My friends know that while I'm a Mac addict, I'm a pretty serious PC gamer. It appeals to my inner geek. I've built my Athlon-based PC on a Barton core, with a Gigabyte motherboard and a 7600 GS graphics card. High end in 2003-2004 but now strictly middle of the road.
It's a very different world from MacLand. Here I muck with jumpers, matched memory, and voltage and overclocking. Total tweaker's paradise, anathema to the MacHead.
I've had problems, it seems forever, with my 3DMark03 graphics test. The 3DMark tests were very sophisticated, next-generation graphics designed to test all aspects of a system to their limit. At the time, if you scored well, you had a very fast system.
I used to consistently score pretty highly (top 100 systems in my class) because I used matched memory, stripped the OS (Windows XPSP2) to the minimum, and used good quality components. But I always had a glitch - the video card would hang up during the test and cease to show the all the frames. It's bugged
me for a good year (first upgraded the video in Baltimore and then encountered it) and I seem to have finally sussed it.
This evening, I turned off a bunch of services and apps, and tweaked some overclocking settings and ran the test without any hangups. And upgraded my 3dMark03 score to something respectable.
Of course, I don't exactly know what setting fixed it - I'm still in the process of figuring that out. But I finally have a stable, repeatable graphics performance to tweak. I can muck with overclocking the card separately or just the motherboard/front side bus. I'll likely try both and see what gives the best results.
So.. my hidden vice, overclocking and gaming, becomes public. :)
Posted by artandscience at November 14, 2007 07:29 PM