A vanilla G400 overclock conundrum...

[Heed]

Well, I finally decided to overclock my G400 vanilla to near Max speeds. I had messed around quite some time ago and determined I could safely get a sys pll clck of 285 resulting in 142.50/190 gclck/mclck-- 6ns ram for me

Anyway, the weird thing is that I see absolutely no performance increase. I just grabbed 3dmark 2001 and decided to use it as it should be used-- as a benchmark (not some sort of weird pissin' contest ). I ran the full tests at default speed and then overclocked the card and ran the tests again-- not a bit of difference. Then I just decided to run the first truck dooda low res one just to get a FPS check. Again, absolutely no difference between the standard clock speed and overclocked.

I even tried the Matrox tweak utility and set it to 110%. Again, not a scrap of difference between the two speeds.

I'm running a P3650@866 (133fsb) on an Asus P3B-F. I thought a processor speed of around 800 was where the card topped out, but I'm starting to wonder. If I'm not seeing any performance increase when overclocking the card it seems to indidcate that the card is not topped out; rather my system is the bottleneck.

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts. Has anyone overclocked a G400 on a similarily powered system and seen any performance increase?

Just in case anyone asks the clock settings are taking effect, as far as I can tell (mgatweak shows the increased clock settings from the matrox tweak utility, and if I go too high on mgatweak I will get artifacts). I'm running win2k with the 5.84 beta driver set.

Thanks,

Heed.

[dZeus]

Use MGA tweak to overclock and enable 'clock monitoring' and minimize it to the tray.

What scores do you get on 3DMark 2000 (2001 isn't usefull since it tests DX8 where the G400 only accelerates DX6 fully). If you use 3DMark2001, you are kind of benchmarking the CPU speed when testing with a G400 because of that... so that benchmark is not really usefull in this situation.

[Heed]

Yeah, that's why I just tried the car chase demo thing. I figured the full 2001 test results were skewed towards dx 8.0. I'll check out 2000. I have been using mga tweak, but wasn't using the "clock monitoring". I just tried 2001 chase demo with clock monitoring-- no change. I guess I best download 2000.

Thanks, I'll see what happens.

Heed.

[Heed]

That was the problem. Thanks dZeus. At default speed I was getting around 3004 3dmarks-- my last run a 154/192 I got 3403. I nice notable increase. Good thing I installed a 80 mm case fan right at the end of the card so it hits both the heatsink and ram chips.

Thanks again.

Heed.