Msi 8800gt

[BobRoss]

I had a weird situation this morning before work. I had to leave though so I didn’t get to investigate it more.

I have a Prescott 3.2ghz and it had been running with a 7900gtx video card. I got some version of 3dmark and it would do 15000 range. I OC’d the processor to 3.4ghz and the 3dmark score went up a thousand or two which seemed reasonable. Now here is the weird part. I put on a new video card, an MSI 8800GT that came OC’d to 660mhz. I reset the Prescott to 3.2ghz (stock) and 3dmarked it. It got a 30000 range score. Double the 7900! I was needless to say very pleased with that! But when I ran the Prescott back up to 3.4 my 3dmark score went down several thousand! WTF? Is that a normal occurrence? Am I really better off running the CPU at stock frequency?

[Samuknow]

It may be throttling.

What board do you have?

What PSU do you have?

Tell me more tell me more....

[BobRoss]

The PSU is the Mushkin XP-650.
I'm not sure what the board is. It's some board I got bundled with the CPU from Frys.

I thought maybe throttling so I loaded that throttlewatch program but it didn’t report any throttling even after 4 hrs of 2 instances of prime95.

I have been able to overcome the 3dmark score dip by running the gpu faster from inside the msi utility. So now I have the score up to 31400.
Obviously I am going to keep messing with it though.
I am going to try to run the CPU faster since I haven't really gotten to its limit yet. So it will be interesting to see if the next CPU increase also increases the 3dmark score or if it will decrease it.

[MUff1N]

If you want to know what kind of mobo you have, download and install PC Wizard 2008 v1.84 from CPUID. It will give you all the details about all the HW in your rig.
CPUID

[BobRoss]

Ok i got it, i'll let you know

[BobRoss]

ok it's an ECS P4M900T-M with an VIA P4M900 chipset.

As I clock the CPU higher my 3dmark score seems to be going up overall. For instance when I put the 8800 in it jumped to 30273 at the stock cpu speed of 3.2 ghz and now at 3.6ghz its up to 30608. But it seems like with the cpu overclocked the best speed i can get from overclocking the gpu is worse.

So that with the cpu at stock 3.2ghz and the gpu at 660mhz i get 30273 but if i bump the gpu to to 685mhz i get 31426.
However if i bump the CPU to 3.5 ghz with the gpu at 660 i get 30538 but then if i bump the gpu to 703 mhz i get 30971!

How can the score be worse with a higher cpu and gpu speed? I am still under 55c and throttlewatch doesn't report any throttling.

Update: at 3.6ghz with a 660mhz gpu i get 30608 but if i go to 685 mhz on the gpu i actually go down to 30594?

[MUff1N]

Since nobody else is responding to this I will give a stab in the dark on this issue...
This is just a hunch but it looks to me there is something that is causing a "Choke Point" in your system so no matter how much faster you clock your CPU it won't make any diff or make it worse...more than likely it's your Single Channel Memory & I'm not sure how Via Chipsets are with overclocking.
I never see any posts about that so I assume they don't do very well with that...

So with that said my suggestion is to find the balance point between your CPU clock speed and your graphics card to where you get the best gaming performance out of the machine.
But this is just a suggestion & a halfway educated guess on my part.

[Daniel ~]

Hi Miff1n, ya know, those scores are pretty close, they may not be accurate to the tolerance we'd like...?

[noob]

Its your motherboard holding you back, and as Muff1n stated, you hit a choke point.

VIA chips overclock about as well as a brick. You will be exceeding its max bandwith in several areas, causing errors it is able to recover from - hence the lower score. You are lucky in not getting BSOD's.

Sorry to say - if you are wanting to overclock - you will need a new MB