Overclocking Radeon 4330? (inspiron 1545)

Is it possible? I have tried nearly everything and nothing supports this card! I want to run fallout with decent frame rates, and it just isn't possible without overclocking. I am using windows 7 RC 32 bit. Thanks!

 

The original Fallout will run just fine on a Pentium II with integrated graphics and 256MB of RAM...if it doesn't run well, it's probably not your graphics card.

 

Fallout 3, sir.

 

What are your specs, exactly? I have a Dell Studio 15 and can play that game at a good framerate, but the 4570 is essentially a higher clocked 4330.

 

C2D T6400, 256 vram 4330, 2gb of ram. Not just fallout 3, i'd also like better performance is all games. Any help with this overclocking thing?

 

I am not on my laptop right now at the moment, but I believe you can simply use ATI Catalyst Control Center to overclock. However, I am not sure how it works with laptop videocards so be careful.

 

I don't think it works for ati mobility cards, but thanks for the suggestion.

 

What kind of battery life are you getting? Are you able to play America's Army 3? $550 good for this laptop?

 

Try this tool:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1383/mirrors.php

It works perfectly with my Mobility Radeon 3450 on my Studio 1535.

 

Yep use that tool its guarentteed to work on all mobility cards.
Please post your results on your overclock.

 

I had tried that tool before posting this thread. It stalled and was non responsive for me, even in vista compatibility mode.

 

My advice is to go back to vista and make it your gaming os and use the tool to overclock your gpu.

 

got the same thing going on with my HD 4330 card, just no-go in terms of overclocking, no matter what program i try. i succeeded in installing regular desktop gpu catalyst drivers (9.8 version) by using "Mobility Modder" in its current version, but i couldnt find any overclocking option in the Catalyst Center. If anyone gets it to work, id be very interested to hear how its done with this card!

greetz

 

I actually wanto to underclock the card so that the fans don't spin as often, but again no luck so far

 

@desantil

are u that sensitive to noise? i cant imagine the HD 4330 producing that much heat that its necessary to underclock it, given its pretty low wattage...

 

I have a 1555 with the 4570, I have an SSD on it so there is no noise and now the fan can definitely be ehard when it kicks in. I would like to underclock so that when I am just browsing/emails/etc it doe snot kick in a smuch, when a game is on no issue

 

The only option you have is to turn the powerplay settings on. Dell pretty much locks these down, so there is not a lot else you can do.

You could also try applying thermal paste to the GPU; it's probably only got a thermal pad on there from the factory.

 

I applied a copper square (14x14x1mm) and Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound in place of the GPU thermal pad. My fan never really comes on when I'm not gaming.

 

I can't overclock my 4570 too. It seems there is no way to overclock ATI 4xxx mobilty cards.

 

well, lets hope its just cuz the 4xxx series is still too "recent" to be able to overclock it with any tool :-/

 

HI, where did you buy the copper square?

thanks

 

got mobility 4330 hd overcklocked to 580/600 been good for a week win7/vistax32. you need to download amd gpu tools to oc and ati tools to change colors because you gonna say bye-bye to you newest catalyst 10.3.UNINSTALL ALL ATI FROM HD, from remove programs offcourse, reloaD.turn account management controlls off. Next is mobility modder.net dh, and catalyst 8.9, once you download it click install ,after it unzips cancell the install. Modify the extracted c:\ati\support\8.9, (another thing is driver enforcement tool "dseo" for win vista/7 only) to sign in modified driver, /cry, but anyways download it, run it, make it in test mode, dont restart, sign in driver,open folder; copy and paste c:\ati\support\.....\packages\drivers\display\LH_\B_68 folder\atikmdag.sy_. Ok now last part is device manager, click dipslay, windows 4300 driver update, choose vga adapter not 4300 windows 1.1 driver, click update driver, have a disk, and modified 8.9 install location down to /drivers/display/LH_ click proceed. now you have 4330 shown and amd gpu tools will oc for you but not save on boot hehe its ok i dont turn my laptop off anyways. enjoy

 

one more thing at first i chose 4570 driver from the modified 8.9 catalyst lyst and it worked but then somehow it recognized 4330 once i repeated for some odd reason

 

use this great program to overclock any video card - http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/
however, after u install u need to go to ur program files>msi afterburner and open msiafterburner.cfg in notepad, and change enableunofficialoverclocking from 0 to 1.

hope this helps and works, it worked for my 4570, confirmed thru gpu-z

 

Yes I had found this as well fairly recentlyish. To be honest though, the difference in frame rates is so marginal, that I've uninstalled it all now.

 

Can't you just pull the vbios off the card, then Use Readeon BIOS editor, edit your clock settings, then reflash your GPU vbios. Thats how I've always done it.

 

I cant find any prog that will pull the bios off the card.

Tried everything.

@chaugh- Thanks for that info

Edit :Tried AfterBurner 1.50 and its a no go here.Every time I click the shortcut my system just freezes and I have to do a hard shut down.

Ill stick with Rivaturner (same base program anyway)

 

man im sorry, i dunno why that is happening to u. i remember we couldnt overclock the card and it was after abit of researching on their forums i found for some ati cards we had to manually edit their .cfg to enable unofficial overclocking (for me, i could underclock without modding their .cfg).

anyway, the 4570 is pretty much already a overclock version of the 4550, and combined with the sub-par gpu cooling pads and design, i dont really see much need to overclock the 4570. i overclocked my 4570 to 720/900 and after 20 mins of MW2, my gpu was at 92 degrees which, even if it is still in the safe range, shortens the life of the gpu inho.

 

I can't believe it! I tried so hard for a while trying to overclock this thing before finally giving up and getting rid of the laptop. I'm sure I would have been able to play farcry2 multiplayer now!

 

Onecool, create a bootable USB stick, then boot from it. You may need to change your boot order in BIOS. Below are more instructions from Mandrake. It's the same process I followed on my M17X so it's set for the M17X, but it should be the same process for you.

The tools you'll need are
ATIFLASH
Radeon Bios Editor
GPU-Z

1) Get a copy of your current BIOS and make an additional copy of it and store it somewhere besides your M17x. Do this by placing a copy of atiflash on your boot stick. Turn your M17x on and get into the system BIOS. You need to change the boot order of your system to look at the usb stick first. Then save, exit and boot off the stick. At the command prompt type atiflash -i. When you do this it should report back to you information on your 4870. It will show two cards if you have a crossfire setup. If you notice the cards are EXACTLY the same (I would assume somewhere written in the bios that one card is defined as Master and the other as Slave). Out of paranoia I treat them as two different cards and repeat the steps twice. Now to get a copy of the bios type atiflash -s 0 bios0.rom. This will take a copy of the bios on card 0 and call it bios0.rom. Repeat for the second card, atiflash -s 1 bios1.rom. Like I said before keep an additional copy of the bios files in a separate location. If you want to go back to stock eventually it's best to load the original copies.

2) Use RBE to change the clocks in the bios files. I normally just take my copy of the bios and drag and drop them right on RBE in Windows Explorer. That will open up RBE with the BIOS file loaded. You'll get a warning about the GPU not having ATI overdrive capabilities. Click OK to it. Click on the button on top called Clock Settings. Here is where you'll set your different clocks and voltage to save to the bios file. There is also a little wizard button you can use that will simply ask you how you want the over-clock settings to look like and your under-clock settings. You can use this wizard if you are a beginner. Once you change your clock and/or voltage settings save your bios. In this example I will call it nbios0.rom for card 0 and nbios1.rom for card 1. Put a copy of these two new files on your boot stick.

3) Flash your cards with the new settings. Reboot your system and boot off the usb stick once again. Here is another step to do out of paranoia. Verify that the checksum for your original bios file and new bios file are exactly the same. If they are not it has become corrupted somewhere along the process. Type atiflash -cf bios0.rom (this is the original file) then atiflash -cf nbios0.rom (this is the new file). The output should be exactly the same. Do it also for card 1. Once you are comfortable everything is OK flash the new bios by typing atiflash -p 0 nbios0.rom. It will tell you it's successful (hopefully) and to reboot your system but DO NOT reboot if you have a second card. Repeat the process, atiflash -p 1 nbios1.rom. Once that is successful pull your usb stick out and reboot. Once you're back into Windows use GPU-z to verify your clock settings.

Courtesy of Mandrake (NBR)

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread230061.html

 

DR650SE, if only it were that easy on these laptops. That will not work on the Inspiron 1545 or Studio 1555. It is possible that newer versions of the software are capable though, but I'm not really seeing it in the release notes. Also the links you give are significantly out of date.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1731/ATIFlash_3.79.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1770/TechPowerUp_Radeon_Bios_Editor_v1.25.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1761/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.3.9.html

I wish I still had one of those laptops with me so I could test it out. The thing with these two laptops though is that it was not some standard thing that the 4330 and 4570 were not overclockable. Other laptops could overclock them using GPU tools or whatever it's called. Also ATI flash could not detect that were was even a video bios. RBE could detect there was a bios and attempt to extract it, but it could not fully do so and could definitely not flash it. It is some dumb dell thing and perhaps it has been overcome in current versions of the software, but as of september and october of last year it was impossible on these video cards.

 

Hmm... The tools worked for me. But I was doing it on the M17X, I would thought pulling the BIOS from DOS would have been the same. Well it was just a guess since I havn't used one of those laptops. Maybe if somone else around here can try it out. Might be worth a shot.

 

You're right that the procedure is identical. The problem is the software used isn't compatible with or doesn't support (maybe it does now?) the way Dell did it.