How do I overclock a PNY GeForce4 Ti4600?

[Cobra]

Hi guys,

Most GF4 Ti cards like the MSI in the other PC at home have a slider for memory and core frequencies in their properties. This allows an overclock to be achieved easily. However, my card has no such options.

This is a pain, because I want to overclock it. Does anyone know how to get PNY cards to do this? Perhaps, since they're all fairly similar, I could flash it with a BIOS from another brand like MSI. I know that the Leadtek FX5950 BIOS will trick many FX5900s into becoming FX5950s, usually regardless of brand so perhaps I can do something similar.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Cobra

[rallynavvie]

There is a registry hack for any nVidia graphics cards that allows you to do this. It's basically a hidden menu option under your video card properties window that needs to be opened via the registry. I did this a while back with my PNY 4400 but it changed with the new Forceware drivers. Do a search for overclocking the GeForce4 and you'll find the registry tweak somewhere. Also make sure you get the aftermarket cooling solution for your card. Thermal-something makes a copper HSF for the GF4 cards to replace the crappy OEM one. I highly recommend it if you're going to overclock your GPU. It also includes heatsinks for the VRAM. They sell them still at:
www.sidewindercomputers.com

[mujahid7ia]

I would try powerstrip, it's a great program.
www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm

[Cobra]

I did this a while back with my PNY 4400 but it changed with the new Forceware drivers.

That's a crying shame - I installed the damned ForceWare drivers about half an hour ago to try to get these settings!

mujahid7ia, that application seems to have worked fine. Now I need a way to measure the framerates to see what difference it's making.

Thanks guys, it's been really helpful. I'll try to get it sorted from here!

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

i downloaded rivatuner from guru3d.com which does the job nicely. then use 3dmark2001 or aquamark3 to check for improvements. slight overclocking got me a 1000 point increase in aquamark - but i need a faster cpu and more ram to get the potential out of my card.

[Cobra]

flan,

What a cracking website! I downloaded the benchmarks (amongst many other things...) and I'll post them up in a bit.

Thanks again for all the advice, guys - it's really helped!

Cobra

[Cobra]

Great. My card doesn't take kindly to being overclocked at all - it crashes AquaMark and UT2004 freezes for abuot 6 seconds then resumes when it's more than 2% overclocked on either/both memory and core. I was thinking about increasing AGP voltage to 1.7V but a rise from 1.5 --> 1.6V made pity little difference so I decided not to continue.

That's a shame. I was looking forward to making it beat the new GeForce 6800!

Just out of interest, my system (standard graphics speeds) scored the following:

- AquaMark: GFX - 2,220; CPU - 6,736; Overall - 18,763
- 3DMark03: 1,865

All details are in my computer profile.

Thanks again for the help guys. At least I know how to get it done when I get a new card.

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

i have a ti4400 and was experiencing the lockups in ut2004, but it wasn't caused by OC, it was caused by using ANY driver that didn't ship with my card.....
using the supplied driver i oc'ed and aquamarked. normal was 15,222. best stable i got was 16,204 with memory at 621mhz and core at 293.6mhz.

This is on an XP2000 running win2k with 256megs of DDR2100, and the crappy kt133a chipset. hopefully an upgrade to kt400 with xp2600 barton and 512megs of 2700 ram will happen in about a week. be interesting to see how much that will boost the scores. hoping for a bit less swapping while playing UT2004 as well, every time a new character comes on screen there a brief pause - very annoying when they're shooting at you!!

[Cobra]

flan,

My PC would only stop that damned pausing as it swaps to virtual memory (hard drive) when I fed it 1GB of RAM. It paused occasionally when it has 512MB.

Those lockups were definitely caused by overclocking the card. I don't experience them when it's running at standard frequencies - it's a pain.

Never mind. I'll just need to upgrade when I get the cash!

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

well my plan is to set the V mem on a sperate hard drive, this should help. if not, hen i'm playing games i'll just turn virtual memory off. it annoys me! i don't honestly see i'll need it, my PC is currently:

Displaying this webpage
Doing a 2 pass encode in TMPGenc, with a file coming over the network.
Downloding/uploading files on kazaa over the wireless network.
Completing a WU for folding@home.
Downloading pictures from my digital camera.
running my firewall
running my virus killer
running mbm 5.0
and running my jukbox software.


used memory, 279 megs

[Cobra]

And to think, I used to run an entire computer off of 8MB of RAM.

16MHz 68LC020, System 7.0 - what a machine. Even had a 1x CD-ROM, externam SCSI job. Beautiful!

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

bow to the power of my 1.3mhz amstrad! with TWO 5.25 floppy drives! it had 640K of memory

[mujahid7ia]

If you have 1+ GB of RAM, find ExecutivePaging in the registry and set it to either 1 or TRUE, the Windows core files will be loaded to RAM, not VRAM.

For better gfx card OC'ing, use http://www.arctic-cooling.com/en/products/vga_silencer/

Better cooling.

[Cobra]

mujahid7ia,

I couldn't find that in my registry, but I found where you can get it and instruction on how it it used:

http://www.pureperformance.com/js/showtip.asp?id=50

I put it on and it seems to have been set to "1" by default - I did not change it.

Nevertheless, I talked to one of my friends who is a computer scientist and he said it was a damn good idea.

I wonder if, by installing that, it set it up automatically for me. I'll run AquaMark and 3DMark03 again tomorrow and see what difference it has made. If there is no difference, it was probably enabled anyway. Perhaps Windows does it automatically when it detects 1GB of RAM - I can remove a RAM module to test this.

Thanks for the suggestion - it's a good 'un!

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

thought add this in, as i saidstandard score on aquamark was 15,222. part 1 of my upgrade happened today, i now have 512megs of ram and virtual memory is turned off. aquamark score - 21,200
I'm gonna overclock my card now and see what happens!

[Cobra]

Let me know how it goes - I couldn't achieve more than a 2% boost as I said on both memory and core before AquaMark crashed. I suppose that's the beauty of AquaMark - if it encounters an error it just seems to die on you, and that lets you know you've gone too far.

I am considering, when I get more money, to buy what my brother has - an FX5900XT. He likes it, and if it's good enough for him then it's definitely good enough for me!

Cobra

[flaninacupboard]

well, part two of my upgrade is complete. now running XP2600 with 512megs of 2700DDR. Aquamark shows a slight improvement, up to 23,000 something - ill get an accurate figure at home. however, 3dmark 2001 showed a huge improvement, from 8,000 to 10,000.

Swapping is all but gone (still no virtual memory which never causes a problem - EXCEPT when i run photoshop. crappy bloated software...) and i can play ut2004 all details on max in 1024x768 no bother, and been playing battlefield on max detail too.

so i guess graphics cards aren't everything.
my mobo came with an app called core control, supposed to allow you to overclock your cpu, it just crashes and locks my system if i run it, crappy thing.