Overclocking and Tweaking

Overclocking the ELSA ERAZOR III was fairly easy for me compared to other reviews of the board I have seen. I promptly added a Radio Shack 486 to the surface of the heatsink before delving deep into the realms of overclocking.

I was surprised to see that ELSA has the memory default clock set to 140MHz. It was probably made that way so they could yield a higher quantity of boards.  For overclocking, this particular board clocked to 166MHz for the core stable, and 163MHz for the memory stable. Yes, yes… I do know that this doesn’t follow the ratio that NVIDIA recommends, but with overclocking you take whatever you can get.  Another aspect for tweaking the board was setting the memory timings lower. As far as I know most of the reviews I have seen do not cover this. The ERAZOR III comes with some very popular RAM, Samsung G7. I used a popular overclocking and tweaking program called TNTclk.

After looking at the memory timings I was surprised to see the timing between the read and write state was set to 0. This means that the full potential of every megahertz was being utilized in this particular part of the memory.

After experimenting I found that setting the wait state from read to precharge to 0 gave me about a 1.5% to 2% increase in performance without visual distortion.  Why should I care about 1.5% to 2% increase you say? Well, overclocking the TNT2 yields very little performance increases. The range in overclocking the board from its standard clock settings to 166/163 increased overall performance roughly 8% to 9%. While not a big increase, it does improve upon the fill rate at higher resolutions.

32-bit color and 16-bit color

While I was using a Voodoo 3 for a while, I was oblivious to the world of 32-bit color. I decided to take a look at how much better 32-bits of color looked compared to that of 16-bits. I was half expecting the framerate to crawl in 32-bit mode, but was surprised to see the performance great. On faster systems, playing in a 32-bit color depth can make the game play experience a whole lot better, especially with the newer games released. I took two screenshots of Kingpin in the same location to show the color blending abilities of 32-bit color. The pictures are in the highest quality JPEG, so the pictures should loose little to no image quality loss from the conversion from TIFF. The pictures are scaled to 200% of the original size to get a better view of the area. One other important thing to take into consideration before viewing the images is to set your desktop to 32-bit color. You can notice how in 16-bit mode the color on the wall and the light coronas look a little grainy. In 32-bit mode the graininess is gone and the whole screen looks improved.

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