Geforce3 and processor bottleneck?

[ctk1981]

I recently purchased a PNY GeForce3 Ti500 for a dual processor computer. I wasn't really planning on playing any serious games on it, I have a radeon 8500 in other computer for that. Heres my question though. I have dual 1Ghz PIII's. First off, I realize dual cpu generally means a bit more of overhead and some FPS lost. I havent really benched it in any games yet but have ran 3DMARK2001 SE on it. Heres the simple part I guess:

Stock speeds: 5731 mark -- Maybe low, my buddy has overclocked his GF3 Ti200 and gotten 6000 marks, but hes on a 1.47Ghz AMD with DDR.
Overclocked to 260mhz core/575 Ram: 5765 marks.

Above with detonator drivers 30.82. Overclocking with Riva Tuner RC11.1 on low level hardware.

From the above statement, I assume a few things maybe/are happening. 1) My motherboard is holding me back (no fast writes, SBA is enabled with riva tuner). i815E chipset. 2) The 1Ghz processors are holding me back 3) Something is seriously wrong with this card perhaps, or my overclock really isnt benefitting me anyways.

Im leaning towards a processor/possible motherboard bottleneck. Is my overclock decent? I havent tried to go any further but so far no problems. No artifacts while I playing around with Max Payne.

Thoughts and suggestions appreciated, thanks!

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Both of your scores are low, your bud's is about 2000 points off, but it's probably nothing some Bios/OS tweaking won't fix. The tweaking sections at http://www.techspot.com/ & http://www.3dgpu.com would be a good place to check out. I wouldn't start overclocking until you get your system up to par at default speeds.

 

[boyRacer]

It's your proc... or procs ... i have an original GF3 clocked to Ti500 specs and my score is 6400 with a P3 1.26Ghz. My bro has one of those 1.1GHz Tualatin Celerons overclocked to 1.5Ghz with an 8500 and his score is 8700. What's depressing is... both those scores are lower than most of these people running around with P4s and XPs...

 

[ctk1981]

Thanks everyone. I was figuring a processor bottleneck more than anything. I was just happy to see it overclocked a bit. My last two radeon 8500's werent able to budge one bit above defualt. Since this is no way a gaming machine im not entirely worried about it. Nor is the motherboard really even setup for gaming. It only has two sizes listed for AGP aperture size, 32 and 64 I think. My Radeon performs best with 256MB (considerable difference) but oh well.

Im thinking sometime in the future im upgrading my daily machine to a Radeon 9700, I'll move the 8500 down to the dualie because of the better 2D and put the GeForce3 into my dads computer and overclock the crap out of it there with some better board settings. Hopefully all in all this will work out for the best.


One side note, I had this board for two days and one set of ramsinks fell off!!! Ive been running it without the sinks, however there is a 80MM fan blowing cold air onto the graphics card. Once my artic alumina shows up I'll epoxy that sink back onto the bank of ram.

Thanks!