PNY 6800 128MB slower with pipes and vertex unlocked?

M

MERKMAN

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Messages
226
Greetings all. I have a Shuttle SN45G I imported from Germany some time ago. It's the "Tomb Raider - Angel of Darkness" version they only made 1,000 of. I'm sure many aren't interested, but I liked the case and picked one up when they marked them down to finish selling them all. (And the shipping was EX-PEN-SIVE!)

ANYWAY... I got one of the $159 PNY 6800 128MB video cards for it, and suddenly my Athlon 2600+ Mobile CPU and 2x256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 memory weren't stable. After having no luck Sunday, I gave up on it and came back to it tonight. It seems to have been the memory timings. The SN45G motherboard doesn't let me adjust the memory voltage, so I'm locked at 2.6v. As a result, I found that I could get the system pretty stable at 2.5-3-3-7, though Prime95 still isn't convinced. Guess I may have to slow the timings down further to get the whole system TRUELY stable.

Well... with the system as is, Doom 3 installed and ran great. I got a couple Timedemo scores of 67+ and then maybe 88 fps. This at 1024x768 medium quality. So then I used Rivatuner to "unlock" the extra vertex shader and pipelines, expecting my fps to increase. But instead, the scores were actually the same or slower. Not exactly what I expected.

Anyone else had any experience with this? Am I doing something wrong?
 
*points at PNY*
They are evil, and of horrible quality. That's probably why you're getting a decrease.
 
Yeah, but at least $159 was a nice price. ;)

In all seriousness... with the stuff unlocked, shouldn't this card be faster? Or is unlocking these units without having the extra 128MB of RAM the 6800GT's have just not doing much?
 
ur forgetting the card has less voltage than the GT n Ultra for the same amount of pipelines n shaders, n ur mem is using more energy than the mem on the gt or ultra. not all cards can successfully be unlocked.
 
Gotcha. I thought the main problem with unclocking the card was the possibly bad pipelines like I had with my BFG 6800OC when I unlocked it. The vertex shaders unlocked and see to be fine, but with the extra pipelines unlocked I had corruption in the form of lines with Doom 3, etc.

So is it best just to NOT unlock my 6800, even if no checkboard or other issues exist? Or is there something I could do to try and get the card to perform closer to a 6800GT?
 
Have you run the NALU demo from NVIDIA? I bring this up because both nalu and doom3 were showing no improvements after I unlocked my PNY on my shuttle AN35. I think what fixed it for me was setting the AGP arpeture to 256. I couldn't believe it made that big of a diffrence in those two programs, but it did.
 
yeppers... it's a serious gamble if the pipes will unlock, and then if they will be good... you could try lowering the core clock a bit, like by 25mhz or something and see if that helps... maybe it can't run all those pipes at stock clock... even so, if you get it stable at a lower clock, you should yield a net gain in performance with the extra pipes... just an idea.
 
on the is there anything you can do standpoint, mod your bios up to 1.4V from 1.2 or 1.1, not sure, but that will defo help...
 
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