Overclocking the GMA 950

[Machead III]

Anyone here that's been gaming on their Boot Camp XP partition will already be well aware that Apple cuts the bollocks right off their graphics archiectecture on the Mac side, but there are many ways to overclock those cards from Windows, resulting in sometimes massive performance increases in games/3D apps.

I know it's possible on the X1600 cards in the iMac and MacBook Pro; every time I was going to run a 3D game less than a year old, I'd crank the card up from 300/350 to 450/450. The jump in performance in games like Half Life 2 was just immense, going from acceptable but a little shuddery to butter meltingly smooth.

Anyway, I have a MacBook now, and I know Apple restricts the amount of RAM available to the GMA 950 a HELL of a lot, resulting in shockingly, and unnecessary, poor performance in 3D, games in particular.


So I was wondering if there was an ATItool app out there I could use to "overclock" or assign bags more RAM to the GMA 950 on my MacBook, on the Windows side, safely and effectively.

 

[TBi]

The GMA is dynamically assigned ram as needed in windows. As for overclocking. I wouldn't even if i could. Your northbridge and with it your entire motherboard is at stake if you make a mistake.

 

[generik]

Anyone here that's been gaming on their Boot Camp XP partition will already be well aware that Apple cuts the bollocks right off their graphics archiectecture on the Mac side, but there are many ways to overclock those cards from Windows, resulting in sometimes massive performance increases in games/3D apps.

I know it's possible on the X1600 cards in the iMac and MacBook Pro; every time I was going to run a 3D game less than a year old, I'd crank the card up from 300/350 to 450/450. The jump in performance in games like Half Life 2 was just immense, going from acceptable but a little shuddery to butter meltingly smooth.

Anyway, I have a MacBook now, and I know Apple restricts the amount of RAM available to the GMA 950 a HELL of a lot, resulting in shockingly, and unnecessary, poor performance in 3D, games in particular.


So I was wondering if there was an ATItool app out there I could use to "overclock" or assign bags more RAM to the GMA 950 on my MacBook, on the Windows side, safely and effectively.

Last I checked ATi does not make Intel integrated graphics, in fact they are now owned by AMD, so hell no, there is not a chance!

Such an option is probably configured in what is known to PeeCees as the BIOS, which Apple doesn't use since they are so advanced. And likewise as a mac user they don't think you will have the need for such rudimentary features (afterall having choice and being a Mac users are orthogonal concepts) so you just got to accept your Macbook for what it is and take what Apple decided to sell you.

Remember, your Mac is not what you choose to buy, but what Apple choose to sell you. Don't even have the illusion that you own your own Mac 101% and can do anything as you wish with it. You don't. Your only options are what Apple chooses to open to you in their software.

Another community message brought to you by generic

 

[Lollypop]

The GMA is dynamically assigned ram as needed in windows. As for overclocking. I wouldn't even if i could. Your northbridge and with it your entire motherboard is at stake if you make a mistake.

Even if you could overclock the GMA and keep the rest of the northbridge stable you wouldnt gain much from the overclock, the reason the GMA suck so much with games is that the heavy lifting is done by the CPU, the graphics card drivers has the CPU do some of the work and has the GPU do the rest... if you overclock a ATI you will get better performance because the GPU does all gpu related work, overclocking the GMA wont give you the same results because only parts of the graphics to be rendered will be processed faster due to the overclock, the rest will still be ofloaded on the CPU.

 

[Machead III]

I haven't actually got my MacBook, I'll be honest, so if Windows can reassign as much ram as needed, my 2 gigs of it should improve things.

The reason I ask is that I've seen many a PC with the GMA 950 running fairly recent 3D games really quite well - Half Life 2 for example. But then that game is particularly well scalable, and it takes significantly less to pump the game out at smaller resolutions than larger ones, and it was a 15" laptop, so it's not going to be as strained as a card trying to produce it at 17" or 20".

Anyway, so long as with 2gigs of ram I can run Civ4, Deus Ex 2 and Half Life 2 at acceptable speeds, and I'm really not asking for ultra smooth fps here, then I'm happy. That's the only gaming I'll be doing on my MacBook save the old 2D point and clicks, which my digital wrist watch could probably handle.

Anyway, I'm gonna fiddle about with settings and various Windows utilities, and try and squeeze the max out the GMA 950, and post my results somewhere on here, because I know a lot of people who obviously didn't buy a MacBook/Mac mini for gaming, would like to know if their rig is capable of a few choice games they're interested in.

generic: I never implied that ATI made the GMA 950 :/

 

[Ross Henderson]

Last I checked ATi does not make Intel integrated graphics, in fact they are now owned by AMD, so hell no, there is not a chance!

Such an option is probably configured in what is known to PeeCees as the BIOS, which Apple doesn't use since they are so advanced. And likewise as a mac user they don't think you will have the need for such rudimentary features (afterall having choice and being a Mac users are orthogonal concepts) so you just got to accept your Macbook for what it is and take what Apple decided to sell you.

Remember, your Mac is not what you choose to buy, but what Apple choose to sell you. Don't even have the illusion that you own your own Mac 101% and can do anything as you wish with it. You don't. Your only options are what Apple chooses to open to you in their software.

Another community message brought to you by generic

Speak for yourself, I can't believe anybody can be that submissive. I only hope your joking.

 

[disconap]

I don't think your gpu is ATI. But if it is, google ATIAccellerator; if it's nvidia, you'll need to flash it, there's no on the go program for OSX that I know of; you can find flashing tools for nvidia on the strangedogs forums. But I strongly, STRONGLY advise you leave it alone; as was stated above, one mistake isn't just a replacement graphics card, it's your whole motherboard.

 

[Machead III]

I know it's not made by either ATI or nVidia... it's Intel, ofc.

There's not much I can find on actually overclocking the GMA, but you can force XP to assign it tons and tons of ram, which is nice.

It's pretty much completely impossible to damage your computer by software overclocking. Computers have certain temperatures they don't like to reach and will shut down if they do anyway, long before it's possible to actually do any physical damage to the computer.

 

[Lollypop]

ITs actually very easy to damage your computer with software overclocks, admittingly less so when overclocking your GPU, but because the GMA is on the northbridge you do run the risk of damaging the entire machine, its not about temperatures, its about the integrity of your data as well, if you overclock the GMA just to much and the SATA controller as a result flips one bit you can corrupt your entire HDD image, bleak and highly unlikely but do you really want to risk it? The GMA is the weak link on the current intel macs, live with it...

 

[jennysgotagun]

GMA 950 Overclocking Finally Possible!

I have found that it's possible to overclock GMA 950 on Mac, Windows and even Linux. There exists a free tool called GMABooster. Strange that this thing hasn't been released earlier in GMA 950 lifecycle. www.gmabooster.com
Already tried this GMABooster @ 400 MHz. Perfomance boost in World of Warcraft is there!!! Cool but too late for most users.....