Creative Labs 3d Blaster GeForce3 Ti500

Author : Wayne Date : 24th September 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Creative Labs and especially Rosie Tickner of ProdigyPR for their help and courtesy in providing this graphics card for review.

Overclocking :

As with other GeForce cards, overclocking is simplicity itself. I should make it clear that running your card out of spec will invalidate your warranty and may lead to premature failure and that I'm including this information for reference only. Is anybody listening?? Okay, let's press on.

First step on the road to overclocking your card is to make a new key in the registry. This creates a tab that allows you to alter both core and memory speeds. If you're not confident with making changes to your registry then I'd suggest you ask someone more experienced to do this for you.

First you need to open your registry by clicking Start/Run then typing "regedit". After doing this you need to make your way to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global" and then you need to right click on "Global" and create a new key called "NVTweak". The "NVTweak" directory may already exist in which case start from this point. Once you've done this you then need to right click on "NVTweak" and choose the option to create a new dword value which you need to name "Coolbits". Finally, double click on the new "Coolbits" key and in the box that opens enter the value "3". Once complete your registry entry should look something like mine shown below.

Reboot your system and head into the additional properties part of your drivers and you should now see an additional tab named "Clock Frequencies". I think a quick look at the image below will explain all you need to know.

Remember to adjust the sliders a small amount at a time and test your settings before you progress (yes I know most of you can overclock in your sleep, I'm doing this for that little ole lady in Birmingham who's only just started out).

In the end I was able to get the 3D Blaster to a healthy if unspectacular 265/550. It would run higher than this but simply wasn't stable in 3DMark with various visual glitches and random lockups.

Running 3DMark 2001 at the overclocked settings gave a nice 450 point boost.

As I didn't want to rip off the Ramsinks, I'm not certain what memory Creative have used but going off the eventual maximum speed I'm guessing they've adopted a 3.8ns chip. I say this because in theory a 3.5ns chip should be good to at least 570MHz.

Knowing that MSI were responsible for Creative's past cards I fired up PowerStrip, and sure enough this is also an MSI fab. Unless I'm mistaken, this is MSI's G3Ti500 Pro-TD.

 

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