Ok, figured I'd start a new thread for this one since some of us just bought the X850's. I was looking around the net and had seen that the X850 XTPE additions have a much larger cooling system. Here's a couple of links that I've found with pictures of the it.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/radeon-x850xt/index.x?pg=1

http://www.guru3d.com/article/content/176/

I'm running ATI Tool on my other box at the moment to see what the max Core Clock speed I can get out of it, but in the mean time I figured I'd look around and see what coolers we'd have to buy if we can update the bios on it and turn it into the XT versions of the card. So far this is a general idea of what we're going to have to get in order for it to run decent at the upper speeds. I figure spending an additional 30-50 dollars on a third party cooler (bringing our price to 150-190 depending on when we bought it and what cooler we get) is still much less then spending the 300$ for actual XT card out right. I'll post more on this once I run ATI Tool through all the tests, but so far, this is what I've found. I haven't actually looked at prices for coolers yet so that'll be the next thing I do once I find out if the cards will go the XT speeds. With all the rumors floating around the net about doing this, and with ATI putting these cards on sale so late in the game, it might be that ATI locked these cards down some how.

I'd be very careful overclocking anything with an "XT Platinum Edition" in its title.

AFAIK, the XTPE Cards were already clocked hard to their permissible specs in order to counter NVidia's Hardware at this time.

While not ATI, there are numberous "Sudden G70/G71 death" threads across hardware Forums, just telling me that Modern Hardware is alot more sensitive than some people think.

I don't say Overclocking is not possible anymore, but the risk of losing a ~200$ investment for gaining a max. 10-15% (which is benchmarkable, but not really of practical use) is IMHO not worth it.

it would only be safe when using Liquid Nitrogen as cooling for the card, as CPU and as Chipset, still very dangerous to mess around with, as an alternative you could use Artic cooling.

When I had my ASUS AX800XT PE it ran stock @ core/mem 520Mhz / 1120 Mhz and that was fast for a card for it's time I OC'ed it once to 540Mhz / 1180 Mhz X850 XT PE speeds that went fine but when OC'in above the 580Mhz for VPU and 1230Mhz for ram the card didn't like it at all, it fastest speed which ran stable on it was core/mem 570Mhz / 1212Mhz  and that meant that my R420 and Hynx GDDR3 was from good quallity most cards never got past the X850 XT PE AGP speeds aka 540Mhz / 1180 Mhz.

It's that the cards were running at a near maxz speed at that time, anyways I clocked mine back to stock speeds 520Mhz / 1120Mhz, since OC'ing to 570Mhz / 1212Mhz was rather pointless that time of day.

wrote on 13.08.06 at 11:55:55:

I don't say Overclocking is not possible anymore, but the risk of losing a ~200$ investment for gaining a max. 10-15% (which is benchmarkable, but not really of practical use) is IMHO not worth it.

Exactly why I did not run my 9800Pro at XT speeds to often, I just didn't see a huge bump in performance.

I see your point on cards this fast already. I was more or less curious as to if it can be done rather then anything else. Sure wasn't expecting any miracles from bumping the cards speeds up some from what they already are. I was very sucessfull at OC'ing my 9600 Pro though from from 400/200 to 480/480 (240) and that made a huge difference in some of the games as far as frame rates go. Example being MoH Pacific Assualt when your on the .50mm guns shooting at the planes off the ships (third section of the game I think), going from 15 fps when the planes were attacking the ship to 25/30 fps made it alot easier to hit the planes coming in because it wasn't as choppy moving the guns from 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock. I realize the fps for most of the games won't hit that low with this card so this was more or less a question of can it be done?

I think it could be done (reasonably) with watercooling, I'm not aware of available 3rd Party air coolers that could make a similar difference in Temperature.