How to get higher OC for 4870's.

I have discovered that for whatever reason, flashing the vbios allows for much higher clock speeds than trying to OC with software.

Up until today, I had been using AMD Clock Tool and was reaching a max stable clock of 600 for the GPU and 1000 for the memory. Anything higher than this would cause games to freeze up. However, after flashing my vbios with values of 675/1050, everything works great!

AMD Clock Tool confirms that they are running at this speed (as do my framerates) and I haven't had a single issue after playing BFBC2 for over an hour.

I owned a studio 17 with a 3650 for a while and remembered that when I went from the 8.x drivers to the 9.x drivers, my GPU OC abilities dropped by about 100 mhz on the GPU core. There was no way to flash the vbios on it, so I was never able to see if flashing with my original OC values would still be stable. This is what gave me the idea to see if a vbios flash would give me higher clock speeds than I was able to attain with AMD Clock Tool.

Here is a guide on how to flash them

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/466403-m17x-r2-overclocking-ati-4870s.html

 

Here is a zip with the files needed for a DOS boot disk

http://www.bay-wolf.com/utility/usbkey/win98boot.zip

and here is a tool to creat a bootable USB thumbdrive

Download HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (free)