Sapphire X300SE - HyperMemory and Overclocking
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Hyper Memory
This card is the first to offer ATI’s HyperMemory, a way for the video card to use system memory. While it could have been done with AGP cards, the bandwidth would have bottlenecked it to the point of being useless. Thanks to PCI-Express, we now have the bandwidth. The 128MB HyperMemory model has 32MB onboard RAM and uses 64MB of system memory. The 256 MB HyperMemory card has 128MB onboard RAM and uses 128MB system memory.
The reason you won’t find this technology on any other model of ATI card is that is meant to make the cheaper cards cheaper. The less memory ATI needs to buy to build the card, the cheaper for you. The performance also won’t be up to that of the memory on the higher end cards. Those cards’ memory is clocked a lot higher than your system memory.
Overclocking
This card really isn’t meant for gaming, but everyone has their one game they love. If you need a little extra FPS out of your card, overclocking it is the answer. Remember this is a low end card, so overclocking won’t have as big impact on performance as the high end cards. The stock clock speeds for this card are 325 MHz for the core and 250 MHz for the memory.
To overclock, I used ATI Tool. This program allows you to change the frequency of the RAM and Core. It will also try to find the maximum clocks for you. The good part is that it will do it for you; the bad part is that it is a computer. It can’t think like a human can, so I had some issues finding the max speeds. I would get random freeze ups while it was finding the max speeds. This was most likely due to heat. I put a fan under it to circulate the air around the heat spreader and that seemed to help a lot.
I found the max speeds with ATI Tool, then bumped it down a few MHz, and that is the overclock speeds I tested with: 350MHz core and 250 MHz memory. Moderate overclocks, but this card doesn't overclock very well.
Next: Testing >>
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