Video Card overclocking?

[LePaul]

LOL

Nicely done!

It was pretty stable, the only thing really holding my FPS back seems to be my monitor now.  60hz is all she can do.  Abunabi was over last night, shaking his head while I was tweaking this and that and posting to you.  The RivaTuner is a annoying little program, once you learn not to hit "apply" as it undoes everything you do.

1700mhz seems pretty stable, Im sure I could go higher but why?

Jedi Knight and Soldier of Fortune just look outstanding with 4x FSAA going and with every texture/mode cranked to full.

Looks like you managed to match my system and card via tweaking!  I haven't messed with the video card drivers for one reason:  big download via dialup.  That and there are so many variants of these damn things, I dont know which to go with.  I have what Visiontek has on their website, yet see nVidia has some up, etc etc.

Aces High is still 75fps everywhere, in heavy smoke and ack, 69fps.  

Bloom, if you use yahoo messenger, gimme a shout, nick is BD5Pilot.

[bloom25]

Are you running Direct X 8.1b?  It seems to me that your system should be capable of more (though that is an excellent score).

LOL, half of my time last night was waiting for the new 30.82 drivers to download (11 megs or so).  DX 8.1b was a 9 meg download.

[bloom25]

Ok, I pushed mine to it's absolute limit.  All background non-essential services turned off (intellipoint, tiny personal firewall, etc) and core at 300 MHz and ram at 600 MHz.

10585 is a good score I think.

3DMARK2001 PROJECT FILE

PROJECT
Name   My Benchmark
Description   
Registration Name   
Registration Key   
3DMark Version   300

DISPLAY
Platform   NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
CPU Optimization   D3D Pure Hardware T&L
Width   1024
Height   768
Depth   32 bit
Z-Buffering   24 bit
Texture Format   Compressed
Buffering   Double
Refresh Rate   60 Hz
FSAA Mode   None

OPTIONS
Show Title Screens   No
Continuous Benchmark   No
Benchmark Run Count   1
Demo Sounds Enabled   Yes
Continuous Demo   No
Game Sound Effects Enabled   Yes
Game Music Enabled   Yes
Game Detail Level   Low

RESULTS
3DMark Score   10585
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail   165.0 fps
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail   53.8 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail   184.2 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail   109.7 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail   140.5 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail   63.9 fps
Game 4 - Nature   57.1 fps
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing)   1025.1 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing)   2290.1 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light)   49.6 MTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights)   12.6 MTriangles/s
Environment Bump Mapping   150.8 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping   158.4 fps
Vertex Shader   82.1 fps
Pixel Shader   122.5 fps
Advanced Pixel Shader   90.6 fps
Point Sprites   25.4 MSprites/s

SYSTEM INFO

System Info Version   2.2
Installation ID   0x00000000
OEM ID   

CPU INFO
CENTRAL PROCESSING UNITS
Manufacturer   AMD
Family   AMD Athlon(TM) XP 1900+
Internal Clock   1.62 GHz
Internal Clock Maximum   1.62 GHz
External Clock   138 MHz
Socket Designation   SOCKET A
Type   Central
Upgrade   
Capabilities   MMX, CMov, RDTSC, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE
Version   Model 6, Stepping 2
CPUID   0x00000662

[Animal]

Bloom, any framerate improvement from going to 8.1b?

[LePaul]

138mhz on the FSB?  I might try that

Im downloading 8.1b now, we'll see what that does.

As for the drivers...straight from nVidia?

[LePaul]

Well Bloom, you outdid me by a few points

I notched my FSB to 138 like you, so Im now at 1725mhz (Athlon XP 2100+ according to bios!).  Upgraded to DX 8.1B and the same new drivers.  

3DMark score of 10,495

Got me by 90  

[bloom25]

I'm wondering if I should tell you how to gain 200 points...   I kind of like my $618 computer beating yours.

Lets just say that "best image quality", which is what I was running to get the 10210 and later 10298 (not posted here) really limits your "nature" framerate.  You might try looking under the GeForce 4 tab > additional settings > Direct 3D settings.  Change image quality to "highest performance."  That gave me 300 more points.  (I turned it back to "best image" after the test, it makes textures look low detail.)

Animal, it seemed to help GTA 3 going to DX 8.1b on my machine.  Other than that, I don't know how much it changed things.  AH ran at 85 fps with 2x AA on before I did any tweaking at all (monitor refresh at 1280x1024), so I would have only noticed it there if it had reduced my FPS.

[bloom25]

Just because I know you are going to beat me now, I figured I'd push the card to it's absolute limits.  The highest core/memory combination I could hit without graphical problems present is: 303.8 MHz core/594 MHz memory (next step up at that core frequency was 621 MHz, which showed problems).

The score came up just a little bit more:

3DMARK2001 PROJECT FILE

PROJECT
Name   My Benchmark
Description   
Registration Name   
Registration Key   
3DMark Version   300

DISPLAY
Platform   NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
CPU Optimization   D3D Pure Hardware T&L
Width   1024
Height   768
Depth   32 bit
Z-Buffering   24 bit
Texture Format   Compressed
Buffering   Double
Refresh Rate   60 Hz
FSAA Mode   None

OPTIONS
Show Title Screens   No
Continuous Benchmark   No
Benchmark Run Count   1
Demo Sounds Enabled   Yes
Continuous Demo   No
Game Sound Effects Enabled   Yes
Game Music Enabled   Yes
Game Detail Level   Low

RESULTS
3DMark Score   10617
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail   165.6 fps
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail   53.9 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail   185.5 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail   110.3 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail   140.2 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail   63.8 fps
Game 4 - Nature   57.2 fps
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing)   1030.3 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing)   2310.2 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light)   49.9 MTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights)   12.7 MTriangles/s
Environment Bump Mapping   151.5 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping   159.3 fps
Vertex Shader   82.6 fps
Pixel Shader   123.3 fps
Advanced Pixel Shader   91.1 fps
Point Sprites   25.7 MSprites/s

SYSTEM INFO

System Info Version   2.2
Installation ID   0x00000000
OEM ID   

CPU INFO
CENTRAL PROCESSING UNITS
Manufacturer   AMD
Family   AMD Athlon(TM) XP 1900+
Internal Clock   1.62 GHz
Internal Clock Maximum   1.62 GHz
External Clock   138 MHz
Socket Designation   SOCKET A
Type   Central
Upgrade   
Capabilities   MMX, CMov, RDTSC, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE
Version   Model 6, Stepping 2
CPUID   0x00000662

I'll enjoy my temporary victory.

[LePaul]

LOL

You know, with this little competition of ours, its just a matter of time before one of us has a smoldering box where some really cool PC parts used to live  :-)

I hadnt thought about clocking any higher, or bringing the detail down.  You might recall that's what I loved about the Voodoo 5...sure I could get a few more FPS at high performance but 2x fsaa is gorgeous.  Now, Im running 4x and solid 75 fps everywhere in Aces High.  Roll rates are stunning and I can chase La7s thru smokey fields without cussing what a damn slide show it is to do so!

I squeaked a 10,512 last night notching the detail back to performance.  I also wonder if a monitor capable of more than 60hz will gain me anything in Aces.

[bloom25]

I know what you mean, I just ran the card at those settings just to see what it could do.  I'm actually using it at 2x AA @ 1280x1024 32 bit with all image enhancing settings at max.

I'm also only having Rivatuner run the card at 275 Core and 567 Memory at startup.

Even with all the details at max and AA on I get 85 fps nearly all the time, so there's no reason to shorten the lifetime of the card.

I just wanted to see what the card could do.

[LePaul]

Same here, I'd never overclocked anything before...so I wanted to see what I could do to push through 10k on 3dMark

Im wondering if my 75fps ceiling on Aces High is...monitor?

[bloom25]

Yes, it's going to be your monitor.  If you know it can handle a higher refresh rate you can force it to do so.  I can tell you how to do it if you'd like.

[LePaul]

Its a KDS monitor, about 4 years old.

At this point, pleased it fires up every night