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Overclocking 5750 (mobility 5850) - Results inside

maximespring said:
Yes i know i did that. It's just that as Prokofiev said the installer doesn't seem to overwrite the bootcamp drivers and even after install the driver stays 10.4.


edit: GPU-Z is saying I'm still on Catalyst 10.4 even though I installed 10.8... maybe fixing this will help some more

Installed 10.8 properly this time and raised the speeds, helped a little bit

I wondered how Prokofiev did to properly install them as he said :)
Click to expand...

Weird - the mobility ones I download each month installed over the bootcamp drivers without any problems
 
I'm having issues getting new catalysts installed on my 24" iMac, too (don't have the new 27" yet, probably not for a few months at this rate :( ). So doing driver upgrades has been an issue for me for a while (granted I'm still on XP too).
 
maximespring said:
I wondered how Prokofiev did to properly install them as he said :)
Click to expand...
I just simply uninstalled the ATI 10.4 drivers (either from programs in control panel or the device manager, can't remember), and then reinstalled the mobility drivers from ATI. Hope this helps!
 
Prokofiev said:
I just simply uninstalled the ATI 10.4 drivers (either from programs in control panel or the device manager, can't remember), and then reinstalled the mobility drivers from ATI. Hope this helps!
Click to expand...

Did you reboot after uninstalling or just install the new drivers immediately upon uninstalling the old ones?
 
Hi,

I have spent the last week testing and tweaking. These are my findings.

iMac Spec
8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 memory
i7 at Stock
1TB Western Digital HDD
Windows 7 x64 with all latest hotfixes.
Latest ATI 5800 series drivers (10.80)

Tools used
GPU-z for checking the temperature on the ATI Mobility
Real Temp 3.40 for checking the temperature of the i7 CPU
MSI Afterburner 2.0 for overlclocking the GPU.
(NB this doesn't support Mobility cards without a change in the config file)
MacFan64 run with Adminpriv for setting the fan speeds
image004.png



My settings
The iMac was a big purchase for me, and gaming is something that is "Nice to have" but not the primary reason. I intend to use the IPS & Mini Display port with a gaming rig in about a year, but want to try and play games whilst I save for the gaming PC. I therefore am looking for a medium OC, that won't stress the components too much. I have OC'ed silicon since my 486 days, so feel happy with the concept and risk versus benefits.

I use headphones & therefore run my fans HIGH. I have an ambient temperature of 24 degrees. (Despite living in Norway!)

Fans: 2500 2500 1800
GPU Clock: 750/1075

My Results

After 4 hours gaming my GPU maxed at 67 Degrees. Idle I am at 49 Degrees. (Reference level: On stock fans I am idle at 53 degrees.)

My CPU never reached more than 65 Degrees, but the GPU is the obvious bottleneck and the CPU/Memory seem hardly stressed.

CRYSIS 1.21

2560x1440
All settings to "Very High"
Shaders down to "Medium"
Island Benchmark: Average 28 FPS. Range 25-30
Realword Gameplay: Average 25-30 FPS, some dips to 16FPS after large explosions.
Conclusion: Increase of about 8FPS over stocks is VERY NICE. I have never played Crysis before, and even with medium shaders at Native resolution this games looks fantastic. I am happy playing with 25-30FPS and find the game perfectly playable.

GTA IV
2560x1440
All settings to "Optimized"
The benchmark says 30FPS, but the game is unplayable. It speeds up & slows down and make you feel sea sick. I will google optimization of this game, my instinct tells me I need to find a config file that will limit the FPS to 30fps to try and get them more consistant. I will come back with more info on this.

Test that I will now perform in the coming days: DIRT 2 DX11 mode, Metro 2033, Crysis Warhead & Battlefield 2.

My Thoughts so far

-My god the screen is AMAZING!
-Gamers with a headset can easily run fast fans to be on the safe side
-750/1075 gives a very nice improvement in FPS compared to a very small rise in temperature. This is a level I am happy with.
-Many of the best games the past 12 months will not run smooth at Native resolution on stock speeds. This OC plus reducing the most GPU hungry settings a notch make this iMac able to run these games at Native. This is a a whole bunch of fun!
-Realistically we will be needing to run the next range of games at 1080p in the coming year, if they push hardware even more. Today I get a 10fps rise dropping to 1080p in Crysis to 38-42fps on my settings. I am hopeful that I can run the new wave of games (Rage etc) at 1080p and 25-30fps
-Obviously the GPU is woefully underpowered! DON'T BUY AN IMAC FOR GAMES, but if you just want to play a game or two, then with this OC it seems to do a very good job.

There seems to be more i5 overclockers, so I thought I'd share this as an i7 owner. The CPU temperature is not a problem for me, but as you can see I run the "I hate heat" high fan speeds of 2500 2500 1800.

I'll do my best to test games more now, and do 1080p benchmarks. As a console gamer I can assure you that the iMac at 1080p still looks far better than anything I've seen on my 360 or Ps3!

/ImacN00b
 
Nice work and summary imacnoob!

I know this kind of defeats the point of you wanting to play crysis, but have a go at crysis warhead if you can. They optimised the engine quite considerably so you will be able to get even more playable framerates at native res.

If you do manage it please post up the results!
 
system16 said:
Nice work and summary imacnoob!

I know this kind of defeats the point of you wanting to play crysis, but have a go at crysis warhead if you can. They optimised the engine quite considerably so you will be able to get even more playable framerates at native res.

If you do manage it please post up the results!
Click to expand...

Yes, I will do.

I've heard different theories about the optimization for Warhead:

Theory 1: They optimized the game engine, and then used this overhead to add more enemies and onscreen action. The result is that that game runs almost the same as Crysis, but with more eye candy for the same GPU effort.

Theory 2: They optimized the game engine and you should see about 5-7fps improvement from the first game to the second, like for like.

I only had a very rubbish phone film, not sure if anyone wants to see, but this is how it looks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VcZkP6LrkY


Any more requests or questions & I'll do my best to give the i7 side of things.

/ImacN00b
 
OK! We have a breakthrough on GTAIV Episodes....

After some tweaking and dropping to 1080p I benchmark at 38fps, and the game is silky smooth. Having come from XBOX360 the visuals are jaw droppingly good!

Things I tweaked: (This is important for using systems memory as a buffer for Vram, and also to lock a max FPS of 40 for a consistant smooth experience. )

- Increased min/max pagefile to 8GB
- Used the following switches to the commandline for launching the game
-nomemrestrict
-norestrictions
-percentvidmem 100
-texturequality 2
-renderquality 4
–frameLimit 1
-refreshrate 40

Instructions to do this here:

Settings that work well for me:

Video Mode: 1920 x 1080 (60Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Reflection Resolution: Medium
Water Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Low
Texture Filter: Anisotopic x 16
View Distance: 30
Detail Distance: 33
Vehicle Density: 51
Vsync: on

Benchmark results
Average FPS: 38.42
CPU Usage: 31%
System Memory usage: 42% (That's 3.3GB!)
Video Memory usage: 81% (That give a nice buffer, and I think why its smooth now)

I can't tell you all how good this game looks at 1080p and 16x Aniso. I will now try and tweak it for native resolution, but to get such a smooth FPS is really important in this particular game, so I am quite content.

If fellow Imac owners have struggeled with GTA, then maybe these settings can help.

These results with the 750/1075 OC.
 

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iMacN00b said:
OK! We have a breakthrough on GTAIV Episodes....

After some tweaking and dropping to 1080p I benchmark at 38fps, and the game is silky smooth. Having come from XBOX360 the visuals are jaw droppingly good!

Things I tweaked: (This is important for using systems memory as a buffer for Vram, and also to lock a max FPS of 40 for a consistant smooth experience. )

- Increased min/max pagefile to 8GB
- Used the following switches to the commandline for launching the game
-nomemrestrict
-norestrictions
-percentvidmem 100
-texturequality 2
-renderquality 4
–frameLimit 1
-refreshrate 40

Instructions to do this here:

Settings that work well for me:

Video Mode: 1920 x 1080 (60Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Reflection Resolution: Medium
Water Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Low
Texture Filter: Anisotopic x 16
View Distance: 30
Detail Distance: 33
Vehicle Density: 51
Vsync: on

Benchmark results
Average FPS: 38.42
CPU Usage: 31%
System Memory usage: 42% (That's 3.3GB!)
Video Memory usage: 81% (That give a nice buffer, and I think why its smooth now)

I can't tell you all how good this game looks at 1080p and 16x Aniso. I will now try and tweak it for native resolution, but to get such a smooth FPS is really important in this particular game, so I am quite content.

If fellow Imac owners have struggeled with GTA, then maybe these settings can help.

These results with the 750/1075 OC.
Click to expand...


Just wondering if there is much visual difference between 1080p and native? Are there a lot of jaggies?
 
Loramarthalas said:
Just wondering if there is much visual difference between 1080p and native? Are there a lot of jaggies?
Click to expand...

Hi, Good question & Something I have been paying close attention too. :)

In simple terms No, it looks fab. The reason is that the settings I have chosen still allowed me sufficent GPU bandwidth to enable Anistropic 16x, this cleans up the screen tremendously and for my money 1080p with 16x looks better than the native + stutters + no Ansi.

I believe that 1080p will be the sweet spot for gaming on imac, especially as games get more demanding.

What was really nice with GTAIV was that it uses a tonne of CPU & Memory resources, and the tweaks I show above push that load even more away from the GPU.

For Imac i7 owners this is a good thing as we have a boat load of free CPU and DDR3 memory, but we are crippled with a laptop VGA card with an old school 128Bit bus.

So curiously the thing that PC gamers HATED about GTA IV back in 2008(CPU/Memory hog) work in the iMac's favour! :D
 

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If you're sitting within 4 feet of the iMac's screen, there is a huge difference between native resolution and 1080p. If you're sitting between 5 and 10 feet from the screen, there isn't much difference at all.
 
TMRaven said:
If you're sitting within 4 feet of the iMac's screen, there is a huge difference between native resolution and 1080p. If you're sitting between 5 and 10 feet from the screen, there isn't much difference at all.
Click to expand...

Yes absolutely, but the question of "Jaggies" is reduced with the 16x.

At the end of the day the imac is not a wise choice for hardcore gamers, but it is quite a capable box at 1080p.

Near 40fps gameplay for GTAIV at 1920x1080 is really quite an impressive feat, but I will do some tweaking at native to see what I can do. Bench marks at Native where 26fps, bit the problem is it "Judders" as there is just too much video memory being chucked around and the GPU can't cope.

I still believe that the 27" screen looks fab at 1080p, so I can live with the vaseline effect. But that's just me. :)
 
I've been playing GTA and Crysis on my 24 inch Dell @ 1920*1200 and they both look great. I can max out Crysis, with shaders down a little. GTA kills my system though. I have to turn it way down to get it smooth. Looks like a new iMac i7 with a little overclocking and set to 1080p will give me better performance than my 8800gt can right now.

Wow. I wish they'd hurry up and get some refurbs happening.

Seems like overclocking is the key here. Without it, Crysis 2 and Rage and Fable 3 are going to look awful. It would be a shame to get stuck playing games in 2011 at low setttings.
 
I find 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 works perfectly well FPS wise on the new iMac's - but obviously when running the games in full screen they look like they have been smeared in vaseline.

I always find running them in a Window makes them look excellent and run at the high frame rate. Only problem there is you get the clutter of the desktop around you when playing, but i'm someone who can ignore that.
 
system16 said:
Nice work and summary imacnoob!

I know this kind of defeats the point of you wanting to play crysis, but have a go at crysis warhead if you can. They optimised the engine quite considerably so you will be able to get even more playable framerates at native res.

If you do manage it please post up the results!
Click to expand...

Hi, I see no big difference in performance on Warhead, almost identical to crysis. The sweet spot seems to be 1080p everything on "Enthusiast" with shaders down to high (1080p) or medium (Native). With an OC you will get about 20-25fps on high and 25 -35fps on medium.

This is identical to Crysis. Personally I am now liking 1080p with high shaders better, as I love the "Sunrays" and smoother feel to the game. As mentioned previously, running in a window works if you want a sharp image, but as a console gamer the 1080p fullsceen is fine for me.

Cheers

iMacn00b
 
when I run MSI Afterburner my clock speeds are locked... is there a way to unlock these numbers? it's set to max 628/1000 and when i try to type higher numbers in it just resets to these.
 
Im currently the proud owner of an iMac i5 4ghz with Radeon Mob HD 5850.

Followed the OC procedures to 750/1050 and ran the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark.
OC Score: 2275
Stock: 1925

(100 / 1925) * 2275 = 118.18
That's about 18% improvement

Might not seem like much, but it makes a world of difference! :eek:
Would be interesting to see the more daring give us some hints on how far we can take this card without melting our motherboards ;)
 
Overclocking a 5670 on an i3 3.2Ghz iMac getting this results on FFXIV Benchmark (Win 7 64bits)

Stock
Core Clock: 650Mhz // Memory Clock: 795Mhz
Score: 991

OC
Core Clock: 845Mhz // Memory Clock 1035Mhz
Score: 1221
 
tpavur said:
when I run MSI Afterburner my clock speeds are locked... is there a way to unlock these numbers? it's set to max 628/1000 and when i try to type higher numbers in it just resets to these.
Click to expand...

Hi there,

Have a look at this post here mate, I tried to explain how to unlock unsupported GPUs, but maybe didnt do a good enough job:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/11025000/

That picture I took is the file you need to change the setting "EnableUnofficialOverclocking=1"

Whatever you do, dont do this before setting your fans to high speed. This way you will be a step ahead of the thermal overides which means a nice 60 degrees GPU instead of 80.
 
Hazary said:
Overclocking a 5670 on an i3 3.2Ghz iMac getting this results on FFXIV Benchmark (Win 7 64bits)

Stock
Core Clock: 650Mhz // Memory Clock: 795Mhz
Score: 991

OC
Core Clock: 845Mhz // Memory Clock 1035Mhz
Score: 1221
Click to expand...

High,

What temperature did your GPU hit at 845?

Thanks

/iMacN00b.
 
Playing starcraft2, about 71º C without touching the fans. 60ºC with fans at 3000, 3000, 2000.
 
iMacN00b said:
Hi there,

Have a look at this post here mate, I tried to explain how to unlock unsupported GPUs, but maybe didnt do a good enough job:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/11025000/

That picture I took is the file you need to change the setting "EnableUnofficialOverclocking=1"

Whatever you do, dont do this before setting your fans to high speed. This way you will be a step ahead of the thermal overides which means a nice 60 degrees GPU instead of 80.
Click to expand...


where do i get macfan64.exe?
 
ok i got macfan64.exe can someone please dumb down how to navigate in cmd to set the fan speeds...
 
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