geoffrey

Tis card has quite some overclocking headroom, even without voltmods. Here is how higher clocks boost performance in 3D Mark 2003 Mother Nature @ 1280x1024:



Highering the GPU clock has a much higher impact on the card its performance then when highering the memory clock, seem like the GDDR3 chips clocked at 750MHz isn't really a bottleneck for those GPU's.

Also note how I could clock memory past 1GHz DDR with default volts

Attached Thumbnails

geoffrey

The memory performs better at higher GPU clocks, everybody knew this all along and here is some proof, but first let me explain what is shown in the chart below. In yellow I added the memory scaling graph which is also displayed above. Those overclocking results are obtained by keeping the GPU clocked at 500MHz. I then highered the MEM clocks with 20MHz at a time while running through 3D Mark 2003's Mother Nature test at each clock settings. I repeated those tests with the GPU clocked at 650MHz, though you can clearly see two instead of one extra graph below. The graph colored in red represends the results I obtained by overclocking the GPU in "3D performance" mode only, the orange graph shows the results I obtained by overclocking the GPU in "low-power 3D" and "3D performance" mode



Higher GPU clocks makes this card certainly more memory dependend which is good as people with worse clocking GPU's have a theoreticle alternative now to keep with their competitors. Another interesting fact I noticed is that with the higher GPU clocks the performance at some point suddenly felt back noticable. The most interesting thing is that it felt back to the performance level of our stock clocked GPU chart, it seems like the driver/hardware resets the GPU clock when the card is becoming instable. My first though is that it would fall back to the 2D clocks, though overclocking in 2D mode didn't offer a solution here but I know there is a third performance mode which we can enable via Rivatuner's 'Power User', called 'low-power 3D'. After overclocking that mode performance suddenly increased again to the level where it should have been. Further on the performance degreased again a lot. I didn't found a solution, I think this is just the result of a to high clocked card.

Something I also realised here, scoring the highest FPS is not just setting the highest possible GPU and memory clock. Once I overclocked the GPU the memory doesn't seem to overclock as well as with the GPU on stock clocks. At 500MHz, I could see performance increases to over 1000MHz DDR on the RAM's while at 660MHz GPU clock I noticed high FPS drops once the memory was clocked over 970MHz.

Attached Thumbnails

Teemto

Very interesting stuff.

__________________
1999 First home made PC: Celeron 500 * Abit BE6 * Diamond Viper v770 32MB *Quantum Fireball KA 18GB ATA-66 * 64MB SDRAM * Philips 107SX 17" * 50x CD-ROM * Win98

geoffrey

3D Mark 2003 Mother Nature @ 1280x1024
Optimal Level Of Detail settings with stock vga clocks.
Latest GeForce 7 Forceware drivers available at NVIDIA.COM



LOD 15 seems to be ok, nothing special though it might be enough to get the 1st spot

Attached Thumbnails

Massman

Lod15 is best for 03, use 3.8 or 3.9 for 01

jmke

nice scaling charts there, I also noticed the deCrease () in performance if you push the GPU too far past stability, most likely the GPU does corrections for the faults it finds (due to the overclock) causing lower time for frames to render. it's also definitely software related, as 2001 seems to suffer less from this phenomenon

__________________

duploxxx

wow, nice testing done.

graphs say it all...

geoffrey

I'm not dead yet...

geoffrey

HR-03 Plus heatsink, clocks 670/860

Nature 3D Mark 2001: 180,4
Nature 3D Mark 2003: 73,1

card unmoddified

duploxxx

nice cooling there.

are you still able to fit on the mobo?

for highest score you'll have to voltmod