Since I
now own one of the fastest consumer based video cards on the market
I was really interested to test how much higher I could
boost the frequency. I was not disappointed by those efforts!
At
first, things didn't start off very well - there weren't any ramsinks,
so the memory only clocked to about 540 MHz (which isn't to bad already). With additional cooling
I was able to get the RAM up to 560 MHz with
no artifacts! The Elite memory would do 575MHz with no artifacts but would
eventually crash computer so it wasn't very stable. As for the
core, I can only guess how high it can go.
Unfortunately the "coolbits" registry
hack only allows for a 25% increase in the speed of the core and it hit 250MHz
no problems. That's a whole 50 MHz and 100 MHz increase from
stock speeds! Honestly, I was afraid to post my overclocking success because
many other reviews haven't had much luck overclocking. Previously, the highest
results I'd seen were around a 230MHz core and 540MHz memory.
'
Here are the test system specs:
Athlon "T-Bird" 1 GHz AVIA 0110 at 1.5 GHz (10x150)
Asus A7V133 BIOS 1004 BETA 003-A Via 4in1 4.31V
2x 256 MB PC-100 Apacer Ram
30 GB IBM DeskStar 75 GXP
20 GB Quantum Fireball AS
ATI TV Wonder Realtek
10/100 NIC
AOpen 56k Modem
SB Live!
Platinum 5.1
Test cards/configurations used for the
comparison:
|
Video Card |
Technology |
Speed |
Drivers |
1. |
MSI StarForce 822 |
GeForce 3 |
200/460 |
Detenator 12.40 |
2. |
MSI StarForce 822 |
GeForce 3 |
250/560 overclocked |
Detenator 12.40 |
3. |
Asus V7700/64 |
GeForce 2 GTS |
200/333 |
Detenator 12.40 |
4. |
ATI Radeon 64 MB VIVO Retail |
Radeon |
183/183 |
4.13.7115 Beta Drivers |
Software: |
|
Benchmarks: |
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 8.1 Beta |
|
3DMark 2001
Vulpine GLMark
AquaMark 2.1
Quake III
Arena 1.17 |
On the advice of a reader, I tried using older Radeon drivers, but I didn't get any performance
gain. Ok let's take a look at the synthetics first, 3DMark 2001 here we
go....