New to OC's.com

Hi there,
I'm relatively new to this forum and to the concept of overclocking and I was wondering if some of the community might help me with my 3DMark scores and help me to squeeze a little more from my system. I will try to provide as much info about my system as possible

XP SP2
2 x WD 80G 7200rpm harddrive (1 for storage only)
Asus P4P 800SE mobo w/865PE chipset
I bumped my FSB on my cpu up from 200Mhz to 236Mhz. This bumped my CPU frequency up from the OEM 2.6Ghz to a 3.1(actual 3071Mhz, rounded up) and I have no stability problems at all with just normal Windows navigation or playing Quake 4 or America's Army on half-way decent settings.
2 gigs of Geil dual channel DDR-400 RAM with heatspreaders
BFG Geforce 6200 OC currently default settings of 375Mhz Core/400Mhz memory.

Now I benchmarked with 3Dmark and came back with a score of 1193, which IMO is not only on the poor side of things, when compared on Futuremark's website I see I am about ~500 points behind my closest comparison:
Someone else who had the same video card as me, running 100Mhz slower than my processor and HALF the RAM. (???)

I enabled Coolbits on my PC and ran the self-adjusting overclocking feature. It ran for a few minutes and suggested a core of 416/memory 489. This however ground my system to a halt. Nothing would respond so I had to reboot back to my video card's default core/memory speeds (still not quite sure what to think of my 6200 OC )

My temps are usually around:
IDLE: 30-32*C CPU/~34*C Mobo temp
Gaming: 36-38*C CPU/~36-39*C Mobo temp.
All voltages are set to stock settings in BIOS.
System is protected by Ad-Aware SE Pro, Spybot S&D 1.4 and ZoneLabs Zone Alarm Security Suite Pro.
Thats about all I can think. If any of you can help me figure out how to squeeze a little more out of my video card and system(not sure on the video card, seems like its at its ragged edge right from the factory) to obtain a higher 3D mark score, it would be greatly appreciated. TIA!

FF

*EDIT* forgot to mention my Geforce 6200 OC is currently on Forceware 81.94, is 256mb DDR and is AGP.

Check out the guide for tweaking your comp for 3dmark. It is one of the stickies in this section. Also be sure to set your performance setting to max performance: go to control panel, system, advanced, performance, then check adjust for max performance.

well first off which benchmark are you running? 3dmark 01' 03' or 05'?? If your running 05' that isn't nearly as bad as if you got 1k in 03. We need alot more info then what you provided. Like cpu, if memory is 512x4 or 1024x2, power supply, and motherboard.

Make sure you have aa/af shut off before benching, cause those will really drag down your score big time. Make sure ALL your programs are not running, like antivirus, spyware, and stuff like that.

EDIT: btw to the forums bud!

The 6200 your are seeing are more than likely to have had there extra pipelines unlocked so there will be a big increase from just that.

Have you tried unlocking the extra pipelines yet?

Thanks for the welcome!
BenF - thanks for the suggestion. I had forgotten about that adjustability. I'll be sure to read up some more on the the 3DMark info.

I'm running 3DMark '05. Unfortunately, it is not the pro version so i don't have any adjustability.
When I run 3D mark I do not have any of my anti-virus/spyware programs running except Zone Alarm, which is probably taking up a good bit of memory anyways...

Stang - The only other info I know on my CPU, according to CPUZ is that it is a Northwood, my FSB is set at 236Mhz and my bus speed is registering at 945.0Mhz.
The Geil memory is 4 X 512. It is currently set at a FSBRAM ratio of 1:1 with latencies of 2.5-4-4-8. My powersupply is an ATX 420 watt unit and my mobo info is listed in my first post The BIOS for my mobo is American Megatrends.

Night8Jim - I just did some digging in the last 15 minutes and found out that my BFG6200 OC has the NV44 core. I tried unlocking the extra pipelines using Riva Tuner but I *think* it is not possible. I followed the guidelines from here:
http://www.doomedpc.com/?q=node/36
And found that my video card showed up in RivaTuner as NV4A (A1,4x1,3vp) with 256mb DDR. When I followed the directions on doomedpc.com and rebooted, it showed up with a configuration of 2x1,3vp, whatever that means(I'm still new to all this).
So am I not able to unlock those extra pipelines with this card? Any way to be able to confirm it? Many thanks for all the info guys! I'm learning quite a bit. Thanks!

oh didn't see the line where you listed your mobo.

After doing a project search and compair for a P4 within 2900-3100mhz and a nvidia geforce 6200 the #1 score is only 2354, with 2nd place being at 1183...

Stang, that 1183 is my benchmark score, lol. I reposted a 1193 earlier today but I guess it did not post. I'll try and post another benchmark tonight.

Any other info I can use to help boost my 3D mark score? TIA!

Yeah but your score is on par with other systems very similar to yourself. The 2300 score is just a unlocked 6200, cause he was pretty close (like 600 points less) then my old venus cpu @ 2.75ghz and a 6600 non GT.

OK, I reposted a 1280-something score a wee bit ago.

So is the BFG 6200 OC with the NV44 chip unlockable? Is that the final word? Any way to confirm this? I don't mean to ask redundant questions, I'm just trying to figure out my options.

*UPDATE*
As of 11pm eastern I diligently worked on my video card options. I think I am probably stuck with the limited pipelines( I can only get lucky so much tonight).

That said, I think I found a way to overclock my BFG 6200 OC(!). As mentioned previously, whenever I tried to overclock my 6200 using coolbits on the latest Nvidia driver, the second I bumped my core up from 375 (even moving it to 376 caused a total system freeze) my PC would take a poopie.

Whilst researching I found another forum that had a thread where someone else was experiencing the exact same problem as I. Well, lots of people actually. But one person posted the solution. I was told to download Nvida ForceWare version 76.44 and that this would allow me to overclock my 6200 without the system seizures. I downloaded and after a brief, almost-botched driver install I think I have it working now.
I've currently got my 6200 running 416/489 at the moment with no stability issues whatsoever. While this isn't exactly ground-breaking clock speeds, its a start in the right direction.
3DMark gave me a 1329 score and I feel there may be a little more headroom with the core clock. I played Quake 4 at High Quality video setting at medium resolution. I honestly can't remember the resolution but it was greater than 800x600. Maybe 1000-ish by 700-ish? Anyways, the animations were great, experienced no slow-downs and everything was smooth as butter. 30 minutes of playing and my GPU temps were 34-35*C according to my Nvidia control panel.

Does anyone think I can safely push my video card more, despite the lack of pipes compared to a REAL 6200?

I'm off to the Nvidia section to relay my findings...

Well i have an even worse overclocker than you do (6200TC) by changing the cooler it sloud me to get another 25Mhz out of the core, i also have had a lot of trouble with my spare system this is running a 6200 and the piplines have unlocked but it just crashes on everythink, so i have to keep it on toccat the momoent.