Sunday 20 June 2010

Overclock ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570

If you have a laptop and it is running on the ATI HD 4570 with 512MB or 1GB memory, certainly you would wish that the OEM would have stuff a better graphics card inside, right? No fear! If you are thinking of overclocking the GPU, it is not difficult though. One word of advice is that I am not responsible for your actions!

Overclocking has been one of my favourite past time. In the early days, I have managed to overclock a Pentium Pro 180 to work like a Pentium Pro 200. I even managed to overclock the PP180 to 250mhz. Nontheless, it was quite tough to overclock surpass 200mhz due to the restrictions on the motherboard then. The benefit then was the menu responded much faster than before on the Windows 95v2.

As for overclocking the GPU, it is hardly a solution for it as you can always do so using RivaTuner to overclock and GPU-Z to reach out on your GPU's ID. Back then, I would be really happy if my pc is running on a Gforce TNT2 with 32MB of memory. Most of the time PCs would come with Intel's integrated graphic memory.

Bear in mind that I am talking about a desktop and nothing about a laptop. Do you know why? The reason is because the gap in performance between a laptop and a pc would be just too wide. In another word, at that time, people would not be able to play graphic intensive games on their laptops and the battery life would suffer too.

Fast forward fifteen years later, I have seen the gap in performance between a laptop and a pc have narrowed. Presently, you have similar graphics card for a laptop and also for a desktop with the only exception that the graphics card for a laptop would be more expensive and it is not easy for someone to change their GPU unless the laptop is using an MxM from Nvidia (Sorry ATI fans..there's nothing like Nvidia for you).

For the moment, let's talk about laptop GPU. Nowdays it will be very easy to find a laptop equipped with an ATI HD graphics card. This is far more reliable and produce better performance than the Intel integrated graphics card e.g. Intel GMA 500, 950 and so on. We are talking about discreet graphics card. One benefit of using a discreet graphics card is that the graphics card will not be using the system memory as it has its own dedicated memory.

Some of you might think that it is possible to overclock an Nvidia or an ATI HD graphics card on a laptop. Absolutely. You could overclock your laptop's GPU so long as you are just not too extreme in overclocking. Otherwise you might seeing artifacts and the GPU would just shutdown as a result of producing too much heat. I do have to remind you that if you are thinking of overclocking a laptop GPU, do it at your own risk.

Apart from that, why not overclock then? Go ahead!!!

In overclocking a laptop GPU, you do need a programme called RivaTuner and another software utility called GPU-Z. Download RivaTuner and install it onto your laptop but don't run it yet. Fireup GPU-Z and look at the Device ID which you could find it in the middle of the 'Graphic Card' tab. It should look something like this - '1002-xxxx'.

We are just interested with the 'xxxx' part. Now, get into the installation folder of RivaTuner and open a file called rivatuner.cfg. You need to use notepad to open it. Once you have opened the file, look under the heading of [1002], you will see a line of command which starts with RV710. RV710 is the chipset for your HD4570. At the end of the line, just add the device ID plus 'h' at the back of it...It goes like this - 'xxxxh'. Save the *.cfg file and then fire up RivaTuner.

The rest is up to you guys!!! Happy overclocking!!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

when i add the device id with h at the end .....on saving it says do you want to replace the original file...i clicked yes...then it says access is denied...