- own a 6200 and can't afford an upgrade yet
- just want something to get by till they find a really good deal and can go for an upgrade (like me)
- or just can't afford an expensive GFX card but still want to be able to play the newest games
\a friend of mine asked me if I could look at his rig and maybe do some OC'in , wiremanagement, so he could play with doom at 1024x768 without lagging. my initial response was (after I found out what card he has), that I can't perform miracles but will try what I can. first I opened the antec case and got the card out to be exactly sure which 6200 are we talking about:
http://www.pccyber.ca/scrItem.asp?produ ... ct_id=6136
this is an asus EN6200GE/TD/128M/A. then I checked this site:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... mes_3.html
-to see what is the core. I was surprised to see it has the same GPU as the 6600LE, 6600 and 6600GT! the GT's GPU is clocked at 500Mhz so I new since the fan is the same as on some GT's my 6200 can at least be clocked that high
the default for the 6200 is 300Mhz and the max I was able to reach on the core was 580Mhz! the next step was to find out what can be done with the DDR 128MB memory (the stock was 500Mhz). the max was 645Mhz, which is pretty good. I decided to set the card to 551/623 to be on the safe side (there is no cooling on the memory and the GPU cooler underneath isn't smooth eighter)
first I ran 3dmark03 with all default settings (300/500) and this is what I got:
(click to see a better image)
then I OC'd the card to 551/623 and it gave me 5868p. in 3dmark03
well it went from 4099 to 5868 which was allready more then I expected from this card.
that's when I had the idea to check if anything could be done with riva tuner. I knew, that the 6200 has 4 pixel pipes but I also know that it has the same GPU as the 6600GT which has 8 pipes, so I knew that the remaining 4 pipes are locked somehow and was just wondering if they could be reopened. I tried and lo and behold: the 6200 just had the 8 pipes after the reboot !! I checked with 3dmark03 again and yes, yes it was real.
so this is how it went:
open riva tuner ( http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163 ). you will see the 4 pipes:
click on customize and the first little icon that resembles a video card:
a new window opens. click install:
next check both empty boxes on the left (allow enabling hardware masked units and unlock professional capabilities). on the right in active pixel configuration, change to custom and click customize:
yet another window pops up. here you will see which pipelines are disabled (not necessarily the same line(s) as mine). just put a checkmark in front of any line that says disabled, than click OK:
you will notice the pipe count changed to 8. now click apply and OK:
it will ask you to restart windows. click yes:
tada! after opening rivatuner I got 8 pixel pipelines!
next I rerun 3dmark03 with the 8 pipes and 551/623 Overclock, my score was this:
that's a 72% performance increase with no money spent
putting cooling fins on the ram chips and lapping the GPU cooler+adding arctic silver would increase the OC ability but this is not my card and I had no cooling fins laying around at home. with the above, the card could probably reach 8000p. in 3dmark03. this is a $62CDN (about $45US) card and now doom3 is running just fine at 1024x768 at medium settings
(it was lagging before at 800x600 minimum settings)
