The 2600Pro - Abusing her to the max
Hello guys :)
Maybe some of you seen it already, but we're doing a contest based up the Ati Radeon 2600Pro, with 256MB of DDR3 Memory, PCI-Express from the brand 'peak'. I've almost finished a few mods , but i'm here to kindly ask what can be done more.
First of all i would like to show you guys what i've did in the past time with the card.
The card comes with a default voltage of 1.3V for the GPU, and 1.80 for the memory. The memory is from the brand samgsung and locked at 1.1ns and runs at 700MHz. In theory this should be a maximum of 900MHz, but with even a voltmod it's hard to bypass the 850MHz. The Core is clocked at 600Mhz.
The cooling is a default heatsink with a solid base, from peak.
http://jvanderlinde.net/contest/images/114882.jpg
This is the actuall card. The whitemarked spots are the capacitors that are changed with ones with bigger values. The original values are:
Quote:
5X Sacon FZ 1500uF 6.3Volt ESR=0.022 Ripple=1800
3X Sacon FZ 470uF 16Volt ESR=0.036 Ripple=1150
and replaced with
Quote:
5X Samxon GC 2200uF 6.3Volt ESR=0.010Ω Ripple=2900 mA
3X Samxon GC 1000uF 16Volt ESR=0.012Ω Ripple=2220 mA
At higher voltages it should be some little more stable for the card itself, so it might help at higher clock-speeds. After that i was done with soldering the caps, here's the result:
http://jvanderlinde.net/Blog/pics/116347.jpg
I made a mistake cause i needed to put the on the other side of the card.. This position won't let me use my VF1000CU cooler cause the caps are too high. I'm going to resolder these caps again but then on the other side of the card ;)
Since the 2600Pro does'nt come along with a PCI-express Powerconnector, and only takes power from the PCI-express slot which is technically capable of 75watts, we thought making our own boostermod would help:
http://jvanderlinde.net/contest/images/boosterback.jpg
I have'nt done this yet, but i'm surely going to solder this part. My motherboard does have an seperate Molex-connector on the board itself for PCI-express cards. I'm not sure if the boostermod would work. Again, if i'm changing the caps towards the other side, i might get in trouble with the boostermod.
For the voltmod we use a 250K'ohms resistor that will allow us to raise the core voltage up. There's no way you can adjust any of this by bios, neither does memory timings do, so we're locked at hardmodding. After applying this GPU voltmod some people encountered an "OVP" that will shut down the card if it's higher then 1.4Volts (overvoltage protection). At first sight there was a sollution to bypass this, by also tricking the OVP-thing by a resistor:
http://www.techzine.nll/f/g/15255php6d4cXD.PNG
However this is kinda clumsy considering you have to increase the voltage in order to let the mod 'think' its at the correct voltage. Since i had'nt any resistors left i removed the SMD just for fun.. to see what happend. The card did exactly the same as it would do with a voltage higher then 1.4v, then i bridged the SMD making the OVP completely go away, and crank the voltage up to 1.6V lol :up:
http://tweakers.net/ext/f/FJNXDFuYsI...xRbns/full.jpg
This is an example-picture , not the actuall. But basicly it shows on the left the VGPU-mod with the resistor, and the second SMD onto the right needs to be bridged in order to completly vanish :D Some say it's dangerous consindering it would shortcut but hey my card is still running for 2 straight days now since that i applied the 'bridge'-mod.
My current cooling due to the capacitors being too high, is a modded VF900. The original fan is removed and a 6000rpm fan has taken place.
http://www.dumpjeplaatje.nl/images/XPf47643.jpg
This is just the test-setup yet, in order to test out the temperature and all. The actuall benching has'nt begun yet.
So.. The basic rules are for this contest
3dmark 2001, Nature scene only, standard settings, 1024x768 etc etc, Lod-tweaks are allowed, any type of system is allowed, modding of the crystal is not allowed, as long as you post a clear screenshot of GPU-z, CPU-z, 3dMark, and some extra it's alright.
I'm going to use my own rig for this setup. Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ at 2.6GHz (i'm going to push it up towards 2.9GHz)
4x512MB A/vdata PC6400 @ 580MHz (super-memory! :up: )
Western Digital Raptor 36GB , 10.000RPM, A Nforce 550 based motherboard (Gigabyte M55S3) and ofcourse a stripped windows XP installation.
Do you guys have tips left after reading this for the videocard with overclocking? I know watercooling or Dryice is a sollution but i did all that stuff away a while ago. I found myself a little more safe with plain aircooling. I might use the cold days in my barn , to get the lowest temperatures. Is there anything that i can do yet?
I know i have'nt mentioned Vmodding the memory, but for some reason increasing the voltage of the memory it only gets worse, and we don't know why. It supposed to be 1.1NS (900MHz) but we can't even get it up that fast :(
Tips? Some guy already had 1005MHz core with these cards .. We ordered a batch of 22 cards from my work.
