Drivers and First Impressions

I continued with the installation of the drivers… my CD-ROM was spinning up and down, which took about five minutes to install. I restarted my computer and did everything I was supposed to, but for some reason the drivers that came with the Xentor didn't work too great with my system. Such as whenever I restarted my computer I would get an error saying my video adapter is incorrect, and whenever I would try to set the colors and the resolution, I would have to restart my computer, meaning I would get the same error as before. Because of this I went to Guillemot's website and downloaded the latest drivers for the card. The downloaded file came in .zip format and inside was an .exe which was all automated, you just had to wait to be prompted to restart your computer and you were good to go. I had the card working great in about five minutes after downloading these drivers. The games looked good and ran oh so very fast... I didn't even get to overclock it yet.

Overclocking and Tweaking

I already had an utility for overclocking TNT/2 cards called TNTClk which had worked great other times, so I opened up that first, curious as to what it said. I noticed that the defaults were set to 170 Core and 183 Memory.  I noticed on Guillemot’s website that the Xentor had its own Overclocking utility called Power Sprinter. Without overclocking the card I quickly downloaded the program and tried my success with Power Sprinter.

When I set the Core and Memory to the defaults with this program they were 150mhz for the core and 183mhz for the memory… don’t you think that’s strange? I thought so. Maybe it was that Guillemot had to get their clock settings back to ULTRA TNT2s default as some other manufacturers have done due to NVIDIA’s request, not sure of that though, website specs that could be updated still say, "175 MHz core chip speed".

With messing around with the clock settings for about thirty minutes I left the core at 175 MHz and I got the memory up to 200 MHz.   I tried different settings for overclocking the Xentor 32, I could push it up to 175/210mhz but a lot of artifacts started showing in Quake2 so after tweaking it a bit I found 175/200mhz was the best stable overclock I could get.

Artifacts with the card overclocked @ 175/210mhz

Then I started up a game of Quake3 Arena V1.07 and did some "testing" for a couple of hours.  It was a sure thing.  175/200 was quite stable with the Xentor32.

 

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