Well I felt like playing around with mine tonight. And guess what? I was able to squeeze another 140 3DMarks out of it without overclocking the card or the CPU! If you'd like to know how I achieved that hit read more. 56K warning due to images.
It all started with the release of 3DMark 2001 SE. I was on holiday and read about the crashes with ATI beta drivers due to the missing activation if the 8bit stencil buffer in those. I was looking for an easy solution and came across the UniTuner 1.1. Again thanks goes out to Thomas @ ToMMTI-Systems.de for the heads up. So I used UniTuner to tweak some settings including activating the stencil buffer to prevent the crashes. The test was run on the following machine: AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 512 MB Samsung DDR 2100 CL 2.5 RAM @ CL 2 ABIT KR7A-RAID Mobo ATI Radeon 8500 Retail @ 275/275 2x Fujitsu MPG3409AH-EF HDD; 7200 RPM I took two screen shots of how your settings should look like to increase your overall performance: Note: UniTuner installs a second tool called GameUtil that will run @ system startup. I emailed Emil Persson a.k.a Humus the UniTuner developer about this and he told me that you can safely disable it. Here is his reply: GameUtil is needed for forcing refreshrate and settings gamma/brightness/constast from within games. If you don't need any of those features you can disable it (not that it uses much resources anyway... < 1MB memory, almost no CPU). Final result without overclocking: 8752 Want to compare your results? Click on this link to see how your system compares to mine.
It all started with the release of 3DMark 2001 SE. I was on holiday and read about the crashes with ATI beta drivers due to the missing activation if the 8bit stencil buffer in those. I was looking for an easy solution and came across the UniTuner 1.1. Again thanks goes out to Thomas @ ToMMTI-Systems.de for the heads up. So I used UniTuner to tweak some settings including activating the stencil buffer to prevent the crashes. The test was run on the following machine: AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 512 MB Samsung DDR 2100 CL 2.5 RAM @ CL 2 ABIT KR7A-RAID Mobo ATI Radeon 8500 Retail @ 275/275 2x Fujitsu MPG3409AH-EF HDD; 7200 RPM I took two screen shots of how your settings should look like to increase your overall performance: Note: UniTuner installs a second tool called GameUtil that will run @ system startup. I emailed Emil Persson a.k.a Humus the UniTuner developer about this and he told me that you can safely disable it. Here is his reply: GameUtil is needed for forcing refreshrate and settings gamma/brightness/constast from within games. If you don't need any of those features you can disable it (not that it uses much resources anyway... < 1MB memory, almost no CPU). Final result without overclocking: 8752 Want to compare your results? Click on this link to see how your system compares to mine.
