Vanilla 400 here - a couple questions

[TonyA]

A couple questions - thanks for any helpful feedback.

My specs:
Vanilla 400 - 32 meg dual head / 6ns
Abit BE6
Celeron 366 o/c to _550_ mhz
128 megs Cas 2 ram
IBM UDMA 66 7200 rpm
AGP: set to 256 (tried at 64 too)

1. My 3dmark scores seem low. ie.
640 x 480 16 bit (default clock) - 3916
1280 x 1024 16 bit (default clock)- 2003
1280 x 1024 16 bit (143 clock) - 2219

I saw the review of the 16 meg G400 and the score on 3dmark at 1280 x 1024 with a P3-450 was 3151. My 550 / 32 meg G400 should certainly be faster shouldn't it?

2. I can't get above 144/192 clock without visual anomalies. At 144 I start to see a faint dotten line across my screen at certain times. I have 2 Radio Shack DC Blowers going across the card (about 5 inches away...No fan on heatsink yet) In case you are not familiar with these DC Blowers they are very powerful. (I just happened to have them handy - didn't buy them for cooling the card necessarily.) Any thoughts on whether I will be able to get into the 150+ range if I add a slim cooler or a lasagna cooler even though my memory is 6ns? Should I just try to return this card and get a Max? I'm dissapointed with my 3dmark scores compared to other people's scores. Any thoughts? Thanks.

[TonyA]

My 32 bit 1280 x 1024 3dmark score at default clock: 1442 <ouch>

[Allan1]

I'm not sure what's keeping your scores so low. I have the exact same card as you but I'm running a P3@580 and I get scores around 4600.

I added a lasagna cooler to my card but the real bottleneck for us is the 6ns ram. No matter what we do we can't get by it. I run mine at 140/190 and everythings great. Anything beyond that and I get the same errors as you. I guess we'd have to put down the big money for a MAX or somehow exchange our cards with those lucky bast... who got their G400's with 5ns ram.

[Maggi]

don't compare apples with peaches ...

Futuremark uses different dlls for different processors.

The PIII series benefits from the adv. instructions set, thus it always gets way higher scores.

Your results ain't bad for a Celery, believe me !

Just look out for other Celery results and you'll see.

------------------
Cheerio,
Maggi

Asus P2B-S @ 112MHz FSB - Bios 1010 final
Celeron300A @ 504Mhz
128MB 7ns SDRAM
G400 DualHead 32MB SGRAM @ 201 MHz memory clock

[Nuno]

Maggi:
Those scores are defenitly very low: Here´s what I get in a celeron 450, G400 32 mb:
640x480x16: 3805
1280x1024x16: 3419
1280x1024x16@143 Mhz: 3637
@150 Mhz: 3681
1280x1024x32(default clock speed): 2709

Hey, Tony, are we talking about the same 3dmark version here? These numbers are from 3dmark max, there was a previous version that should give numbers close to that (the results are not comparable between versions)

And I would talk about PIII getting a really nice boost in 3dMark, but Maggi already cleared that up!

About the clock speed: hey, that´s life, my G400 6ns memory, makes it up to 204 memory, others won´t... you got no guarantees in this overclocking business...

But you should be happy with 143 (core), as you see 150 doesn´t make all that difference...

Check your version of 3dmark and then post something about it.

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 08-23-1999).]

[franksch3]

The problem here probably is this:

There are two versions of 3DMark around. The older one is 3DMark99 MAX and the newest one is 3DMark99 Pro. The scores between these versions are different.

Most benchmarks sites seem to forget to say which 3DMark99 version they are using. So probably your card is completely OK.

Frank Schoondermark

[TonyA]

Nuno, and other's who responded,

Thanks for you input.
To answer your question,
I'm running 3dmark 99 Pro - build 100
some more scores comparing my g400 and V2 SLI:

(default clock on these)
640 x 480 -16 bit- 3764 (V2-SLI) 3916 (G400)
1024 x 768 -16 bit- 2392 (V2-SLI) 2667 (G400)

So its beating SLI, but scores still
seem slow compared to your Celeron 450 Nuno. Do you think it could be a bios setting or maybe it doesn't like my BE6 board or 66 udma drive?

My setup again is:
Vanilla 400 - 32 meg dual head / 6ns
Abit BE6
Celeron 366 w/128 cache o/c to _550_ mhz
128 megs Cas 2 ram
IBM UDMA 66 7200 rpm
AGP: set to 256

[TonyA]

Nuno,

I just realized you said you are running 3d mark "max". Mine is "pro" (no "max") as I said in the above post. I didn't realize they were different programs. The program they have for download is the max version. I guess I should try that and see if I get higher scores. Have you tried running both and found the pro version gives lower scores than the "max pro" version? Thanks.

[Nuno]

Hi TonyA

I was typing that, but you already figured it out. The 3dmark I am using is "3dmark max pro - build 200" or so it says.

I don´t have that early version anymore. As you can see, there´s nothing wrong with your setup, I remember that version gave lower numbers than the actual one. Go http://www.3dmark.com/download/ , download the new version and try it for yourself.

[TonyA]

Ok much higher scores now that I got the new version of 3dmark 99 Max. These look better? :-)

My CPumarks with a celeron 366 overclocked to 550 ranged from 5120 to 5160.

(126 clock, 16 bit, triple buffer)
640x480 4312 3dmarks
1280x1024 3496 3dmarks

(126 clock, 32 bit, 32 bit z-buffer, triple buffer)
1280x1024 2291 3dmarks

(143 clock, 16 bit, triple buffer)
640x480 4315 3dmarks
1280x1024 3808 3dmarks

(143 clock, 32 bit, 32 bit z-buffer, triple buffer)
1280x1024 2679 3dmarks

[dnickle]

Are you guys using the new powerstrip ? With G200clk I could only get 150/200 with my OEM 32 meg with 6ns RAM. With Pstrip I get 155.3/207 with no anomalies. Try it, you'll like it.

[dnickle]

Are you guys using the new powerstrip ? With G200clk I could only get 150/200 with my OEM 32 meg with 6ns RAM. With Pstrip I get 155.3/207 with no anomalies. Try it, you'll like it.

[dnickle]

Are you guys using the new powerstrip ? With G200clk I could only get 150/200 with my OEM 32 meg with 6ns RAM. With Pstrip I get 155.3/207 with no anomalies. Try it, you'll like it.

[dnickle]

Are you guys using the new powerstrip ? With G200clk I could only get 150/200 with my OEM 32 meg with 6ns RAM. With Pstrip I get 155.3/207 with no anomalies. Try it, you'll like it.

[GTI]

Have you tried running the 3DMark99 demo looping for 12hours+ at 155/207???

My G40016MDH with SEC-6ns could clock higher than 146/195 but will get garbled image for a prolonged-looping. I now settled for 146/195.

GTI.