YIKES! I OC'd my Ti4200 and my 3dmark score WENT DOWN!!!

[SunnyD]

Yeah, I'm not kidding either. I've got a Gainward GeForce 4 Ti4200 64MB stock clocked at 250/513 that averaged around 8000 3dmark2001 SE points (7990 to 8300 was the range).

So, I played with the settings, twiddled this and that, and just couldn't get a good tweak out of it. So I said what the hell... lets overclock it.

So I did a minor overclock, just to bench it. I went up to 265/555 core/memory clock. Fired up 3dmark2001, and let it run... Everything seemed nice and smooth, the framerates seemed a little faster...

But at the end....

Congratulations, your 3dmark score is 7206 3dmarks! :Q

Can someone explain me that?

System specs aside from the video card:
IWill KK266-R 1.4GHz Tbird 384meg Crucial PC133 CL2 Maxtor 40GB 5400rpm ata100

 

[merlocka]

Can someone explain me that?

Did you try any other steps between stock and 265/555 to see if there is an inflection point in performance? In general, overclocking should be attempted in much smaller steps than you have tried.

There are things which overclocking can obviously adversly affect without causing a hard "crash" or visual artifacts. It would be very specific internal timing stuff, and I have no clue about the specifics, but any data streams internal to the chip which have any type of error correction in them could explain this behavior (as you push closer to "crash" stability level, there are more errors which need correction). Or internal cache could miss timing, etc...

 

[SunnyD]

265/555 really isn't a very unreasonable OC for a GeForce 4 Ti4200 though... that's what I don't understand. I do understand your comment about various physical internal timing issues, but I've seen people with very odd numbers for tweaks, just to squeeze out every possible point from their card. I'll dig around and try again. This OC just seemed really conservative to me, especially for this series of video card.

SunnyD

 

[EdipisReks]

did you restart the system between runs? 3dmark scores can go down dramatically if it is run several times without the system being restarted.

 

[HardwareAddicted]

I had done this to myself once too....

I found that I had enabled AA and my scores went WAY down....

Something to check....

 

[cdub]

I have had alot of problems getting my Gainward 128MB Ti4200 to run reliably above 535 ~ 540 on the memory clock. Processor can go way up there, but the memory seems very particular. I have had this exact problem, and lowering the clock seems to help. Although, I was able to complete a 3DMark at something like 300/590, and broke 10000 points. The card was giving some unusual visual errors though, so I didn't do that again.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: EdipisReks
did you restart the system between runs? 3dmark scores can go down dramatically if it is run several times without the system being restarted.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: EdipisReks
did you restart the system between runs? 3dmark scores can go down dramatically if it is run several times without the system being restarted.

Okay, I tried it - scores went up from the average 8000 marks to the 8200/8300 range oberclocking to 260/550.

So 3dmark isn't being reliable - that's so nice to know.

SunnyD

 

[EdipisReks]

well, there can be 2 problems. if you are looping 3dMark, it tends to develop a memory leak. if you just run it over and over but aren't looping it, then 3dmark suffers from the same problem all programs suffer from with windows: windows allocates memory, but it doesn't give it back when the allocated programs are ended. it's a good idea to restart between runs regardless of what benchmark you are using.