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Hardcore Kyro II Overclocking


Date
: 08/24/01 – 02:27:54 AM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Index

Card Manufacturer: Hercules
Price: around $150

We want to say thanks to Hercules for supplying us with their Kyro2-based card, the 3D Prophet 4500!

Introduction

As you guys and gals probably already know, the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 is Hercules’ Kyro2 videocard offering. I have to admit that this videocard has become a true statue in the low budget videocard market. Not only does it give the nVidia GeForce2 MX-based videocards a hard time, but it is also is a lot faster and cheaper than an avarage GF2 MX videocard.

I bet you’ve already read a hundreds of 3D Prophet 4500 videocard reviews from all over the web . If you read over these reviews again, you will notice that not one single reviewer could overclock the Kyro2 card more than 10MHz to 185MHz. If you know that the default clock and memory speed are synchronized at 175MHz, than I’m not happy at all with overclocking the card to ‘only 185MHz’! That’s why I started exploring the internet to find out more about how I could get my Kyro2 card past that 185MHz barrier.

After gathering all information from various sources on the web, I started modding my Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 to squeeze every bit of juice out of it! And because it’s actually a very easy process, I really want to share my experience with all of you. So read on what you have to do to convert your good old Hercules Kyro2 card to your very own Kyro2 Ultra videocard!

I must warn everyone that you will void your warranty by doing something like I’m going to show you in these next couple of steps – Use this guide at your own risk!

What do we need to achieve our goal?

• Hercules 3D Prophet 4500
• Thermaltake Volcano II Heatsink
• Low Profile Fan
• RAM Sinks
• Thermal Grease
• Thermal Conductive Glue (should fasten strong and fast)
• 15kOhm OR 18kOhm OR 20kOhm resistor
• Soldering Iron
• Spray Can (gold paint)

That’s about everything you need to crank up the core and memory speed of a 3D Prophet 4500 … Let’s begin our modding adventure with step 1 …

Page 2 : Step 1 : Heatsinks

Step 1 : Heatsinks

First thing we need to do is preparing the Kyro2 card for its total conversion. What I mean is that we’re going to remove the fake stock blue orb from the Kyro2 chip. To do this, just press the two white little pins on the back of the card. The fake orb will come off the Kyro2 core and you can remove it. Don’t forget to unplug the fan power cable and to remove the old thermal grease as well. Well now, we have succesfully prepared the card for the modifications.

The first mod we’re going to do is installing better cooling on the core as well as RAM sinks on the memory chips. Why do we do that? Well, that’s simple. Overclocking hardware results in more heat and if we get more heat, the stock heatsink on the Kyro2 chip isn’t capable of cooling it down any longer. That’s the reason why we’re going to install a big Volcano II heatsink on top of the core. I chose attach the heatsink to the Kyro2 core with some thermal conductive glue. You should just put a little bit of thermal grease on the bottom of the heatsink and also a little bit of glue; then press the Volcano II heatsink on the Kyro2 core and hold it for about 1 minute or so. This way, the heatsink will be glued on the Kyro2 chip. So far, so good. You could leave the Volcano II heatsink as a passive cooler, but I decided to equip the sink with a low profile fan I removed from my 3Dfx Cool cooler on my Celeron300A CPU.

The next thing we need to do is put our RAM sinks onto the memory chips the same way as we’ve put the Volcano II heatsink on the Kyro2 chip. I only attached 4 RAM sinks on the bottom of the memory chips, because the Volcano II blocks the chips on the other (top) side. Don’t worry about that, putting RAM sinks on one side of the memory chips should be more than enough to keep it cool.

Because there’s enough room on the bottom of the Kyro2 chip (backside of the videocard), I decided to cut a RAM sink in 1/4 pieces and put it on the back of the chip. By doing so, the Kyro2 core also has passive cooling on the back as well as active cooling in front (Volcano II).

One last thing I decided to do and that’s not really necessary, is putting a RAM sink on top of the voltage regulator of the GPU. Because we’re going to increase the voltage in a next step of this guide, I thought this might not be a bad move at all. Again, the sink is attached with some thermal conductive glue and a bit of thermal grease to improve the heat dissipation.

There, that should do it for the heatsinks, now let’s continue with the most difficult part of this article, the GPU voltage mod!

Page 3 : Step 2 : Voltage Mod

Step 2 : Voltage Mod

Like I said before, this is the most difficult step in our modding adventure. Well, actually if you’re a tiny bit handy with a soldering iron, this step will be easier than the previous one, but then again, I know a soldering iron is unexplored territory for many of our readers (including me and myself!).

What you need now, is a resistor of about 20kOhm to solder onto the board. I know it sounds like a really ‘spooky’ thing to do but actually it’s not if you go into it a little deeper. I decided to solder a 18kOhm resistor onto the voltage regulator on the board, but you can also use a 20kOhm or 22kOhm resistor as well. If you choose to use a 20kOhm resistor, then the GPU voltage will be lower than when you would use a 18kOhm resistor. And when you use a 22kOhm one, it will be even lower! So if the resistance goes up, then the voltage goes down … that’s the general rule. I even tried a to install a 15kOhm resistor, but because this will increase the voltage a lot, you will need very good cooling. And by the way, the 15kOhm resistor (with a higher voltage) didn’t allow me to overclock higher than I could when using a 18kOhm. So I guess, a 18kOhm resistor is probably the best choice for most of you guys (and gals).

Now, how do we solder the resistor onto our board? Well, you just need to take the 3D Prophet 4500 card and put it on a desk with the CRT output facing left and the GPU and heatsink facing up. In the upper right corner of the card, you should be able to locate the voltage regulator chip. If you’ve done that, you should solder the resistor between the pin 3 and pin 5. So pin 3 and pin 5 should be connected together with the resistor. Be absolutely sure that you haven’t soldered pin 3 to pin 4 or pin 4 to pin 5 by accident!! You will fry your card if you attempt to use it with these pins connected!

If you soldered the resistor between pin 3 and pin 5, then it should do the trick.

Page 4 : Step 3 : Finishing Touch

Step 3 : Finishing Touch

After you’ve completed step 1 and 2, your modified Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 should be almost ready to rock ‘n roll!

As the finishing touch, I decided to spray the silver Volcano II heatsink and the black RAM sinks in gold. Not real gold of course, but it does look like it as a matter of fact ;) You can easily fool your mother … I know, because I did! :p

Of course it would have been better to spray the sinks first before installing them onto the videocard, but that would only make things too easy … Heck no, I just forget to spray the sinks before I installed them. Stupid me :(

Now comes the most exciting part : plugging the modified Kyro2 card back into your rig! Fingers crossed and BOOM!! It works! At least for me, it did. I immediately started up Powerstrip (the little program I use to overclock my videocards) and I tried to push the core and memory clock (they are synchronized, remember?) to 195MHz. That seemed to give me no lockups or artifacts during gameplay (Max Payne, I love that game!), so I decided to increase the clock some more until I finally had reached the limit of the core … at 198MHz. Now, that’s not a bad overclock at all considering the fact that it runs at 175MHz by default. It’s a shame that the memory can’t be clocked higher because it’s limited by the Kyro2 GPU clock :( Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to live what that, don’t we?

To conclude the installation process, I want to show you some pics of my finished product, the Kyro2 ‘Ultra’ :

Page 5 : Testing

Testing & Benchmarking

Test system :

- AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
- Swiftech MC370-0A Cooler
- Abit KT7A-RAID Mobo
- 256MB OCZ Performance Max SDRAM
- Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro2 videocard
- Hercules’ 3D Prophet 4500 driver version 7.114.
- Western Digital 45GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Win2k + SP2 + Via 4in1 4.32

3DMark2001

Quake 3 Arena v1.17 DEMO 001

We can see an increase of overal performance on all the benchmarks. Way to go, Kyro2 ;) Let’s jump to the conclusion, shall we?

Page 6 : Conclusion

Conclusion

Good

- Fairly Easy Mod
- Cheap
- Higher Performance
- Looks Sexy

Bad

- You could destroy you card
- Once more : you could destroy the card

Well, it looks like we have created a whole new videocard out of our sweet low budget Kyro2-based Hercules 3D Prophet 4500. If you want to overclock your 3D Prophet 4500 to its limits, then this is the only way to do it. Of course the resistor hack is optional, but I guarantee you will not get any further than 185MHz without increasing the voltage of the GPU. Hardcore overclockers from all the world will certainly be interested in this project. But also the occasional gamers are capable of getting the last bit of power out of their Kyro2 card by following this article. To finish, I would like to make one last warning to everyone who is interested in attempting this modification … USE THIS GUIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK AND YOUR WARRANTY WILL BE GONE! Have fun and please be careful!

I would also like to express my gratitude to the peeps of Chip Online and to some geeks on the [H]ardforum for providing me with useful information related to this Kyro2 mod.