A 1/4" female pipe coupling, brass, costs: $1.52 / piece. You need one of these for each two memory chips, meaning that in the case of the RADEON 8500, you need four pieces for 8 memory chips.
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| The $6.40 Question, er, Solution A short roundup | |
| (Review by MS, January 9, 2002) |
Summary
Buying an OEM version of any graphics adapter often has the drawback of getting lower speedbins of the graphics processor and also the memory. In case of the FIC OEM version of the RADEON 8500 both core and memory are clocked at 250 MHz with relatively little margin until severe errors kick in in form of triangular white- or blackouts. With an investment of 4 x $1.52 at HomeDepot for some brass pipe-couplings and some 1/2 hour of work, I was able to increase the workable frequencies of the FIC RADEON 8500 to 282 MHz, which, combined with an overclocked Athlon XP 1900+ pushed this card to the front page of MadOnion's 3DMark2001 Hall of Fame. The detailed instructions of the "how-to" are in the following pages.
The first thing to do is to locate your memory chips on the graphics card. Since the instructions here are universally adaptable to any card, there is no point of going into the details of the placement of any specific design. For most nVidia-based cards, there are RAM-sinks commercially available but what are you going to do on a Sunday afternoon when you feel the urge of cooling your memory?
Hop into your car and get over to the nearest HomeDepot, HomeBase, Lowe's or similar
Here is what you need to look for:
A 1/4" female pipe coupling, brass, costs: $1.52 / piece. You need one of these for each two memory chips, meaning that in the case of the RADEON 8500, you need four pieces for 8 memory chips.
I take it for granted that you already have a hacksaw and a vise, otherwise, add them to the shopping basket, they are universally useable like for cutting frozen spiral ham or similar ...
A possible way around is to go to the neighborhood car garage and ask there but that is half the fun. Next step is to rip the plastic bag, take out the raw coupling and carefully fasten it in the vise. Careful here, brass is pretty soft and you don't want to squoosh the new acquisition right away.
It's going to look like this.
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