Calling all 7900GTO owners - help needed :-)

[Englaender31]

Hi guys,

Hope I can ask you GTO owners out there a few bugging questions to get my rig optimized as well as poss 

My specs:

Athlon64 3800+ single core (2.4 Ghz, Venice) – not overclocked
2 GB OCZ dual-channel CAS2 DDR400 RAM
ASUS A8N-E nforce4 PCI-e mobo
(Win XP SP2)

My previous GPU was an ATI Radeon X800XL PCIe 256 MB (oc at 449:506 and using the latest Omega drivers).

I’ve just bought an MSI 7900GTO 512 MB. Using at stock speeds.

Here are my questions:


1) Does anyone know what kind of warranty comes with the MSI card (there’s nothing in or on the box) and how one activates it (if necessary)?

2) What drivers have people found give the best performance so far? I’ve tried the 91.47 drivers that came with the card and the XTreme-G 92.91 drivers. The standard Nvidia drivers generally gave marginally better results in 3DMark 2001/2005/2006 and the X2 rolling demo, but the XTreme drivers gave a 5 FPS average better performance in a Rome Total War BI custom battle.

3) Does anyone know if you can safely disable “nvsvc32.exe” in the startup processes list? As far as I can see all it does is consume memory.

4) From the GTO, I only saw about a 1 FPS improvement (!) on average when playing Rome Total War custom battle compared to my X800XL, but when I tried the first demo for Medieval Total War2, I almost doubled my FPS compared to the ATI card. Any ideas why? The two games are based on the same engine, although MTW2 is more graphic intensive.

5) Compared to the X800XL, I’ve almost doubled my 3dmarks in 3Dmark 2005, but only gained about 1200 3dmarks in 3Dmark 2001 – anyone know why?

6) When I run 3DMark 2005 and press Details under the “System” section to get my specs, under the GPU specs it states “0.0 Hz” under VGA Memory Clock and VGA Core Clock. Does anyone else have this?

7) Is 3DMark 2006 now the only benchmark worth using?

And now the biggies:

1) Has anyone fried their GTO clocking it at GTX level on the mem?

2) Overclocking the card. I’m trying with RivaTuner v.2 16.1 – and the best I can get is 705 core, 745 mem (i.e. mem not even close to GTX level). If try to raise the mem higher, I get a message saying the driver failed to pass the internal test for that clock frequency (I’m using the XTreme-G drivers).
Can you guys help me get my card to GTX mem levels (assuming the answer to 1) above is “no” ;-)

3) How can I get Windows, Riva, 3DMark etc. to recognize my card as a GTX?

Thanks a lot for any helpful advice )

Cheers, Englaender31

 

[Digital Viper-X-]

I think for your frying question regarding overclocking the mem = no

the GTO uses tighter ram timings, while it also uses less voltage to the ram, so even if you get 800mhz out of it or even 900, the voltage remains the same, which is lower then GTX voltage


now to your question about overclocking

I found that using coolbits and OCING via the nvidia control panel worked better for me, i could get to 800mem fine, i set it to 825 in Riva tuner and got a -LOWER 3dmark score and choppy game play, so i went back to using the nvidia drivers and it was perfect


you would have to flash your card to a GTX which might increase your memory voltage(not sure on that) and raise ur memory timings, if that happens your card *might* fail

now your 3dmar2k6 question, its probably your cpu holding it back, or a combination of driver + cpu

 

[Sniviler]

1) Does anyone know what kind of warranty comes with the MSI card (there’s nothing in or on the box) and how one activates it (if necessary)?

http://www.msicomputer.com/support/sup_genwar.asp