PCMark04 scores

[SearanoX]

Man, that's a nice score...wish I could get something like that. I can't manually overclock my CPU (can only flash it), so I don't want to take that risk after nearly frying my friend's computer doing it.

I'll just wait 'till the next computer, I guess.

[AsianBatman]

Btw seranox..whats your system specs...because i to can not oc my cpu.

[SearanoX]

Specs?

Pentium 4 2.5a
Radeon 9800 128 Pro
512 PC3200 RAM
Old Gigabyte GXG motherboard (I was going to upgrade it, but that has been postponed)

That should be all you need to know...I don't have the latest version of my BIOS, which may be it, but I don't want to go through the whole e-mail process with Award.

[Soulburner]

Pentium 4 2.5a

Your CPU is 100x25?

[SearanoX]

Yeah, that's right. I can flash it up, but it's too risky. I'd like to bring it up to around 2.8, but that's not going to happen until I get a new motherboard. Once I get a new motherboard, I'm also going to try for another 512 stick of PC3200, because I have only one stick of 512 right now, so I can't take advantage of Dual Channel.

[Soulburner]

Flash? You are referring to the BIOS on your board right?

2800mhz would only require 112fsb, can your memory handle that? You said you have PC3200, that would be a huge underclock...

And your board doesn't support dual channel so two sticks would only add more RAM.

[SearanoX]

I'm talking about getting 2 sticks when I upgrade the motherboard.

Yeah, I'm going to try flashing it up to that. I nearly messed up my computer earlier trying to flash it, though, so I'm worried...I put the multiplier up to 110 just to test it out, and I couldn't get it booted up to BIOS for nearly two hours.

Still, I'll try it out soon and see if there's a worthwhile increase, but I doubt there will be a huge one due to my motherboard bottlenecking me.

EDIT: Okay, I brought it up to 2.8, ran PCMark 2004, and saw an increase of about 300 points to 3690 (approximately). Do you think it would be safe to bring it up to 3.0? I don't have any extra cooling right now, buy my case has quite a bit of empty space in there, and has pretty good ventilation, with vents on the back and both sides.

I'd rather be safe than sorry, so unless it's not going to darastically decrease my CPU's life span or cause it to fritz out in stressful situations, I won't put it any higher without any extra cooling.

[AsianBatman]

I think it should be fine unless you up the v-core.

[SearanoX]

Okay, I overclocked up to 3.0, and I'm going to leave it there. CPU doesn't seem all that hot for now, and I'm going to get a new fan in there just to be on the safe side. Here are my final scores. Not amazingly high, but it's a good increase, especially for the more CPU-limited games like the UT2003 botmatch, Counter-Strike, and Raven shield. All tests were run using default settings.

PCMark 2004: 3911
3DMark 2001: 15900
3DMark 2003: 5582
Aquamark 3: 38498
UT2003 Flyby: 205.27 fps
UT2003 Botmatch (more CPU bound): 65.25 fps

Good increases on everything, and while it's not uberly high, it's still more than I expected for the most part. UT2003 should also be staying above 50 fps nearly all of the time, which is really all that you can notice. Anything above that is just gravy (at least for me).

3DMark 2001 didn't show a very big increase for some strange reason...at least, not as big as I would have though. Still, it's most likely the motherboard dragging it down somewhat.

Thanks for all of the help.

[Wiggo]

Quite frankly until the P4 supported HT and went to the 200MHz FSB they didn't perform that well at all.

[SearanoX]

I know this is kind of the wrong place, but it pertains to my last post(s). I've noticed that while playing UT2003 and Raven Shield, I've had much higher framerates than what the benchmarks betray. In UT2003, my highest was around 120, lowest was 40 in some cases. Now, under the exact same situation, I'm getting 150 high, 80 low. I use a slightly lower texture resolution (Higher as opposed to Highest) as there's virtually no way to tell the difference between the two (even if you compare side by side, there's a very slight difference), yet gives quite a big fps boost.

Maybe I'll run some custom benchmarks...speaking of which, perhaps we could start a UT2003 benchmark thread? Not everybody has it, but it's used with virtually every test these days, and is an excellent way to guage system performance.

[Soulburner]

For UT2k3 I use the Flyby and Botmatch benches.

[weta]

2818

AMD Athlon XP2500 processor
Abit NF7-S v2.0 mainboard
Generic 512mb PC2100 DDR memory
Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 64mb DX7 graphics adaptor

[swinger]

Hows this? (system in sig)

[XblackdemonX]

3302