Rovclock

Generel

Rovclock is a utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card.

It is very helpfull for underclocking the Radeon chip in order to save power when running on batteries. Also, by underclocking it is possible to prevent the fan from running.

It can also be used to gain performance by overclocking.

Features

Used to under-/overclock Radeon gfx-cards.

• Controls GPU core frequency
• Controls gfx-memory frequency

Project Homepage / Availability

• Homepage: http://www.hasw.net/linux/

Usage

• Set the core frequency (-c) to 100 Mhz and the memory frequency (-m) to 120 Mhz.

$ sudo rovclock -c 100 -m 120

• Get current frequencies among other information (-i).

$ sudo rovclock -i

Stable clockrates

• T42, Radeon 7500
  NOTE: Setting the memory under 100Mhz may hang your card.
  • LCD: 100MHz core, 120MHz memory.
  • Using DVI output on Port replicator: 100Mhz core, 180MHz memory.
• T43 with ATI Mobility Radeon X300: the following settings are used by ATI's Windows driver:
  • "Optimal performance" (default): 297MHz core, 229.5MHz memory.
  • "Balanced": 209.255MHz core, 182.25 memory.
  • "Optimal battery life": 104.63MHz core, 121.5MHz memory
    Compared to the default setting, this reduces idle power consumption by approximately 300mW, and GPU temperature by 3-4 degrees. There is no noticable difference in 2D performance using the radeon driver.
    Further reduction of either clock leads to display corruption.

Interesting links related to this project

• Gentoo forum discussion