ATI 9500 Pro overclocking.

Now that we've got the P4 overclocked we need to look at other places to improve performance. The only two left are memory timing and the video card. So, let's do the video card.

I dug around and found that the 9500Pro is now a few generations behind the latest and greatest. But no matter, it should still perform quite nicely with the latest games. What I did find however is that the 9500Pro model is NOT overclockable. The video BIOS is locked at a specific speed.

Why would they do that? Common logic is that either it's dangerous to overclock this card, or that ATI knows people overclock and they don't want folks doing so. I imagine they'd rather you just bought the more expensive model. Since users are reporting overclocking without damage to their cards we can assume the later is the case.

But it's not so simple. You can't just alter the BIOS, you need to replace the whole thing. So, you'll need a new BIOS, in addition to some other things:

• Modified BIOS
• A clean MS-DOS boot floppy disk
• The ATI Bios flash utility.
• A program to adjust the speed of the card (to overclock it).

I have provided copies of the files here so you don't need to dig for them all over the 'net. Please know though that I will NOT be keeping updates here, so these are only the latest as of today (August 4, 2004). The 9500Pro is an older card so I seriously doubt new versions of this stuff will be coming out. But you never know.

The Steps:

1. Get a blank floppy and format it for MS DOS boot. To do this, insert the floppy and r-click your A drive and select Format. Make sure you select the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk."
2. Next, unzip the contents of ATIFLASH.ZIP onto the floppy disk. You need all the files.
3. Next, copy the 9500WARP.BIN file to the floppy disk. You're putting everything on the floppy, get the picture?
4. Now reboot your machine with the MS DOS disk in the drive. Your system will start up in MS-DOS mode. For you kids, this is how computers looked all the time. You just had an A:\ prompt and that's it. But let's move on.
5. Back up your existing BIOS and flash the card. This step makes a backup of the current BIOS of your ATI 9500Pro video card. It is important. At the A:\ prompt type:
1. atiflash -s 0 original.bin -- that's a zero. This makes a backup of your original BIOS, called original.bin
2. atiflash -f -p 0 9500WARP.BIN -- Also a zero. This puts the new BIOS onto the card.
6. Reboot your computer, removing the floppy.
7. Install RadClocker, following the directions. Please read all about RadClocker here. Essentially what this does is allow you to overclock your card only when you run a specific program. By creating a special shortcut, your card will be overclocked to the specific settings you want whenever you run this shortcut. Very cool!