Futuremark Corporation five years later) released the benchmarking application 3DMark99. Until now, computer benchmarking was normally done with the likes of SiSoft Sandra for the CPU, memory and storage subsystems; Quake II time-demos were used to test the 3D graphics capabilities. The idea behind 3DMark was to have one set of tests which everyone would run at the same resolution and detail settings, making scores directly comparable. 3Dmark can be credited with the initial mainstream popularity of graphics card overclocking as people vied for first place. In 2001 the Online Result Browser (abbreviated to ORB) was launched, allowing people across the world to validate and compare their scores at a central location. Overclocking had become the buzzword all over the internet and the rise of discussion boards further advanced its popularity. As graphics card bechmarks gained popularity, several changes were taking place in the graphics card-overclocking world as well.
One of the many pivotal points in overclocking history was when ATI released the Radeon 9700 Pro in August of 2002, wrestling the performance crown away from NVIDIA's GeForce Ti 4600. The Radeon's R300 architecture was blazingly quick with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of the two technologies in gaming. Unfortunately for gamers, the card carried a premium price of US $399 at launch - approximately $520 in today's money. There was, however, a solution to this in the form of one of the most famous hacks of all time. The Radeon 9500 was similar to the Radeon 9700 Pro, being based on the same R300 GPU. The main differences between the two were the lower clock speeds, pipelinecount on the Radeon 9500, and a significantly lower launch price of US $179 (about $230 today). The card could easily be overclocked to the same clock speed as the Radeon 9700 Pro, but lagged behind due to the disabled pipelines. In some cases the pipelines were
damaged, meaning the card could not be sold as a Radeon 9700 Pro and therefore became a Radeon 9500. Often enough however, the pipelines were fully functional, and people soon discovered that they could be unlocked via a softmod - so called due to it being carried out in software alone. The high overclockability of the Radeon 9500 along with the chance to unlock the extra silicon made the card a hit amongst overclockers and gamers alike. (Several graphics cards all the way up until the HD Radeon 6000 series remained susceptible to soft mods, however that series was the last of modern day graphics cards to offer this “hack�)
MEMORY MATTERS
In early 2003, the now-defunct Winbond released their BH-5, BH-6, CH-5 and CH-6 memory ICs. These quickly gained popularity amongst overclockers for their ability to run at high frequencies while maintaining very tight timings, although they needed a high voltage to do so. Issue 25 | 2013 The OverClocker 21