Overclocking mobo has no effect on Quake 3 fps?!

[SinoSurfer]

I've read through several threads on benchmark fps for Quake 3 on G400 cards, and I think the fps I'm getting are similar to what others have been getting.

What I don't understand is why overclocking my Abit BF6 from 500Mhz to 610Mhz produces ZERO improvement in fps - 34.9 fps @1024x768, 32-bit color, 'normal' settings?! Is that because my G400 MAX is the bottleneck and 34.9 fps is all I can hope for regardless of the speed of my CPU? Overclocking my G400 Max slightly, however, gets me to ~37 fps with NO overclocking of the mobo. But overclocking of mobo and no overclocking of G400 Max gets me no improvement?! Also, overclocking both my mobo AND G400 MAX causes the system to hang.

I'm using the latest BIOS and drivers for my mobo and G400 Max. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!!

System specs:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
PIII-500 Mhz
128 PC-100 SDRAM
Abit BF6 mobo
Promise Ultra66 IDE card
G400 MAX
Maxtor 50Gb 7200rpm hard drive
Soundblaster Live Value
3Com Ethernet card
AOpen PCI modem
Pioneer 10x DVD-rom drive
Windows 98

[Rags]

That's because you are fill rate limited. Your cpu is already feeding the vid card as much as it can use at 500, the only ways to get better frame rates are:

1. Overclock your G400
2. Get a faster Vid. card.
3. Reduce your settings (try using Bilinear filtering instead of Trilinear, it gives a nice bump without making the visuals yucky).

Rags



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[Damien Green]

Also try reducing your colour depth to 16 bit - you should see a few more fps. Personally I prefer smoother gameplay to eye-candy so you could also play around with the texture quality and try 800 x 600.

[SinoSurfer]

Thanks for the quick replies! FYI, I am using bilinear filtering and 3/4 on the texture slider as these are the 'normal' settings on Quake 3. OK, so basically, the G400 Max is already at the maximum fill rates and boosting FSB speeds won't improve things, unless I use 16 bit color and/or lower resolution such as 800x600??

OK then, I might as well run at the stock 100 FSB and overclock the G400 Max. Can anyone point me to the optimal (if there is such a thing) settings on MGATweak for G400 MAX card?? I know there are a couple of posts on this on the MGA Tools forum, but is there a consensus for the best settings to use on a PIII-500 (well, 450-600Mhz system)???

Thanks!

[MadCat]

I personally play @ 640x480x32. I could boost it to 800x600x16, but thats too ugly. But I get over 60fps. Sometimes you have to sacrifice resolution for other things.

As for the overclock,
What optimal setting? Every card is different, so you will have to determine this for yourself. Try overclocking the core speed in 4-5MHz increments. After each increment, run a few Q3A demos to determine if the setting works. If you overclock the card too far, dont worry, its ok. Most likely it will either lock up your system during a 3d game or the textures will be corrupted. When you reach that point, increment it BACK DOWN 1MHz at a time and test it after each increment. The first setting you find thats stable is the maximum overclock speed.

Unless your case has excellent airflow, I would reccomend you run it a few MHz below this maximum speed.

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[This message has been edited by MadCat (edited 03 June 2000).]