Elsa Gladiac 921DVI GeForce3 Ti500

Author : Wayne Date : 30th December 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Elsa 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. For those of you who don't need this advice, just humor me.

A little playing brought some rather unexpected results. The core pretty much topped out at 265MHz which is identical to the maximum core frequency of the Creative card and suggests this is likely to be the ceiling for most Ti500 GPU's. This is a shame as core overclocking seems to offer by far the better performance improvements. The memory however was different story and kept going way beyond the 550MHz we saw from Creative's 3DBlaster, and this despite the fact they both use Elite 3.8ns chips.
In fact memory performance was so impressive I had to pop off a RAM sink to make sure I hadn't been duped. In the end I was able to run Windows at 305MHz (610MHz DDR) though 295MHz (590MHz DDR) was the limit for moderate 3D exertion and 290MHz (580MHz DDR) was the highest I could use while running 3DMark 2001.

For this test I has swapped out my XP1800+ and fitted instead an XP1900+ overclocked to 1660MHz. As you can see from the Q3 results, the benefits from pumping up your memory bus are minimal and probably not worth the extra heat. An increase of around 4FPS isn't much of a return for a 40MHz overclock unless you really need it.

3DMark 2001 showed some nice scores, at least until I hit a memory speed of 570MHz at which point things went a bit pear shaped. For some reason, any memory clock above 570MHz caused a decrease in performance under 3DMark, and though I did try a few tricks to identify what was happening, I didn't really have too much time to investigate fully. If anyone else has come across this problem I'd sure like to hear about it. As you can see the 3DMark peaked at 9000 at a setting of 265/570 (core/memory) after which it dropped to 8817 at 265/580 before finally failing to run to completion.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that this board had done the rounds means I'm less confident about proclaiming the 921DVI a top overclocker but if this board is typical of other 921DVI's then the memory clocks attainable are amazing. To run Windows happily at 610MHz (DDR) is incredible for 3.8ns RAM, and even the 580MHz for 3DMark is damned impressive. I really don't believe there's a great deal more than 265MHz available from the Ti500 GPU, though if you know different please feel free to let me know.

Page 11 - FSAA and Summing up