Overclock my Pentium III...

[MrElusive]

I need some advice from some extremely technical people. I have a 700Mhz Compaq 5000T. It is pretty fast since I threw an extra 128MB of SD into it but not as fast as I'd like. I'm a gamer and I'm made the way a few of my games are running, they aren't running as smooth as I think they should. I have a geForce 2 MX400 PCI I just bought but that still didn't fix the various framerate drops I get in Medal of Honor Allied Assault. That game is officially the hardest game to run next to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I have the resolution at 1024x768 with 16-bit colors and textures. I run high textures and trilinear filtering and when there are a numerous amount of bots on the screen, say hello to lag. It's not major but when I try to fight back I'll have a 2 second delay and it just cuts straight through me. Is this the CPU causing the lag or the video card? It's a Visiontek 64MB, it runs it a lot better than my Voodoo5 I just sold. Plz help me out.

 

[rogue1979]

Well, first off the motherboard in the Compaq is probably not gonna have any overclocking settings. If you cpu is a 700E that runs stock on a 100MHz fsb, and the motherboard has a 133MHz fsb setting, then you can try for 933MHz. Most 700E Coppermines with cBO, cCO or even cDO will all hit 933-1000MHz. You will need a good cpu cooler and the ability to add a little extra core voltage. If the board doesn't have it then then there is a vid-pin mod to change the voltage from 1.65v to 1.9v. I had a V5 and a Geforce 2 MX-200 32MB on a 1GHz Athlon and the Voodoo 5 whipped the Geforce MX pretty soundly.

 

[MrElusive]

Personally I'm not extremely technical. I don't know if I want to go through all this trouble since I was thinking about getting an Alienware DDR SE for a grand that comes stacked and ready for gaming. I've had enough bad expierences when I don't know what I'm doing and end up blowing up something. Do you have a site that could maybe clue me in on most of the things you said above? I'm interested emmensly in computers but since I live in the country noone knows anything about them. Could you give me another opinion on something? Are Voodoo5's much better than geForce 2 MX400's? I mean like I said I'm no techy but I have to say that that Voodoo5 was a great, fun card to have despite the driver problem.

 

[rogue1979]

Try here:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q2/000511/pentiumiii-06.html

 

[Rand]

<< Are Voodoo5's much better than geForce 2 MX400's? I mean like I said I'm no techy but I have to say that that Voodoo5 was a great, fun card to have despite the driver problem. >>



Quite a bit faster, not to mention having better 2D and better FSAA, though the MX has a better 3D feature set.
You mentioned you have a PCI GF2 though, the GF2 MX400 in PCI is little faster then the AGP GF2 MX200.... the GeForce core is heavily dependent upon AGP's advanced feature set. A V5 is PCI or AGP should be able to handily crush a PCI GF2 MX400.... unless you were having a lot of driver problems with the V5 I wouldnt dream of changing it out for a PCI GF2 MX400. Something was definitely wrong if your GF2 MX400 even in AGP was matching a V5.

 

[Blain]

I really didn't have any problems runn RTCW with my V5/512mb/1.2GHz T-bird combo, running at the same resolution you are.
Could the card be heating up as you play?

 

[MrElusive]

I doubt it's a heating problem but drivers are a very big problem. I'm considering going back to Windows 98 SE just to get certain games running fast with good 98 drivers. I am now starting to realize how awesome the Voodoo5 is but still, MOHAA doesn't support Voodoo5's unfortunately. So do you think running multiple video cards is the answer? I don't think I know 100% on how to do it but I have an idea. Now I spent $100 on XP and I don't know if it's worth it to get rid of it and let it gather dust just because I have a video card that isn't 100% utilized for XP, if you know what I mean. Tough choice to make so I'm gonna say I need to ask the crowd on this one [you guys].
My specs:
700Mhz PIII
256MB SDRAM
15 Gig HD
5 Gig HD (Something strange Compaq did, I think it's used for back up files)
(As of now) nVidia geForce2 MX 400 64MB PCI
40X CD-ROM
(Was going to replace with a DVD-ROM that I bought which was broken: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=32&threadid=731418 )
32X CD-R

It's a rootin' tootin' computer in my opinion, it rarely lets me down but unfortunately is getting very out dated and is in dire need of a new processor and probably motherboard.

Get back to me...

 

[Rand]

Have you checked out 3dfx Underground?
They have some third party WinXP drivers for 3dfx Hardware that I've found to work very well.

 

[sep]

MrElusive,

I have a friend with a similar setup (Cel 600, 196MB) and I just recommended him to get a G2 MX400 PCI (no AGP slot on MB). He plays RTCW and NASCAR 4. I'm hoping he doesn't have this lag with RTCW.

I did notice that your question wasn't directly answered. Is it your processor or video that is the main problem?

Thanks!
-JC