LOSTCIRCUITS

I already mentioned that upgrading to the 5.16 detonator drivers is a minor trade-off between performance and image quality. Performance can easily be quantitated in the form of frame rates, whereas the increased grainyness is rather a subjective description. Suffice it to say that, especially on a larger (19”) monitor, the quality degradation is noticeable but not obvious, but again, that depends on the application. On the other hand, the performance increase, particularly in Quake3 Arena was rather substantial.

Quake 3 Arena Test 1.08 (demo1) frame rates using the Tyan Trinity K7 at 800 MHz CPU clock speed, AGPX4. Note that using the stock drivers (3.68), there is a pronounced performance hit when switching from Fast to Fastest setting. This performance hit is not encountered when the 5.16 reference drivers are used. 5.16OC refers to the frame rates achieved using Powerstrip to overclock the MS 8809 Phantom to 160/200 MHz (engine/memory).

Quake 3 Arena Demo

Quake 3 Arena Demo001 frame rates (same setup as abov using the 5.16 reference drivers under overclocked conditions (160/200).

3DMark 2000

3DMark 2000 was the only application showing the limitations of the overclocking capabilities of the Phantom since running at 160/200 MHz resulted in occasional triangle flashes. Still, the scores are noteworthy enough. In this case, the mainboard used was the BoardRunner K7VA133 (KX133 chipset) running at 103 MHz FSB (824 MHz) with the memory set to 133% of the CPU bus.

• 120 / 166 MHz: 4140 / 375 (3DMarks/CPU Marks)
• 160 / 200 MHz: 4871 / 427 (ditto)

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