ati radeon hd 5450 problems

[swynx]

so some time ago i obtained this a780gm-m3 mother board from a friend. at the time it was a great board for the price, somethin like 60$ and it had 6 sata ports, was a pretty good deal for him.the board has minor overclocking tweaks in the bios. you can change the voltage output and change some numbers, but overall not a true overclock. the board had a loose vga connection through out its entire life, eventually it quit working. so on the spur of the moment i bought a 25$ ati radeon hd 5450 1 gig ddr3 card, directx 10 compatible.

ive recently been toying with trying to get more performance out of this card, as i am just on the verge of being able to play dirt 3 and skyrim on medium graphics, with 25-30-ish fps. ive messed with voltage settings, increased the gpu clock and gpu ram. the catch? the only 2 programs ive been able to do this with are msi afterburner, and ati tray tools. ati tray tools being the better of the 2.

if i leave the voltage at 0.800 i can overlcock the gpu from 650 to 750. im not sure what value as it doesnt say, but you get the drift. and i can change the memory from 500 to 750. if i increase the voltage from 0.800 to 1.150 the screen gets wierd lines, freezes up, goes black, and crashes.

at 750 on both clock and mem i can get 40 fps on both skyrim and dirt 3 with my personal change of the graphics settings, about 25-30 on the games medium setting.

my questions are, why cant i overclock this thing further? why cant i overclock it with amd overdrive, the amd gpu clock tool, amd vision, or riva tuner. they simply wont let me change any values.. is it because of my motherboard? i need a board with the other southbridge or whatever, and i plan to buy one but i gotta wait for funds. or is it simply the card itself?

i go on youtube and a ton of people are overclocking this card with no problems. im no pro at overclocking, but i know enough to hurt myself. im not really worried about the life expectancy of this card because it was after all 25$, at 750 clock/memory the card runs at 50 degrees ive monitored it for hours while playing dirt 3.

any help?

 

[James86]

You spent about 25 bucks on a vid card and you want to overclock it?

Let me rephrase that - You spent less than I do on a tank of gas on a medicocre variant of a low end model in a 3+ year old series of a vid card, and you want to overclock it?

Also, how did you increase the memory as you state?

The board shouldn't be too relevant to OCing a video card as long as it's a full PCI-E 16x and youre not trying to run a bleeding edge PCI 3.0 card like a GTX690 in a board that only has PCI 1.0, but if you're trying to game witha CPU like a Sempron or something versus say my FX-8120, you're not going to accomplish much dude.

A 5450 is a low end 5xxx series with DDR3, whereas a card like a 5670 or 5870 is higher end, and would have the DDR5 memory instead of DDR3 or -gag, even worse - DDR2. Your card simply wasn't made for it.

The same goes for PCs as vehicles. You cant expect to do much unless you pay for it. I have an 8 core FX cpu, and a Radeon HD 6970 2GB DDR5, and even I can't play everything full settings.



What are your full system specifications?

 

[swynx]

the card was a spur of the moment thing. just havent replaced it yet. when i do i plan to spend around 150$ on one.

ati radeon hd 5450
2 gigs kingston ram
amd triple core at 3.1 gigs
250 gig sata drive