Overclocking a Vanilla G400

[Motion Stealth]

Hi all,

A friend of mine has bought a Vanilla G400, now that he saw that one of you guys clocked his G400 to Max standard he wants to know what kind of Cooling you need. He has a Bulk version, that means it is a Cool block instead of a fan. Anybody any idea's ?

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Celeron 366 Mhz
160 MB RAM
G400 MAX DH 32 Meg
Win98SE/Linux/NT4 workstation
SB LIVE (FULL)
13 GB IBM harddrive
4,3 GB Quantum Fireball SE harddrive
Toshiba 36X IDE cdrom
Creative Encore DVD 2x
Teac 6/24x cd-r SCSI-2
NCR810 SCSI-2 card
17" CTX monitor
Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS&TQS
56K modem
Logitech Mouseman +

[Maggi]

the bigger the fan, the better the cooling, the higher the achievable speeds ...

Plain and simple

I made a whopper (big fan on the heatsink, small fan on the back of the PCB) and I must say it is running way beyond spec, but stable.



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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Maggi]

here's what it looks like ...

[Motion Stealth]

Ok, looks and feels very cool ), did you actually took the cooling block of the card ? or just put the fan on top of it ? and did you used also a s7 cooler ?

------------------
-------------------------
Celeron 366 Mhz
160 MB RAM
G400 MAX DH 32 Meg
Win98SE/Linux/NT4 workstation
SB LIVE (FULL)
13 GB IBM harddrive
4,3 GB Quantum Fireball SE harddrive
Toshiba 36X IDE cdrom
Creative Encore DVD 2x
Teac 6/24x cd-r SCSI-2
NCR810 SCSI-2 card
17" CTX monitor
Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS&TQS
56K modem
Logitech Mouseman +

[Motion Stealth]

BTW he made a little test with 3D mark Max 99.

Fill rate: 201Mtexel @ 126/168
Fill rate: 221Mtexel @ 140/186 (stable)
Multitexture: 203Mtexel @ 126/168
Multitexture: 223Mtexel @ 140/186 (stable)

[Frank]

I would have to agree with Maggi.
BTW how far does that get you Maggi?
I'm curious since mine hardly gets very hot.
However I do have a 5" fan blowing over it just to be on the safe side of stable.
But yours is the setup I absolutely needed with my TNT overclocked. To be sure. Great little card. About the only thing TNT about it was it would try to impersonate the sun!

[Maggi]

Project Settings (Template):
Rendering Platform: Internal (Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - Deutsch)
Resolution: 640*480
Color Depth: 16-bit Color
CPU Optimization: Intel(r) processor
Z-Buffer: 16-bit
Frame Buffer: Single buffering
Refresh Rate: VSync Off
Looping: Disabled
Texture Format: 16-bit, 4444 RGBA
Run Tests: Once
Title Screen: Shown

Test Results:
3DMark Result : 4.318 3DMarks
Synthetic CPU 3D Speed : 4.937 CPU 3DMarks
Rasterizer Score : 2.603 3DRasterMarks
Game 1 - Race: 42,3 FPS
Game 2 - First Person: 44,1 FPS
Fill Rate : 237,2 MTexels/s
Fill Rate With Multi-Texturing : 236,0 MTexels/s
2MB Texture Rendering Speed: 451,6 FPS
4MB Texture Rendering Speed: 361,7 FPS
8MB Texture Rendering Speed: 244,3 FPS
16MB Texture Rendering Speed: 177,7 FPS
32MB Texture Rendering Speed: 116,4 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 3-pass: 141,6 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 2-pass: 179,6 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 1-pass: 283,4 FPS
Point Sample Texture Filtering Speed: 112,2 %
Bilinear Texture Filtering Speed: 100,0 %
Trilinear Texture Filtering Speed: 61,0 %
Anisotropic Texture Filtering Speed: Not Supported
6 Pixel/individual: 1.825,8 KPolygons/s
6 Pixel/strips: 3.608,4 KPolygons/s
25 Pixel/individual: 1.779,3 KPolygons/s
25 Pixel/strips: 2.381,8 KPolygons/s
50 Pixel/individual: 1.361,6 KPolygons/s
50 Pixel/strips: 1.530,0 KPolygons/s
250 Pixel/individual: 491,5 KPolygons/s
250 Pixel/strips: 564,1 KPolygons/s
1000 Pixel/individual: 162,8 KPolygons/s
1000 Pixel/strips: 181,7 KPolygons/s

...

That was on my Celery and the G400 is at 150/200MHz frequencies ...


------------------
Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Motion Stealth]

Nice scores !!! I will have to buy a 5" fan and a Socket 7 cooler

------------------
-------------------------
Celeron 366 Mhz
160 MB RAM
G400 MAX DH 32 Meg
Win98SE/Linux/NT4 workstation
SB LIVE (FULL)
13 GB IBM harddrive
4,3 GB Quantum Fireball SE harddrive
Toshiba 36X IDE cdrom
Creative Encore DVD 2x
Teac 6/24x cd-r SCSI-2
NCR810 SCSI-2 card
17" CTX monitor
Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS&TQS
56K modem
Logitech Mouseman +

[Smiff]

Sorry to spoil the fun, but i don't think the size of your fan mattters very much. My vanilla G400 is doing at least 150/200 with no fan at all. More to the point it's not hot! (nowhere near the fry-an-egg-on-it heat of my TNT or Voodoo3). The core, which of course is the only bit you can stick a fan on, is good up to 170! (Maybe even more, I just haven't tried any higher ) I think you are more likely to hit the limits of you memory. But maybe it's just my card?

Smiff

[Frank]

Great scores all around.

The core, which of course is the only bit you can stick a fan on, is good up to 170

Smiff if you got the core that high what was your ram doing, having the eggs for breakfast?
How did you get the core that high?
Yes the G400 is a cool card in many ways.

[Smiff]

Oh the ram was still happily at 200 ish. You just need to do a little cunning divider adjustment with MGAtweak

Oh yeah and before anyone gets a chance to correct me on that quote, i guess you could put lots of little heatsinks and fans on the memory chips ... but would it do any good??

[Neil]

I have my G400max clocked at 173/216. Using MGATweak: 432PLL, 2.5/2/2.5 dividers.

My ram runs stable up to 220 clock (have not tried it higher yet). The graphics chip locks solid at 180.

Any opinions if I should keep it at this setting? (speed benefits vs beating up the card?)

In 1024x768 32bit color, there is about a 6% increase in 3dmark scores (4760 vs 5022),
and about a 10% increase in fill rate (199.7 vs 220.6).

In 800x600 16bit color, not much difference in 3dmarks, mostly because I have vsync on (5622 vs 5625),
but fill rates are up about 12.4% (249.9 vs 278.7),
32mb texture rendering speed also not much gain (100fps vs 103.9 fps).

This is on a p3-450 @ 560mhz.

[The Rock]

I don't know about you guys, but when I OCed my vanilla G400, I never saw much of a difference (2fps in most games). I just dropped it back to stock. I didn't see the point.

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The Rock
Home Machine: P3 450 + 128 Meg PC100 RAM + 23G Storage
Work Machine: IBM OS/390 + 10Gigs RAM + 1.5 Terabytes Storage (and no damn AGP slot...what a waste)

[Frank]

oh, ok.

[Motion Stealth]

Well, we tried to clock it to 150/200 but then the screen starts to go a bit wild. So I guess it's heating up.

------------------
-------------------------
Celeron 366 Mhz
160 MB RAM
G400 MAX DH 32 Meg
Win98SE/Linux/NT4 workstation
SB LIVE (FULL)
13 GB IBM harddrive
4,3 GB Quantum Fireball SE harddrive
Toshiba 36X IDE cdrom
Creative Encore DVD 2x
Teac 6/24x cd-r SCSI-2
NCR810 SCSI-2 card
17" CTX monitor
Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS&TQS
56K modem
Logitech Mouseman +