Overclocking vanilla G400?

[Gurm]

Folks,

As many of you know, I have a vanilla 32mb DH G400. I REALLY don't want to change the card out, since I'm finally happy with it.

My system is:

Win2k Pro
Dual-P3 board (running 700's)
512MB PC133 Cas2
2xIBM45GB (RAIDed to 90GB)
1xWD40GB
G400 32mb dh

My question is this - is it worth my while to overclock the G400? Will it net me any more fps in quake (the only game i play where fps matters)?

- Gurm

[Jorden]

Hiya Jason,

First off the cool thanks for the pics of your kid Siemens

Now about OC'ing the vanilla G400 DH 32Mb. I am OC'ing my G400 OEM DH 32Mb, and I do see changes in lots of games. What you ought to do is first (if you don't have that already) place a cooler on your G400. Just use an old 486 or Pentium cooler, and put it on your heatsink.

My G400 was OC'ed (and locked at that) on 131% OC when I used the first MTSTU4.00.10 utility. While I only OC'ed it 115%. The last version unlocked it for me, and now I am really OC'ing at 115%, and flying a bit more through my driving sims, and even that bit of UT that I tried.

I can't tell if Quake gains anything of it. It's something you have to try, I guess

Jord.

[Maggi]

Go for it ...

To put it in a very simplified way, increasing the core results in higher polygon output and higher memory clocks give better texture management.

But in the case of Q3, you won't see a lot improvements, cos the game engine is more dependant on the FSB, as many sites have proven quite a while ago.
So increasing your FSB and OCing your G400 will result in a noticeable speed increase.

Hope that helps a bit ...

Cheers,
Maggi

PS: OC it 'til it smokes, why in the world do you ask ?


PPS: I like those new icons !

[dZeus]

Gurm, I've listed some benchmarks in Win2k at different overclocking settings in Q3A on my site, on a CPU speed that removes the possible bottleneck of the polygon-pushing-capabilities of the CPU. Check it out:
http://dzeus.student.utwente.nl/g400...chmarking.html

I haven't included any 3DMark results for overclocking, since I got some odd results.. I have to look into that

[Maggi]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by dZeus:
...
I haven't included any 3DMark results for overclocking, since I got some odd results.. I have to look into that</font>

When fiddling with clock setting you have to defrag your memory and relaunch 3D mark between each run ...

It seems that upon startup they interogate your system and pre-categorize or something, because when you change your clocksetting whithout exiting 3D Mark, you get the funniest results like 700MTexels/sec on a G400 ...

Cheers,
Maggi

[dZeus]

how do you defrag the memory? I already relaunch 3DMark between each changement of clocksettings... (and overclock _after_ exiting 3DMark2000)

[Maggi]

I use powerstrip from www.entechtaiwan.com

[Maggi]

btw, the longer run would be a reboot ...

[dZeus]

I think my PC100 memory runnnig at 133MHz may have something to do with the odd behaviour (Opera crashes a lot after running my pc for several hours). I'll get some PC133 RAM today, as it won't cost anything anymore anyway

[Evil_Donnyboy]

Uh, Q3 scales more with video card power than FSB speed.

If you increase FSB speed by 33%, you won't get near a 33% increase in FPS, no matter what settings you have.

At high resolutions, if video card power is increased by 33%, you will see improvesments near 33%.

What do you think is faster? Pentium3 on 133FSB w/ TNT2 or a P3 on 100FSB with Geforce2 Ultra, with all else equal.


BTW, I oc'd my vanilla G400 32MB SH to 160/215 in PowerStrip, but left it at the maximum of 126% in the Tweak Util. I use a small pentium fan, but it seems to run fine without it.

[windigo]

what is the speed of your ram if you dont mind me asking mine is 6ns korea(hyundai?)
my settings in Powerstrip is 145 195 any higher and i start to get artifacts i have an old p166 cooler on my g400DH 32meg card
im thinking of trying to use my old p3 450 fan is that one faster?

------------------
MSI K7TPro2 Duron 750@900
256Ram G400DH32mb
Pioneer SCSI 16xDVD

[Evil_Donnyboy]

windigo, I have an OEM, 32mb SH card. That means it has SDRAM instead of SGRAM. SDRAM tends to overclock a bit more than SGRAM. My card is equiped with Hyundia (korea) ram, I believe it's 6ns, but not sure.

You probably won't gain anything by putting a larger fan on the chip. You are most likely being held up by the ram, and not the G400 core. Just about every G400 core is capable of at least 160mhz. But the oc'ing the ram requires a bit more luck.