How do you turn a video card up? (1 Viewer)

[Kevin_Graham]

In other posts about video cards I've read that some have their video cards turned up. Does this mean there is some way to increase the video card's performance?
Thanks in advance for educating a novice.

 

[BrendanW]

Depending on the video card you have, you can sometime overclock it. This means pushing the clock speed, or the memory speed....or both to beyond what the card is rated for. Some of this can be done quite safely, other settings my run a chip too hot. When a chip gets hot you will notice instablility, artifacts, general wierdness. What brand/model of video card do you have?

 

[Nick_Murphy]

Aside from overclocking you can check and see if your video card is running at the highest acceleration in windows as well, you may do this by going to the display properties in your control panel...then...

settings | advanced | Troubleshoot | and then make sure the graphics acceleration is at full!!! hope that helps you out! and if you do decide to overclock don't try anything too stupid! hehe!

 

[Rob FM]

Kevin, what video card do you have?

A lot of the new ASUS cards have that feature (7700-Ti, 8200, 8500)

~Rob

 

[Kevin_Graham]

I have an Aopen nVidia Geforce 2 MX 400-E. I've included a link to Aopen's website that lists the cards attributes.
www.aopen.com/products/vga/mx400.htm
When I get home I'll check to make sure that the windows setting is at maximum accelaration.

 

[Kevin_Graham]

Now that I'm home I can see that the windows setting is at maximum. Within control panel/display/settings/advanced I noticed a tab for clock speed. There are 2 slide bars. The first one is core clock frequency which is set at 1/3 of the slide bar or 200mhz. The second one is memory clock frequency which is set to maximum at 334mhz. Are these set properly? What kind of improvement would I see if I increased the core clock speed?

 

[Nick_Murphy]

It should actually make out for a significant difference if you think about it Kevin. A video card is generally like a small computer, it has a processor, ram and a chipset. However I've never seen this in the advanced properties before, i've looked at my older machine with win98SE and it doesn't show the clock or memory speed settings either, just the "Hardware Acceleration". It sounds like it's just an addition software add-on from your card! If you feel up to it you might want to max out that bar as well, but i mean it's totally up to you hehe! anyways.....check out this website.....
Link Removed
There you can download a program called 3dMark2001 to benchmark your entire system's performance (in Gameplay, hehe) That way you can really test your system out to it's max! well have fun!

 

[Ryan Smrha]

Overclocking the Gforce 2 MX
Check this out, you may not see much improvement, maybe a few frames per second. But if you like to tweak, go for it.

 

[Kelley_B]

Also make sure you have the latest drivers. I would install the latest ones from nVidia.com as normally the board manufactor's drivers are a few releases behind.

 

[JohanK]

The fact that you have adjustable mem and clock speed is probably due to a program that Aopen had their installation CD install...nice feature. The current MX400 cards usually run at 200/334. If you are not experiencing any video problems, OCing won't be noticeable.

 

[Dalton]

I have a Leadtek Winfast GeForce 3 and and it comes with the handy Winfox utility that allows you to overclock the proccessor and the memory. If you are going to attempt any type of overclocking make sure you have good cooling and ventilation in your system. It is very easy to fry a card by overclocking without good cooling in place.

 

[Kevin_Graham]

Nick - thanks for the link to the 3dMark2001 software. I got some interesting results. My Geforce2 card got a high score of 2029. I replaced it with a Geforce3 card and got a score of 3519!

 

[JohanK]

Seems a little low for the gf3 card even in stock form. I got almost 3000 w/ my 1GHz P3 w/ an OCed gf2 mx400 card.

 

[Nick_Murphy]

Hehe, what you should do is also lower your resolution on the test to these.....
640 X 480 X 16
Texture Format: 16 Bit
Z-Buffer Depth: 16 Bit
And also make sure it's running pure hardware!!
But i scored 6736 with the defaults with my geforce3
and then i scored 7896 with the lower resolutions!!!

 

[Kevin_Graham]

With the resolution turned down I got a 3923. According to this review http://www.3dspotlight.com/reviews/h...tanium-3.shtml with higher resolution they almost doubled my scores. Their test system was based on an AMD Athlon TBird 1.3 GHz. This is certainly much faster than a PIII 600mhz. Now I'm considering upgrading my mobo/cpu (Will the upgrades ever end?). Can I use my 512MB 133 ram on a P4? What kind of mobo/cpu would you all suggest? As a newbie computer tech, is this more of an upgrade than I should handle? I use this computer almost exclusively for gaming and surfing the web.
Thanks again guys!

 

[JohanK]

As a newbie computer tech, is this more of an upgrade than I should handle? I use this computer almost exclusively for gaming and surfing the web.

Hard for me to say. Your current computer is more than enough for surfing. Probably enough for gaming too w/ that gf3 card. If you have to scratch that itch, another possible upgrade might be to slap a higher speed Pentium 3 in your mobo. Whether or not this can be done will depend on what you have now. Questions like:

-What mobo do you have? Chipset? Is it slot1 or socket 370?

-What 600 Pentium3 chip do you have?

-BIOS version? New version available?

need to be answered.

Of course, there is always overclocking with your current setup.

 

[Kevin_Graham]

After reviewing the mobo manual I learned that the fastest cpu it will accept is a P3 750. So I guess I'll be looking into upgrading to a P4. I'd like to research the differences in mobo, P4 chips, and memory. Are there any good sites for the ignorant? Suggestions for mobo/cpu are would be great too.

 

[JohanK]

Kevin, it is likely that your mobo can handle higher than a 750. Check the mobo mfg.'s website for updated info (and possibly BIOS) as manuals are out of date and only accurate up to the time of printing.

 

[Kevin_Graham]

I checked and indeed it is 750 limit. It's a very old board so that doesn't surprise me.