3DMark2001 Tweaking Guide

[chong345]

Okay this is a very general tweaking guide for better 3dmarks scores. It will be more directed towards cards with Nvidia chipsets. Also these are not tweaks that I always use for normal everyday gaming etc. These are for use at your own risk. Also I will not be held responsible for any damage to anything that may be cause by a tweak. So here goes.

First off 3Dmarks gives the highest scores on a fresh install of whatever OS you use. After you get the OS installed its time to install all the tools needed. First you should install any agp drivers etc (ie. via 4 in 1, etc.). 4.37 4 in 1 seems to work the best for me. For Win 2k install Service Pack 2. Then its on to Video Card drivers. Some perform better than others. Best bet is to just test and see which runs best for you. You will also need direct x 8.1. Also get rivatuner and the 3DMarks program. After you got all this installed and everything seems to be running ok, defrag you hdd. Now on to the bios.

Assuming that you know generally how to overclock, you should try to get the highest FSB possible with most agressive memory timings. This will take a lot of trial and error but this will play a major role in your score. After you do that, if your card supports 4x agp and fastwrites then enable them. This is where I spent most of my time tweaking at first. Once you have learned exactly what your rig can do then everything will run much smoother. I must have benched 3dmarks at least a couple hundred times trying to get everything maxed out to as fast as possible in the bios I actually have notes of all the settings that I used so that I know exactly what I could and couldn't do. This also helped me to narrow down lockups, etc. CPU clock speed helps but higher memory bandwith is the greatest increase in scores.

Now we use rivatuner. Open rivatuner. This is where you will overclock your video card and do a lot of other tweaking. First we start with the Direct 3D. Open the Direct 3D options. They go like this.

Tab = tweak

Mipmapping = 3
Depth Buffering = disable W Buffer
Vsync = always off
Textures = Degree of Anisotrophy set to force level 0
Compatiblity = uncheck all the boxes
Antialiasing = uncheck box

Next go to the Open GL settings. Here are those

Tab = Tweak

Vsync = always off
Rendering = degree of anisotrophy to level 1 (off)
Antialiasing - uncheck box

Now with all these tweaks done, you can start to overclock the video card. Rivatuner is used for this as well. I usually use low level overclocking. Start with the mem first. Up it in small increments of 5-10mhz. Run a couple of tests. If you get no artifacts (spots, tear, etc.) then up it some more until it is unstable. Then back off by 5mhz and test again until you got it just right. Now do the same thing to the core. Most of the time if your core is too high you will lock up. If the mem is too high you usually get artifacts all over the place. Just a few is still benchable but some think its cheating. Obviously the higher the better but not in all cases. Sometimes if you are clocked to high you video card, cpu, etc will generate small errors and you will score lower.. These errors are so small that they don't cause you to crash or anything. Everything seems to be running fine but in fact the processing is slower due to the errors. Now you are ready to bench.

You should run 3DMark right when you boot into windows. This will make sure that none of your memory is being used by anything. Reboot everytime you run the tests. Also disable any background applications that might start on start up such as anitvirus, instant messengers, etc. Run only the game tests cause they are the only ones needed to provide a score. You'll save a lot more time this way when testing settings. After all the time you spent tweaking out the bios, and ocing the vid card your efforts should pay off when you see your score. If you crash or get stuck during 3dmark then you should try to figure out what went wrong through process of elimination. This will make things go much more smoothly. Be sure to publish your scores for others to compare. Its also good to keep in mind that when you compare scores with somebody else that their system might have something that they don't tell you about. Most people wonder why they score so much lower than some of the scores they see. Well usually they are just clocked higher on FSB, and vid card. There are a lot of people who have really high end cooling that push their parts to the max. And yes there are a lot of fake scores out there. They are easily spotted. Just be kind and ask them if they will remove it. Their e-mail adress is usually included with their score.

There are many other tweaks out there but most you have to find for yourself since all rigs are different. This is just a broad general guide for simple tweaking. There are other tweaks such as WPCREDIT, other bios settings, swap file optimizations, etc etc etc. Obviously any improvement in cooling that allows you to clock higher will help to get better scores. But basically after you have mastered your bios and use the other general tweaks the rest is up to you. This is where I spend most of my time tweaking now (software and upgraded cooling). I have already got all my bios settings to as fast as possible (given my cooling solution) and the vid card oc'ed to the max. The only tweaks left are software and just overall getting better cooling solutions for my cpu and video card. I hope this guide was helpfull. Happy Benching.

Any questions or comments feel free to post or pm me. I know this could be revised a little better. I'm working on it though. Good Luck!

Chong

Also post your score if you got an increase and how much from you previous score. I'm curious on how much the point differs for different rigs.

[steel102]

nice guide chong...
i also reccommend this guide by gibbo:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sho...threadid=37551

[chong345]

yeah gibbo's is a classic. Its about the same tweaks alomst but he goes a lot into ME. I would like to revise this guide but I'm thinking on what to change. Obviously ATI support would be nice. Thats ok though this guide is pretty general and different aspects of it are useful to different people.

[vvega]

i like this guide as u said everone has differnt mobos card so u cant just do 1 generic setup
its the small stuff like what program to use and the settings on that prog
i use xp pro is that bad for my o/c proformance?
ive got another 300w psu dedicated to powering all my drives and cooling(onlt the speed sensing wires on the mobo) and that seems to have help my mobo o/c proformance im now up to 157fsb from 150 i guess it helped cause all my fans whine more than ever and the hsf and gpu fans gained another 2-300rpm
what about powerstrip i heard lots of people talk about it??
and do u mean the full version of 3d2001 with the extra tests??
once again cheers guys
and where do u get those kick arse pics from (over ya name
im up to 8900 now with a little advice from chong
and hes helpful and cheerful
cheers dude

[chong345]

cool I'm glad it helped you. OK as for the 3dmarks 2001 se. Just downlaod the free version from the madonion site. The scpres are the same for the pro its just the pro has some added tests. It doesn't matter though since half the tests don't count. If you are running an AMD rig I would highly recommend using Win 2K. I have found that my highest scores have been with it. I tried xp but I score 100+ less than 2k. I think riva tuner is the best tweaking software for GeForce cards. I love it. VVega put you rig in your signature. I'm curious on what you are running.

[chong345]

i might try to go into general oc'ing in this guide but that could take awhile. I hope this is easy to comprehend for the general oc'er.

This is my score before riva tuner with all windows BS turned off

Now this is after riva tuner

[Shnyzx]

Nice, too bad it's only 2x what I've ever gotten...

[Sharke]

HEY CHONG your tweaks WORKed!!!!

Look what i got
from a 12123 score to NOW

[chong345]

sweet Glad I could help. I'm glad this guide works. With a little more tweaking then you might hit 13k. Good Job and Really nice score. Join the 12k club my friend. Also considering that your temps are limiting you I'd say that is a hell of an achievement. So far on an average these tweaks seem to help out by about 450 points. Thats a bunch of points.

[EvilBoB]

yea also another tip for ppl that know what there doing
get rid of the services that are not needed in winXP if ur useing this
all u need to do is goto start <<>> run <<>> services.msc
this will show ya all the services that micr0cr4p make u run
just have a look at the descriptions and if u feel u dont need them turn them of and put them on disabled but if you find problems with doing something throughout normal usage u might wanna re enable..

i find doing this just frees up ram and a little system resorces

[steel102]

im running win xp..but i need to reformat anyway cuz of a nasty error i was getting...and a botched repair..i think i have a win2k pro lying around, and a 98se...im gonna put it on a new partition and see which one gives me higher scores..

[Sharke]

Hey.... I managed to get 12566 score...

[chong345]

not bad, if you tweak really hard you could break 13k but it takes awhile to get it all just perfect for that one run.

[steel102]

sharke, whats the rest of your specs?

[Drozdov]

anyone know a good overclocking prog for the ATI cards? I use powerstrip but i thought there maybe other good ones...

Edit: this was from awhile back because i havent done much 3dmark benching....i now have Win2k, Winxp, or Win98se.

http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3254711

[Drozdov]

one more question...if i bought another stick of 256mb of ram, and have a total of 512 in my system, then setting the aperature size from 64 to 128, will it give a dramatic improvement in scores?

[chong345]

not really, the scores won't improve much from adding ram. Most of the people who bench stictly for score only use one stick of 256. This way its easy to just trade out a stick to see which one oc's high. If you look at the top 50 list most (more than 75%) are only using a 256 stick. I haven't done it yet cause I'm too lazy and the epox board design is kinda bad. You have to pull the Video card out to get the ram out safely. Anyway I use 128. I haven't heard anything about aperture greatly affecting scores. I know for sure that how much memory you have doesn't affect scores.

You can set your agp aperature size to 128 with 256 ram to test no problems.