[markponcelet]

I am finding some evidence that underclocking the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 in my Macbook Pro may increase stability in games that are run under bootcamp.

I want to try setting my core and memory settings to 310/278, but I'm having some strange problems with ATITool. When I run it, it offers clock speeds of 1314.56 for core and 1399.37 for memory. No matter what I put in there, the settings always revert to these numbers.

Now, I *am* using ATITool beta 0.25. 0.24 causes a crash for everyone that tries it, as far as I know.

I know people are successfully changing their clock speeds. Anyone here had any success?

(Also, ATITool does sometimes turn off the backlight on this macbook (using the 1.1 bootcamp drivers.) If you run the application and your screen goes black, just reboot. (I'm typing this with a black backlight right now. ;-) )

[markponcelet]

I have solved the problem! 0.25 beta 15 didn't cause the hard crash that the full release 0.24 did, but even the log showed it wouldn't set the clock speed to the values I entered. I downloaded 0.25 beta 13, and clock speeds were set properly (as far as I can tell).

[markponcelet]

I figured out the problem. For anyone interested, the problem was in the version of ATITool I was using. 0.25 beta 15 does not change the clockspeed properly. (It also causes the backlight to turn off on my computer.) Using beta 13 worked flawlessly.

Ops, delete this thread if you want. []

[silver]

Hi, just wondering how things are going with the adjusted speeds? are things better with games and such? hows the overall stability? last but not least have you tried overclocking the ati and if so was things still working right?

sorry for all the questions but Im planning on doing the same but wanted to get more feedback on stability and performance.

thanks
silver

[markponcelet]

There are some games that will work without underclocking. And I don't really see a difference in games when I run under the reduced clock speeds. However, stability is another issue. In affected games, I get a crash within seconds or minutes. Once I underclocked the card, I had no crashes. So far, I've played Eve Online for about twelve hours with no problems. The only crash I had happened when I forgot to underclock this morning.

Bottom line is, when underclocked, the card works like it's supposed to. You'd have to do some benchmarking to know if this underclocking has any negative impact on frame rates or whatnot.

Mark