Having a GeForce2 Ultra to play around with made my overclocking woes all but disappear :). I'm fortunate to have access to the fastest graphics card on the market which will do more for leading edge games performance wise than a fast processor at the resolutions we like to use.
The following results are based on NVIDIA's GeForce2 Ultra running at its default clock speed (250MHz core and 458MHz memory). Thanks to the CardCooler XT, which is positioned parallel to the GeForce2 Ultra, I reached an overclocked speed of 290MHz/500MHz. Version 6.18 of the Detonator 3 drivers were used and vsync was disabled. Sound was disabled and texture compression was enabled.
The processor was running at 840MHz (120/120/40) with a 3-2-2 memory timing. Why not 2-2-2? Well, when running benchmarks at higher resolutions (1280x1024 and up), performance actually decreased. Not sure why, but it happened.
Quake3 Demo001 - High Quality
32-Bit Color/32-Bit Textures
Ooh, look at the performance at 1280x1024! At 800x600 and 1024x768 the CPU is working as hard as it can to keep the Ultra busy as overclocking yields virtually no increase in performance. Performance at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 is going to be similar to these results even on a 1GHz+ processor. Overclocking the Ultra at higher resolutions definitely pays off here offering around a 10% increase in frame rates.
Quake3 Demo001 - High Quality
16-Bit Color/32-Bit Textures
Ahh, 1600x1200 anybody?
To show you how versatile the 440BX chipset is, you can check out the Quake3 benchmarks from my other system here.
Next Page: 3DMark2000 and Conclusion
