New 3DMark Score...

[Marci]

http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3740900

10405... 3rd page of All XPs with Rad8500... still some work to be done! And a 1200 point improvement on my last score of 9200(ish)...

203x9 vcore at 2v
GPU/MEM@303
1x256Mb 2700 timings set to ULTRA
New Catalyst02.1 drivers from ATI, and a bit of fiddling in Rage3DTweak... but not a lot... so now I need an expert in Rage3DTweak to give me some pointers... *HINT*

[MrIcee]

Marci:)

Congrats on another great job by an Xtreme teamate. The main thing is to make sure V-Sync is disabled...set your monitor for 60Hz. I'm not familar with Rage3D Tweak..but if you can adjust the LOD bias +3 seems to work well. Make sure anisotropy is turned off if its posible...as well as antialiasing.

The biggest gain to be had is realized with improved cooling on the Radeon 8500. Whether better air, water or a chilled cooling alternative..if you can get the gpu clock up you'll be in the 11,000's no sweat.:)

Randi :D

[Hardass]

Way to go Marci, nice work.;)

[Marci]

here's a trick for ya... bin yer monitor and rely on tv-out alone...
My monitor got pee'd on (by my cat) so got a TFT instead, sold it to a customer who wanted one quick and couldn't wait, and not bought one since... so fixed refresh of 60Hz on a 32" Dolby Pro Logic Mitsubishi TV!!

Got gpu to 303 and was just beginning to get artefacts (blue snowflakes! looked quite good actually, the nature test with blue snow!), but only on Nature test... got highest score with it at 299 tho... when I pushed it up past 300 it started to fall... bizarre! But if it's only getting artefacts on nature I reckon I could push it more, just ran out of time for tonight as had a meeting to go to...

As soon as FSB goes past 203 I get the usual tearing and wierd unicode characters appearing in BIOS & Dos etc but that's down to the 8K3A+ by all accounts... if anyone knows a solution I'd be glad to hear it... but it never used to do it with original factory bios whatever revision that was. Bearing in mind with that tho I had all sorts of problems with my recording studio soundcards so had to upgrade it. It was the original bios that got me upto 2.1ghz.

Added a few 60mm double deltas pointing towards the gpu sort of from the base of a triangle with the gpu as it's peak if ya get what I mean, which seems to have sorted it out along with some more pencil on the radeon resistors... Desparate to go water & gf4 but cash not willing... otherwise I'd have a monitor!! :)

[Marci]

just got me KX7-333-R fitted... so by the end of tonight I'll hopefully have some new scores up!

[MrIcee]

Marci:)

Good luck with the KX7-333R...remember best scores with that board are done at as high a FSB as possible. Check out the Abit bios guide in the other thread to get you started:)

Randi:D

[macci]

KX7 will most likely boost your score quite a bit :)

Cos it looks like your epox 8k3a+ is not running at very fast settings (most likely a slow bios version?).
Just for comparison Check this out, its at 166 x 10 on 8KHA+ w/ R8500LE (maxed out BIOS and WPCREDIT settings) and I'm kickin ur ass in every test (this is without any tweakers too, just ATI control panel D3D settings) ;)
http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3751745
Installing W2K might give you some extra points too :)

GOod Luck :)

[Marci]

Cheers fer yer help guys, and I never thought I'd see macci replying in one of my posts.... truly onored, me is!!

Apparently you're the man to ask about tweaking the Rads.... I've been nVidia for years and couldn't afford a GF4, but could afford to move from GF2Ultra to Rad8500, so have very little experience of doing anythiung with the buggers.... I've vmodded & cooled it to death, but could do with a hand on some of the tweaking options in sftware such as rage3d.... any help u could give on that front'd be ace...

Anyways, got the kx7 in with cpu vmod done... only had 1x 50k variable lying around. Currently running fine at 1.93v to get 200x9, which took 2v on the Epox... just wish Abit would give us Keyboard Power-On!!

EDIT----

Anyways, it's a day after I posted this and I've added a new thread detailing my experiences / problems so far... looks like I've hit a brick wall with this graphics card p'raps...
KX7-333R - No Improvement so far :( (http://64.247.35.92/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1272)