I live in shame.....this is absolutely horrible.....

by your advice batboy, it's listed as an NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS
Bios version 3.15.00.2
On board memory 32 megs
TV Encoder Type Conexant Bt869
Driver Version 4.12.01.0631

There isn't a clock frequencys tab.......yet. I havn't downloaded a tweak or messed around with the registry yet. I will tho. What version should I have for drivers? (er what's the latest?)

You have the 6.31 drivers then. If you're going to use the latest beta drivers you probably should use DirectX8. Which drivers are the best to use is often a much debated topic and it really depends on your system. Personally, I've had great success with the detonator 10.80, 12.40, and now 12.60 drivers as far as performance. See another thread about the 12.60 drivers for where to download them. Unless you use a driver set that has a self installer, you'll need to change the display adapter to standard PCI graphics display adapter (VGA) and then reboot. Install the new drivers and then reboot again. Don't worry about it saying PCI instead of AGP when you change to the standard Windows driver. What this does is to remove all traces of the old drivers so you can install the new ones clean. It gets ugly if you try installing the new over the existing GeForce drivers. Go to the nVida site or similar for better installation details if needed.

hehe batboy I appreciate you taking the time to be so specific and detailed, but I've been doing this a while and kinda know how. =)

but then again someone reading this that doesn't know how will get VERY good instructions on it.

You have no choice but to use D8 with 3D 2001 as it won't even run with an older version. (something to keep in mind I guess)

I'll update the drivers and run the benchmarks again w/4 way and w/o and post the scores.......lemme get the drivers now and I'll get back to this thread within the hour.

I'd say it must be a driver issue Shadow, or agp4x is not enabled. I'm only running a PIII540 w/GF1 DDR and I get 2200 in 3DMark2001. Although... I am running my GF1 161/333.

I have the 12.00 beta drivers.

Good luck. I'm using a GF1 and I wish I had a V5. Heck, I still miss my voodoo3.

4x is enabled, so I suspect the drivers may help a little. We'll see.

Hey Shadow, a senior member with that many stars would surely know more than the basics, at least I hope. Didn't mean to insinuate you didn't know anything. However, like in my case, if I switched from GeForce to another card I'd be like a fish out of water. Plus, you're right, dozens of people read these posts, often they're just guests lurking, reading, and trying to learn. These lower end GeForce 2 cards really come alive when you overclock them, especially the memory. Once you settle on a good driver that works well with your system, get that clock frequency tab enabled. I was sort of disappointed with my MX card when I got it late last summer too, but they just require a bit of tweaking and playing with various settings.

wildone helped a great deal with the card........sent me the latest drivers and told me how to tweak the card a bit. While running the 3D Mark, I noticed frame rates were 33-50% higher, but I still don't understand how it outscores the 5500.

VooDoo will run 3D Mark almost flawlessly. Very few chops or rips. While this card will come to a dead stop several times during the video. Mainly on the 4 wheeler game at thebeginning.

Colors DO seem a bit more crisp, and I havn't tried OC'ing it or playing UT, but I'm still not satisfied at this point.

VooDoo also skips about 5 of the test with "no hardware support" for them while this card skips 3 of them.

It scored 2101 after this set of tweaks and drivers.

Whelp........ya'll know that little check box beside the Enable DMA? Did you know there needs to be a check in it? ROFL

Curious if anything could be running slow I ran some Sandra on it.......seems my Drive was spinning a 3k or so mark. Enabled DMA (duh) and the score went to 16000 ish. Ran the 3D test again and scored 2402. Now installing Via drivers.......benchmarking again.......then gonna OC it a bit and try some more. I'll let you know the final outcome.

Now I want another one and I want to order it. Suggestions on which to buy and where?

AKDUDE why the Radeon? Where and how much?

Installed new VIA drivers and the score dropped a couple which I assume had not effect essentially. Overclocked it to 215/370 and score went to 2516. Settings good enough?

Oh yea.....removed the sink and gooped it with shack stuff. Figure that's better than the clear sticky stuff they used.

If anyone wants to get their hands on a new oem voodoo 5 5500. for only 50 bucks I know where. Go to excess-solutions.com and call their store. The voodoos aren't on the site but if you ask, they might have some left in the store. I bought 2.

I wish my Herc card overclocked higher on the RAM. I could only get 226/393 before I did a mod and blew up the card. Hehe. That's ok though, gave me a reason to upgrade. I got me a Visiontek G3 comming in tomorrow and then I'll see what my scores are. <Evilgrin> I am SOOOOOO looking forward to this. MUAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAH!

Shadow, I took the time to read the entire post, so here's my interpretations thus far:

1 - The card you have should perform much better.

2 - The voodoo 5 is a good card, but benchmarking with the geforce should produce a noticeable improvement

3 - The latest drivers may not speed up the card, but should improve image quality

4 - Your hardware is probably fine, I suspect a driver issue here.

5 - Overclcoking the card will only boost benchmarks 100-200 points, not much more.

6 - My card outperforms yours with the specs below (getting 3200-3400 3dmark 2000 scores, which roughly translate to 2500-2700 in 3dMark 2001). This should not be... it may take some tweaking the drivers... have you tried the coolbits registry hack and NVMax? I saw the links in the prior posts, I use them and they work fine (with driver versions 1200 and lower only, newer drivers 12.41, etc won't work though).

7 - If you're looking for raw power and benchmarking bragging rights, the geforce 3 and GF2 Ultra are the top of the class.

I have owned a voodoo 3 3000, geforce 256, and my current geforce 2 MX Pro, and thus far the GF2 MX Pro has been the best gaming card of the 3; the gaming just looks better in 32 bit. My friend has a radeon All-in-wonder 32MB card and I've been pleased with his performance and image quality (ie - radeon is a very good option).

Final analysis -- stick with the geforce until you are able/willing to get the geforce 3, they're sweet cards and compatable with nearly all games/systems.

if that's 3dmark 2000, that's a HORABLE score for even a geforce 256, you shuld be getting ATLEAST 5000 on that setup(my creative gf2 mx card gets 5000 on my duron@935) make sure everything's cranked up in the bios(4xagp, fast wrights, 128mb agp apture, vido ram cashable, ect.)

Shadow run this in UT : start cityintro and report back on the min ave and max fps! I bought 2 V5's for 112 at the now dead deal at excess solutions! I can get about 60fsp average in UT with everything maxed out at 1280x1024! BTW I ain't trading unless somebody doesn't want their G3

fireball****aka fireball_87 (Jun 19, 2001 11:30 a.m.):
if that's 3dmark 2000, that's a HORABLE score for even a geforce 256, you shuld be getting ATLEAST 5000 on that setup(my creative gf2 mx card gets 5000 on my duron@935) make sure everything's cranked up in the bios(4xagp, fast wrights, 128mb agp apture, vido ram cashable, ect.)

Click to expand...

It's because 3dmark only looks at the one cpu, doesn't take dual procs into consideration... I didn't enable the video cacheable though, I'll do that on bootup tonight... everything else is fine... I get 45FPS in UT city intro, and steady 50-60 during gameplay on my Hall of Giants server (when I connect through my switch). Not bad, at least I'm impressed. Again, UT doesn't take advantage of the dual procs either.

**Update, just for kicks I downloaded 3dmark 2001, benchmarked again in 3dmark 2000, and I will put the screen shots here:

[img="[URL]http://www.geocities.com/speshal_k/baseballcards/3dmark2001ocdet1200.jpg[/URL]"] 3dmark 2001 score of 1574

[img="[URL]http://www.geocities.com/speshal_k/baseballcards/3dmark2kocdet1200.jpg[/URL]"] 3dmark 2000 score of 3449

The 2001 score is actually pretty good for my card, puts it in some nice company (over the MX Pros and just behind the Radeon LE DDR)... now for the future games in high quality, I dunno... only time will tell, but I'm definitely thinking about a geforce 3 in my next machine (at year's end).

I'm getting 2500 in 2001 compared to 1500 with the 5500. Q3 FPS is about 110.....with the 5500 it was just over 100.

Colors look a lot more crisp with the G2 but the image is a bit more choppy. The VooDoo seems a bit duller, but extremely smooth.

Thanks for all the replys, especially the time you put into yours Pinky.

I'm not really looking for braggin rights.....I'm looking to "see" which card is better. Benchmarks are nice, but they don't answer my question at all. "Which card is better" is still open as far as I'm concerned. The 5500 is well under $100 and someone above mentioned maybe $50 (which I emailed them and told em I wanted 2 ) and for the money, I'm not convinced the G2 is better. I'll continue to play with it, and if I can get the picture quality to run as smooth as the 5500 I'll be happy. Hell for that matter if I can loose a little quality to get it smooth I'd be happy with that too, but still wouldn't be happy with the price.

Here's how you have to look at it... Voodoo cards basically DEPEND on the Glide API, which most newer games, hardly support since nVidia bought 3DFX. Your GF2, especially with the Detonator drivers (5.0.3 I believe is the latest rev), fully supports OpenGL (which Voodoo's do only barely, a la the Wicked driver set), and is supported by virtually all the newer 3d games. I say you got more than a fair deal, with the GF2 enabling you to play games for some time to come.

But hey, I'm biased, I have a GF2

I will admit it's nicer being up to date that I will be able to play all current games. The G2 has probably bought me another year I guess. =)

BTW........the site mentioned above by joey_rjm5 for $50.....I just received an email:

They are sold out now.
Thank You
Ron Harter
Excess Solutions

well I'm posting to my own posts now, so I guess this thread is becomming my personal diary since I keep comming back here to compare results and update. Don't bother to respond if I'm boring you.

Moved the card to my main machine. Pretty much the same machine, but with 256 megs of CAS 2 and a RAID 0 setup. Set Antialliasing to off.......set mipmap detial level to best and texture memory to max (half my memory). Default drivers again and ran a SMOKIN 996 in 2001! hehe

guess there's another bottle neck somewhere......