3dMark Conspiracy Theory

[Shroomalistic]

We all know there is a little group thats stays on top of the 3dmark orb, We know who they are.

What we dont know is what they are doing to get those scores.
Yeah it takes great cooling, and somewhat of a skill for overclocking, but it doesnt end there.

They know something that not everyone know, they keep there knowledge to themselves. This is a 3d team, not a 4 or 5 man team.

You guys on top should take the time and make a good walk threw on what you guys do (ex. Drivers, registry tweaks, video card tweaks.....etc) If you guys really want a good run and good compatition then let your secrets out. I know there are secrets. I know you guys know little tweaks and arent telling anyone in fear of loosing your top 5 in 3dmark.

TELL US YOUR SECRETS, PLEASE!!!!!

This is a conspiracy, there out there. We only know who they are and that they are there. Please people lets get the goods out of them.

Sorry guys I had to do it, the conspiracy will falter.

thanks

Shrooma§§§§inglistic!!!

[Kunaak]

there is no spoon.

[Aldus]

No conspiracy. These guys have just put all the time and effort in the world into benching. Crawling thousands of threads to find the latest tweaks and seeing which work best for them. Trying countless diffrent BIOS settings to see which is fastest with their cpu/mobo/ram/gfx combination. Lastly there is the money factor. Being able to keep buying cards, cpus, mobos, mem, cooling, and anything else they need until they find the very best of each one. Out of all the factors I think money is the least important. Some people (like myself) just dont have the dedication that these guys do. I assume they have been around hardware / overclocking for a long time as well. Im pretty new to the whole secne just started when the 1600+ agoia y's were the hot chip.

[charlie]

Well there's a fine line between Hard-Core overclockers and the fanatic psychotic overclocker. The top two or three employ tweaks and tips that are not discussed...secret registry tweaks, rewriting drivers...stuff that's way out there!!That's the dif' between that last 800 points if peeps have the same hardware!!

C

[Edward2]

As someone who just got into 3dmark recently, I have learned already that there are LOTS and LOTS of tweaks to be made. Some I have found by accident (like the time I changed the wrong setting in RivaTuner and my score when up 250 points), and others I have read about in the forums (like installing windows with APIC enabled which gave me another 250 points).

I have tried a lot of the settings in RivaTuner. I have reduced the number of windows services running in the background (down to like 12). I have tried different video cards, CPU's, mobo's, and memory.

The last thing I will say is that you need to keep very good records of what you changed and how it affected your score. This can be very useful when looking back at your scores and trying to find the right combination.

[FUGGER]

www.tweaktown.com

xp tweak guide 1 and 2

[bowman1964]

dont take this wrong please...:D

do you expect for the great ones like OPP to give away learned tricks that has taken them thousands of hours of hard work to learn...
.do you know how old OPP and some of the better guys are?
they didnt start yesterday.
i can remember the p133pr processor where i was adding fans and running a extra voltage wire to the board to help(or in thought it did)

there is one of the best guides in this section on tweaks..
and to tell you the truth,,I USE IT MYSELF.....
then i start trying countless differant things.

and you must kept records on every detail.

But the worst part is this.....

all that work you do to one system.....proberly wont help you one bitt 6 weeks from now when you have to start over again with new hardwear.

so to you question....there is no excate tweak for any given system.

YOU WILL HAVE TO PUT IN THE LONG HOURS LIKE EVERYONE ELSE DOES.
MY best saying is still...NO PAIN>>>NO GAIN:D

[sjohnson]

So true Bowman. Get to know your rig(s) like you'd like to know your women.

Flatter them with the best cooling and components.

Encourage them to aspire to better things with voltage, conditioning and tuning.

Anticipate what they'll do next. And be right.

And thank the powers above when you get a good one ;)

[luihed]

Originally posted by bowman1964

YOU WILL HAVE TO PUT IN THE LONG HOURS LIKE EVERYONE ELSE DOES.
MY best saying is still...NO PAIN>>>NO GAIN:D

So true....... Shoomalistic, even if OPP, Macci, DJ and JV tells everything they know about benching, they will still dominate the ORB....... they go though the extra mile in everything especially cooling..........

[Geforce4ti4200]

wanna know the secret? cooling, cooling and cooling! oh another little known secret many people forget........buy more than one of each hardware you plan to overclock. I went thru 5 ti4200s in order to get this one that does 290/600 and there are still better ones out there. Buy twp radeon9800s for example, sell the worse overclocker, buy another, sell, buy keep doing this as long as you wish and you have a good chance to end up with one of the best overclocking radeon. thats just the hardware side. for software, lowering the lod bias gives a couple hundred but only works for nvidia cards via rivatuner

[Kanavit]

another secret, you gotta know is circuitry and silicon. what does what , like volt mods, especially with mobos and gfx cards. like adding turbo pll mobo accelerator kit. to have an out of the ordinary mobo that performs above a regular mobo. Cooling is the next step. these aren't normally volted hardware here, it's cutting edge overclocking beyond imagination.

[lalPOOO]

On top of what everyone else said, you only have 60 posts. Maybe you're just here to steal their secrets for another forum :P

keeping records will really help you though when it comes to hardware. Keeping records of software helps too, but I understand where your coming from. Keeping records won't magically pop ideas into your head about secret windows tweaks, but I imagine that if you hang around, and keep applying what you learn, you will see an improvement. (I know I have!)

Another "secret" to getting the high scores is having a job (or having money) Not that you can just buy points, but that you have to be willing to take expensive risks.

[Marci]

Yep.... these guys can potentially blow a few thousand bucks in one bench if everything goes as wrong as it can get... and these guys acknowledge that fact, and live with that fact.
Hours of painstaking testing and tweaking and fine tuning is done, but is ONLY EVER APPLICABLE TO THAT SYSTEM. Every system's fine tuning is different. All the initial steps are covered repeatedly all OVER the web... there are hundreds of guides to optimising XP, optimising graphics performance, and probably at least 50 specifically for optimising 3DMark... they exist because there are so many variations to getting the good scores that no one guide could cover them all and guarantee success.

The reason forums have an advantage over IRC and MSN etc is because they STORE information that you can search through. This site has been going for years now, and these guys have been with it from the start and have shared tips and tricks all over the place in the past.... search thru the forums and you will find all the info you need...

At the end of the day, it's down to having the most powerful hardware money can buy (so usually the most expensive), the best cooling you can possibly obtain (eg: LN2 or Dry Ice), and the knowledge to squeeze every ounce of voltage into the rig as physically possible without making it go bang to make it go as fast as physically possible.

I've been on this site thru the 3DMark teams highs and lows, and the gurus have always shared whatever info they can to get you right up their backsides. They just don't tell you how to get the small extra boosts to pip you past em.

Lets face it, u don't see the bosses over at Ferrari walking over to the Williams camp saying "here, have all the technical drawings and specs for our car next year..."

[charlie]

When I hit 29K, I'll list every optimization, tweak and setting I use... no prob :D

C

[Kunaak]

I know atleast a dozen little tweaks you can do for the registry, turning things off, uninstalling useless crap... and a million other things...

but in the end, nothing beats a clean install, no extra crap just the drivers needed, every bios setting needed, no extra stuff on, and alot of patience.
cause I have yet to come across a software tweak that really helps much...

just this weekend, mickeymouse told me to mess with the LOD.
well I had played with the LOD before and saw nothing to be interested in...
but being that that was a very long time ago, I thought "hmm might as well give it another try" and took his advice on the settings.
it looked like hell, and scores were alittle higher on average.
but nothing drastic.

but stability was down by about 90% and my dragothic scores were dropping like an anchor while everything else was up by 2 frames or so...
but the main problem was stability was shot, after the entire weekend of benchmarking with the LOD tricks, I had 1 sucessful bench, and it wasn't very impressive.

most "tips" are like this.
they work to a point, but aren't always worth it.
in my case, after a fully tweaked windows 2000 install, I gain alittle stability and up my points by about 100...
but the OS is completly unusable after all the benchmarking :(

so I just do minimum tweaks.
just the basics.

[charlie]

Kunaak,
What registry hacks do you use? I tried some including the second level data cache hack and saw no difference between 256/512/1024/0??? Do you use any registry hacks with w2K??
C

[Marci]

I tried some including the second level data cache hack and saw no difference between 256/512/1024/0

You'll find that reg tweak no longer applies to any CPU with integrated L2 cache, and only applies to PII CPUs or earlier...

See this page: http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/116/

If you do a google on L2 Cache Registry Tweak there are several results which state this...

[Marci]

This item is obsolete. On all modern systems, that is all supported processors/systems, it should not be an issue. This is not related to the hardware; it is only useful for computers with direct-mapped L2 caches. Pentium II and later processors do not have direct- mapped L2 caches.

http://is-it-true.org/nt/registry/rtips136.shtml

[charlie]

tHe Black Viper service configuration gave me 2 good runs (about +150pts) and then refused to load Win2K... no boot! Tine to reinstall. What defrag command/proggie do you guys like?

C

[Kunaak]

Registry Editor (run regedit):
+ Turn off Windows File Protection: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon
Change the value of SFCDisable to REG_DWORD 'ffffff9d' . Restart Windows.

+ Turn off OS2, POSIX servers: go to WinNT/System32 (path depent on your OS and how you installed it) and delete OS2.exe, OS2SRV.exe, PSXSS.EXE, OS2SS.exe, & POSIX.exe.

+ Memory management:
HKLocal Machine/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management: set DisableExecutivePaging = 1, LargeSystemCache = 1, IOPageLockLimit = 16384 (use decimal), SecondLevelDataCache = 256 (or your L2 cache size, use decimal)

open up Regedit and browse to [HLKM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\RUN]. From there, you can manually delete the values, which are starting the unwanted applications.

[Stang_Man]

Originally posted by Kunaak
Registry Editor (run regedit):
+ Turn off Windows File Protection: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon
Change the value of SFCDisable to REG_DWORD 'ffffff9d' . Restart Windows.

+ Turn off OS2, POSIX servers: go to WinNT/System32 (path depent on your OS and how you installed it) and delete OS2.exe, OS2SRV.exe, PSXSS.EXE, OS2SS.exe, & POSIX.exe.

+ Memory management:
HKLocal Machine/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management: set DisableExecutivePaging = 1, LargeSystemCache = 1, IOPageLockLimit = 16384 (use decimal), SecondLevelDataCache = 256 (or your L2 cache size, use decimal)

is this for all systems??

[Peen]

like everyone else said, it takes time, patience, skill ,money and a lil luck. also like bowman said, he has been learning tricks since the day of the "Pentium". It aint an easy task, i can think of hundreds of lil things that will get my 3dmark scores, but thats also what makes it fun is the guessing :banana: it took me awhile to get 22k on air, but lil tweaks that i thought of myself got me over the hump :toast:

[DoGMaN]

Here is a nice trick. To build anything you need a good foundation. Just like MickeyMouse said, LUCK & $$$ play a big part. You can super cool the hell outta a MX400 but you are never going to break #1. Start with the right parts and you are surely going to grab a good score. My rig does 21,000 completely stock.

Compare (http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=7216711)

[charlie]

here's a well know tip but here's the documantation behind it:

FX-51
9800XT
win2K sp4
default, EVERYTHING. No optimizations. Just the way Bill intended it to be.

6 runs from 21206 to 21,404 with an average of **21,352**

Plus: set sliders in Control Panel to "optimal Performance", reboot. 6 runs from 21476 to 21720 with an average of **21,569**.

Lesson #1
Sliders to Optimal for D3D and OGL is worth 217pts.

[thetruememphis]

hehe i can hardly get that fully overclocked.

[luihed]

I agree with Kunaak.... nothing beats a clean install and take out everything that you dont need..... If only Im smart enough to actually take everything out of XP and just leave the ones I need to run 3dmark and post my score, that will be sweet.......

Also alot of things you do is just from experience, its hard to explain to someone as its all by feel.......

Persistance is another thing, I know most of the top benchers here go though hours of benching and just finish one benchmark..... if you dont have that kind of persistance then you aint getting the best score possible from your rig..... With my last score it took me 3 hours just to finish one test, luckily it hit my target (25k) on the first try:D tahts when you know the overclocking god is with ya lol........

[bigZ]

quick question, will hard drive speed make a huge difference?

I've got a couple of 7200rpm ATA100 drives sitting around doing not much, I was thinking of using one of them for a dedicated 3dmark drive, so I can have my main system drive setup for day to day, and know it'll be 100% stable. :)

[Kunaak]

HD speed means nothing.

my best benchmarking for this Via board with it's screwed up dividers is a old 1998 3.2 gh hd, it's incredibly resilliant to PCI frequency, but it's insanely slow too ;)

[lundrog]

ok, this could sound dumb, but has anyone ever done a ram drive with xp on it? if we could do a ram drive that would boot off of a rom or somthing and copy all running files to ram, the performance should be nuts, I know it can be done, Just wondering if anyone has the ram to do it. Just a idea.

[FUGGER]

I tried solid state disks in raid and it made no difference in score at all.

I was using 10 gig bitmicro SSD's on a SCSI 160 controller. The drives costs in excess of $10,000 each

[lundrog]

hmm,whats the spec's for those? should have made a diff....


I'd love to beable to mess around with that stuff, however I can't aford to overclock a top end system.

[Marci]

if we could do a ram drive that would boot off of a rom or somthing and copy all running files to ram, the performance should be nuts, I know it can be done, Just wondering if anyone has the ram to do it. Just a idea.

Otherwise known as HyperOS (http://www.hyperos2002.com/) (2003 Release 6 Ideally)

[Shroomalistic]

Anyone have any tips for Ati video card tweaking?