rivatuner, Atitool, and Speedfan read the same). Memory, unfortunately, do not overclock as good as reported by Vostro 1400 owners. 550 RAM frequency is again 10-20 lower than the maximum safe frequency I can go. But even the default memory clock in my Vostro 1500 is 400 which is lower than 500 of Vostro 1400. I might try to increase 3D GPU voltage to 1.2 (using nibitor/nvflash to mod and flash BIOS) and see how temperature and overclock limit scales. But I can play HL2-EP2 at 1280x800 everything high and 2XAA with this overclock. HL2 Lost Coast video stress test has 48fps with the same settings. So i am satisfied for now.

Hope this helps

PS: I think your GPU clock can go above 500.

 

Awesome, thanks mrg666.
yea it looks like we're at the same limits.
I've used ATI Tool to individually test my max core and memory overclock limits.
Looks like my max core is about 685 when keeping mem at 100, and
my max Memory is about 530 when keeping core at about 165.

When overclocking both at the same time, I reached a safe level of 655/519
that got a 3dMark05 score of 3342. The core can go a little higher, but I don't think theres any point because it looks like performance is mostly dependent on the memory clock.
My temps peaked around 71. Is the fact that I get artifacts at such a low limit (compared to everyone else on the vostro 1400) due to my gpu possibly being damaged or due to some type of limit put on th 8400m GS in the vostro 1500???

 

Your gpu is not damaged. I think the graphics card on Vostro 1500 is different. On the positive side, although 8400m-gs in Vostro 1500 can not go as high as 1400, bios mod works in Vostro 1500 while nobody, that i know, succeeded this in Vostro 1400 yet. So, you can still run your graphics card overclocked with the latest drivers in Vostro 1500 which give better performance in 3D compared to Dell drivers.