I came across this article here that describes how to tweak a Radeon 8500 card to become faster.
So my question is has anyone else tried this? And what are my chances of screwing up my Radeon card? I have the OEM version and would like to get a little more speed out of it if possible.
Oohhhh! I get to use the new smilie:
:dubious:
Exactly how are you supposed to do this?
I’ve seen this before; some GPUs have a series of metallic dots on the top - these are essentially jumpers as they are connected to the actual chip inside the package; in order to link the jumper, you just join the dots with a soft pencil (graphite is sufficiently conductive)
(Cite)
Do what? Didn’t you read the article? 
I would advise against modding it. If you don’t know what you are doing and you fark up, you’re out one card.
If you really need th extra 5 FPS you’d get, just OC it normally to 290-300 (assuming you can keep it cooled effectively). OCing it too much can give you lousy performance, frequent system lockups, and/or destroy the card.
Out of curiosity, what type of processor do you have, how much RAM, what is your FSB running at, and what type of cooling measures are you using?
Hard|OCP didn’t find much in the space of OCing the 8500
including stability issues.
I did it on mine and it works. You absolutely have to have a volt meter or you will screw up the card. Do small increments at a time. I just added about 0.2V or so on mine and got another 10MHz out of it.
Markus
Currently I have a 1Ghrz processor with 192mb ram (Im upgrading to 384mb soon). Not sure what you mean by cooling measures, nor am I sure about the speed of my FSB.
General rule of thumb concerning overclocking: if you’re “not sure what [they] mean by cooling measures” don’t attempt any overclocking until you are.
:smack:
Sorry, didn’t see the link. It was early.
My bad.