Overclocking Graphics Card = Lower 3DMark Score?

Last week I received the ASUS X800 Pro (VIVO) that I ordered. I bought this card after hours of research because of all of the great results people were getting with overclocking. I ran the 3DMark03 benchmarks at stock speeds (475/450) and scored 9200. I then used ATITool to overclock it to XT PE speeds (520/560) and scored 7800. Can someone explain how the score can be lower? I understand that my system specs (see below) aren't the best but how is this possible? Also, is there anything I can do to correct this?

My rig:
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (Socket A)
1GB PC 2700 DDR memory
ASUS X800 Pro VIVO
80GB IDE Drive

 

I also had that problem with my Socket A system... overclocking with my 9600XT resulted in lower 3dmark scores... NOW, when i OC with my X800GT (bios flashed to X850Pro) i get 700 more and when i OC i get better FPS.

 

If you overclock way over limit performance really can go downhill. Also goes for cpu and ram. Heat can do the same. Heat and wrong settings makes it worse of course. Why you dont notice effect so much is blue screens and crashes will kick in sooner than final score for benchmark Different degree of problem, strange stutter could be part of it. Funny pixels also. A bit weird you dont notice anything is wrong except much lower score. And extremely weird if you find out performance scale downwards as you move mhz up! You can test. May be there is a sweetspot you are missing, you will want highest mhz where ram/core is happy.

 

I dont know what the problem was.. but i switched to the Omega drivers and my 9600XT didnt have that lower score in 3D mark anymore... It might've been the drivers... It might've just been some wierd unexplainable thing.. I dont know..

Give the Omega drivers a spin.. www.omegadrivers.net

 

Well only difference to normal Catalyst are 2 hidden settings Omega dont tell you about. However they are recommended, at least 1 of them. Setting XP to use "system" as preset for cache can give problems with ATI and 1gb ram. So he changes to "program" in case you have been "tweaking". Look it up at ATI support pages. Rest in Omega are just normal driver settings, wont change anything and these system changes should not have influence on score either, only stabililty or risk of getting the opposite. May be you just needed a fresh start, sometimes it can also help to reinstall chipset drivers. Registry... unexplainable not though, no magic

Here are the 2 changes Omega does:

HKLM,"SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management",LargeSystemCache, %REG_DWORD%,0

HKLM,"SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management",SystemPages, %REG_DWORD%,0xffffffff

Testet fastwrites on/off? Perhaps also different Aperture size. Turn off any display/cache cache on bios. About what you can do on old motherboard. You might find not all settings perform equal.

 

The problem is solved but I didn't actually do anything. It's almost like I needed to break in the card. I stopped running benchmarks and started playing games for a couple of days (3 I think). Then I decided to try 3DMark03 again and viola! I started getting the right scores. 520/560 speeds scored over 10,000. So now the card appears to be working properly when over clocked.

Another thing that I forgot to mention in the original post is that the X800 Pro VIVO only has 12 pipelines enabled but can be soft moded with a BIOS flash to unlock the extra 4 pixel pipelines. Well, I flashed the BIOS and was able to verify that all 16 pipes were available using ATITool. I was getting the same results as overclocking. My scores were in the 7800 range so I flashed it back to the original bios. Since my card started to function properly when OC'd, I decided to try flashing the BIOS again and unlocking the 16 pipes. Just like before, the card magically started scoring better. Stock speeds (475/450) scored a little over 10,000 with all 16 pipes enabled.

To make a long story short (too late) I am really happy with my new card. I had to deal with some frustration at first but it is finally all worth it. I can't believe how outstanding games look. If anyone else is looking for the same kind of upgrade, I denfinately recommend the ASUS X800 Pro VIVO. Thanks to all who replied.

-John

 

Nice, you know about ATI Tray Tools? http://www.guru3d.com/article/atitraytools/189/ super tool for adjusting fanspeed, mhz for core/mem with auto 2D<->3D setup or based on profile for each game/task. Lots more. Omega comes with a special version I understand, dont hesitate to install. My HIS 800XL came with some stupid Turbo software - replaced by ATT. In case you run some Asus stuff this is probably better.