Only a Little Overclock: AMD 3100+ @205 FSB

Dyre Straits · December 3rd, 2006, 11:03 AM

I decided to try just a little overclocking since I only have stock cooling. I've set the FSB to 205 MHz and have run a few tests.

One thing I noticed was that this X1950 Pro PCIe card was lagging a LOT. I think it was due to having ATI Tray Tools installed along with ATI's CCC. The card just wasn't performing well since installing ATT.

So, I uninstalled ATT, ATI Display Drivers, CCC, AND removed the two instances of the video card in Device Manager.

After all that, I ran a registry cleaner before I rebooted.

Once I rebooted I've ONLY installed ATI 6.11 w/CCC and ran a little test. I also played a few minutes of OBLIVION to see the difference in performance. Things are much better now.

For some reason Futuremark won't accept my X1950 Pro as a valid graphics adapter yet. So, I can't post results there and then link to them here. So, I'm just going to post a couple of screenshots of the results from 3DMark 2003. I'll do the newer ones very soon. But, just to give an idea of the big difference in performance, 3DM2K3 was giving me only high 4000 to low 5000 scores with this card. I KNEW something was wrong when I got those results. I got better scores with my X800 XL in this test.

Well, enough gabbing, here's the screenshots of the latest results:

Mac Daddy · December 3rd, 2006, 01:13 PM

Cool stuff man !!

Unixlord · December 3rd, 2006, 02:55 PM

Since your GPU is awesome and your CPU is limiting you every tiny amount of CPU overclocking you perform will/should give you immediate results.

Dyre Straits · December 4th, 2006, 11:09 AM

I've pushed the CPU up some more and even boosted the GPU Core and Memory. Not a lot of difference, though:

Unixlord · December 4th, 2006, 09:43 PM

If you're not seeing performance gains with overclocking your CPU:
Either
A)You're not overclocking enough
Or
B)The bottleneck is not the CPU

Nexu · December 12th, 2006, 02:53 PM

You should run game benchmarks too (the ones you play often if possible).

I noticed when i was OC-ing. The game benchmark results were not same of what 3DMark told me.

Also looking at your specs, i think you might be very well CPU limited. Best way to test this is to run game benchmarks (take Q3 for this example). Run one without FSAA and no anisotropic (just trilinear in-game). Than run another one with highest FSAA and max anisotropic. If they give around similiar FPS results than you're CPU limited.

My system OC-ed would be rated 2900+ and i notice big time cpu limited in games like Q4.