Summary of how I made 20k in 3Dmark2001 with a 9700 Pro.
1) Hardware is listed in my signature. Watercooled 2.4C running at 3.56 gig. Mushkin Level 2 RAM using the 3:2 ratio (DDR396) and 2,2,2,5 timings. WD Raptor SATA harddrive, two optical drives, and no PCI cards. Built by ATI 9700 Pro with Swiftech waterblock and Tweakmonster RAM sinks. Case is cooled with four 120mm fans. Abit IC7 mobo has modded northbridge air cooling and small passive southbridge sink. I can post a pic if anyone is truly interested.
2) Fresh HDD format and WinXP Pro installed, using service pack 1 and DirectX9b. The .inf drivers were installed from the motherboard install CD. The OS was optimized by following the guide at this website:
http://www.blackviper.com
3) Virtual memory page file set to a static 1000 (since I had 1 gig of RAM). Use a higher amount if you have less RAM. I disabled everything in the task bar and in the startup (nothing running in the background hogging resources). I defragged the harddrive constantly and rebooted in between tests.
4) I flashed to the most recent BIOS update. In the BIOS I disabled on-board sound, USB, and printer port. Tried various AGP aperatures, but 128 seemed to work the best for me. Disabling video caching didn't do much that I could tell.
5) Disabling Hyperthreading helped a little.
6) Increasing the AGP voltage allowed me to O/C the vid card core 10 to 15 MHz more, but did nothing to increase vid RAM speed. (I know others claim this won't help, but it did improve stability in my system). Increasing AGP bus speed caused problems, so I left it locked at the default 66 Mhz.
7) Vid card settings were all set to maximum performance. AA and AF set to application preference. I overclocked the vid card until I just started seeing artifacts and then backed off a little. My vid was overclocked to core=400 and memory=350 using Powerstrip. Was rather disappointed how the RAM wimped out.
8) Cat 3.7 and Cat 3.5 seemed to work the best for me. My best score was with Cat 3.5, but I did other tweaks after I installed them, so I will try the Cat 3.7 drivers again. Was not happy with 3.2, 3.9, or 3.10. Did not try 4.1 or 3.4 yet. I'm going to play with the drivers some more tonight.
Did I miss anything?