Permanently overclocked my NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (Dell Inspiron 1520)

I seem to be on a Video BIOS flashing spree. First my Radeon HD4670, and now my GeForce 8600M GT. Well, I thought of breathing new life to my ageing Dell Inspiron 1520 and here is what I accomplished...

I downloaded an overclocked version of the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT BIOS from techPowerUp. After a few hours of research I came to a conclusion that 490 MHz core clock and 490 MHz memory clock should be stable on this system. For some strange reason Dell used DDR2 memory for the video cards on the Inspiron 1520 which severely bottlenecks the performance. Overclocking the memory and the GPU can do wonders. I downloaded the Windows version of the NVFlash tool from techPowerUp and flashed the OCed video BIOS.

Permanently overclocked my Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4670

Permanently overclocked my Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4670! How? Ripped the video BIOS using GPU-Z. Downloaded a factory OCed BIOS for a Sapphire HD4670 (Core Clock 775 MHz, RAM Clock 1000 MHz) from techPowerUp. Opened both BIOSes using RBE (Radeon BIOS Editor) and copied over the original BIOS identifier to the downloaded one. Adjusted fan speed setting in the new BIOS to linearly scale with the temperature. 0 C : 0% speed - 100 C : 100% speed. Save the new BIOS and flashed it using ATIFlash. Restarted system. Result: Old GPU Core Clock = 750 MHz, New GPU Core Clock = 775 MHz. No overclocking software required. Damn thing overclocked in hardware! Did not stop there though. Enabled AMD OverDrive in CCC and set the damn thing to auto-tune. Turns out the card is stable at CC of 790 MHz and RC of 1130 MHz. Finally called it a day!

Running Blood 2 on Windows Vista x64

I would like to share my experiences running Blood 2 Chosen and Nightmare Levels on Windows Vista x64. First off the both game installers use 16-bit installer stubs because of which it does not allow you to install the game directly on 64-bit Windows (32-bit Windows should work fine). Anyways, I installed both games and the patches inside Microsoft Virtual PC on Windows XP 32-bit. Then I moved the full game folder out to Windows Vista x64. If you are using 32-bit Windows, you should not face the same problem. To my surprise mostly everything worked out of the box except the music. I cranked the game to it's highest settings and ran it a 1280x960. It looked good for it's standard. But I was missing the music. So I started examining the files. The game uses Microsoft IMA (Interactive Music Architecture - old form of DirectMusic). Then I loaded the game in Dependency Viewer and start profiling it. I found that the Music failed to work due to a missing function "DirectSoundCreate" in the DLL "dslite.dll". Having done some DirectX programming before, I quickly figured that this is a mini version of the DirectSound library. The file that depends on "dslite.dll" is "am18.dll" that you will find in the Blood2 directory. I quickly opened "am18.dll" in a binary editor ("edit.com /72 am18.dll" works good) and binary edited the string "dslite.dll" to "dsound.dll" and saved the file (always remember to be in overwrite mode - this will not change the DLL file size and structure; do not overwrite other parts of the DLL). Then I fired Bood 2 and voila! Everything worked... even the music. :)

Edit:
Find the hacked AM18.dll file here.