Reclocking MacBook Pros

According to AppleInsider, the ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card used in MacBook Pros is underclocked, in both its graphics processor unit and its memory. The GPU is set to about 310MHz and RAM to 278MHz, when both are capable of around 470MHz. That’s a performance decrease of around 34% in the GPU and 41% for memory. This was done to preserve battery life and reduce noise (cooling fan). For situations where performance is more important than these factors, it’d be nice if you could change these clock speeds. Apple doesn’t provide for this, but hackers have managed to change the speeds (with little ill effect) using ATITool beta 0.25 R14 in Windows (via BootCamp). Hopefully the next version of ATIccelerator, which allows on-the-fly overclocking of ATI GPUs in OS X, will include this new graphics card.