My 3DMark01 score just skyrocketed

I've been neglecting benchmarks for a while because I just don't care too much, but tonight I decided to see what my system could do. Previously my limit was around 18K in 01 with this 9800, and that was at around 400mhz core. I never tried going higher on the video card, just didn't care since it could do anything I wanted at stock. You can see my sig for my computer.

I started off by playing with AGP aperature sizes. I went down to 4mb then continued up from there. I saw performance increases until 128mb, so I went back down to 64mb. There wasn't much difference between 16/32, or 32 and 64mb. However 8 and 4mb did seem to hurt my score.

I have the latest drivers, got them a few days ago. I run my drivers at either application preference or the bar slided towards performance.

My first run got me around 19K, and that was with 4mb AGP aperature. After doing things like running it in real time and adjusting my AGP aperature size I got it upto 20K. This was only at 225FSB, and my 9800 at stock!

As the night progressed I went up on my FSB. I got all the way upto 250FSB. 255 restarted right away in windows, giving it 1.62v corrected that, almost got a full 3dmark run in, but it restarted towards the end. I called 250x15 my max stable overclock because it didn't give me any trouble.

So when all was said and done I was able to get a score of over 21,100 without overclocking my 9800! I ran 3dmark at the default settings. I know 01 is mostly a system benchmark, but I am very impressed. This is a northwood on AIR cooling. I don't consider myself a hardcore overclocker or anything like that, that's why I'm so impressed with my score. My whole computer is basically stock except for extra heatsinks everywhere.

I'm just surprised my score went up so much from the last time I benched. The only thing I can think of is new drivers, and I might have gotten my PCP&C power supply since then, but I dont think my old one was putting down my score. A few days ago I did overclock my card a lot, maybe that sort of burned it in, but why would it perform this much better at stock?

Later today I'll continue my benching. I'll run 03 and see if my score went up there also. I was getting about 6500 I think before. I just got ATI Tool since just having PowerStrip open significantly lowered my 3DMark score for some reason. I can't wait to see what the final score will be. With my system at stock I benched my 9800's core to 475mhz and it didn't freeze or anything, it did eventually show artifacts though. The VGA Silencer on it is really rough, I didnt sand it before I put it on. I ordered ramsinks tonight. I might try flashing it to an XT, but I'll probably end up flashing it back unless if it yeilds very nice results with 100% stability(no artifacts). It's an R360 with Hynix 2.8ns RAM. Only 128mb.

But damn, over 21K on a stock 9800pro with an air cooled northwood isn't bad I'd say. Not to mention my low FSB, wish I could put my PC4400 to use.

Why do you think my score went up so much? Are the new drivers that much better? My old drivers are from when I got this card, that was maybe 2 months ago max, freshly downloaded. Or have I just tweaked my system better now than I had before?

The new drivers made a huge difference for me in '03, not so much in '01, but the performance gain was still there. Getting 21k without overclocking your card is nothing to sneeze at though........ I'm getting 22k on a 2.4C @ 3.5 gigs and my card running 450/380, so if you overclock your card I'd imagine that you could probably get up to around 23k.

What's your '03 score for your card? I'd guess that anywhere from 5.5k to 6k is a decent score for an unoverclocked 9800 Pro, I'm getting 7500 at 450/380 for reference.

Good luck benchmarking, it's very addictive

Drivers make a huge difference, and so do the AGP Aperture settings. 64 megs is what works best for me as well; 256 and 128 actually hurt scores. You definitely want an XT flash. It won't cause any problems, as I'd heavily doubt that your card would have any issues with 412MHz core.

Really? By how much did your scores drop when you used a 256 Aperture? That's what I have mine set to, so maybe my card'll be good for a slightly higher score if I set it lower............ it should get pretty cold tonight, so maybe I'll give it a try again.

I lost about 200-300 points in 3DMark01, so it was not too significant, but enough to catch my eye after the amount of runs I was doing.

Odd, I saw that 128/256 didn't hurt my score(01), but going too low did.

Before my card was getting around 6500 in 03, but I was also getting around 18K in 01 at the time. I'll do more benches later, I dont feel like it now.

It's weird. When I put on my VGA Silencer I could have sworn it said R360, and I was happy. But Sandra, ATI Tool, and Riva Tuner all call it an R350. I'll hold off on flashing it until I take another look at it.

Can someone point me towards a tutorial on flashing it to an XT? I dont know what tool to use, or where to get the BIOS. Or how to save my BIOS.

Meatball, even though you're close to my clock speed, you have a lot more memory bandwith than I do. Around 40mhz more FSB.

Foxie3a said:

Can someone point me towards a tutorial on flashing it to an XT? I dont know what tool to use, or where to get the BIOS. Or how to save my BIOS.

Meatball, even though you're close to my clock speed, you have a lot more memory bandwith than I do. Around 40mhz more FSB.

Click to expand...

Sure, here's the guide that I used to flash my 9800..... I seem to remember that I used the Gigacube BIOS on my card and it's seemed to work pretty well for me so far.

RojakPot

Yeah, the FSB on the 2.4C's does help in '01 quite a bit....... I found that increasing the cpu speed had a much higher effect on my '01 score than overclocking the card did. When I gained 20mhz on the core, my '01 score only went up about 300 points, but my '03 score increased by almost 400 points.

I see the benefits as being pretty equal between clock speed and the clocks on the Vcard.

I was at 21K running the card at stock. I used ATI Tool last night and it determined my max clocks to be around 415/370 without artifacts. My RAM doesn't have heatsinks, and my VGA silencer is completely stock, not even sanded. I'm not even sure if it's even cooling it too well because of the stupid shim on the GPU. I'll take care of all that later when I put ramsinks on it.

When running at my new speeds of 415/370 my score kicked 22K in the butt! Looking at it in detail, my score went up 800 points. I noticed a whole bunch of RAM latency settings ATI Tool will let me play with! I'll do that later too, it'll be a time consuming task of seeing if I like lower latency or high latency with potentially higher clocks.

I'm fairly disapointed though. I was planning on this being my final video card, but now I'm thinking I want to get a full fledged XT, or atleast a 256mb R360. I hate how this works, I'm getting over with a low clocked 9800pro and I'm still not happy!

By the way, I got 5200 3DMarks in 03 with it at stock and at 250FSB. I thought I was getting like 6500 before when I was getting 18K in 01. Maybe it's even more video card dependant than I thought and I had overclocked a little before compared to that newest run at stock. I'll run it again later overclocked.

Just remember that flashing 9800pro->xt is for cards with R360 cores only.

depends on how much system memory you have aperature is just system memory set aside for the videcard to use if my understanding of it is correct.

so if you have 512mb for example and set your aperature to 256 youll notice the scores drop because your setting aside to much memory for the videocard to use and not enough for everything else.

also a 4mb aperature could force you into using hte pagefile and that would drop your scores as well.

i could be wrong about this but its what ive put toghether somewhat from reading up on aperature settings and 3dmark tweaks. if im wrong please correct me so i can understand it better myself.

Ya man, flash that pro to an xt, your already past xt clocks anyways, might as well have the title.

Thats how my card is