Overclocking
I've decided to go all out for speed here so I've cranked the AXIA CPU up to 1500MHz and run few benchmarks with the GeForce3 overclocked as high as it will go3DMark 2001
I ran 3DMark in all the usual setting the highest overclock I achieved was 235 core 540 memory but it was pretty unstable at that speed, I did manage a few runs of 3DMark 2001 and got a pretty reasonable 3DMark 2001 score of 6041!. The screenshot below show the result, it wasn't stable enough to run all the test at that speed but the ones that matter ran. I think the instability was also caused by the FSB being 143MHz on the Soltek motherboard which it isn't to keen on. But still over 6000 is a pretty high score in 3DMark 2001
To get stability I turned down the GeForce3 to 230MHz core 530MHz memory.
Here are the results
1500MHz on GeForce3 @ 230 core 530 mem
| 3DMark 2001 | 640*480 | 800*600 | 1024*768 | 1280*1024 | 1600*1200 |
| 1333MHz GF3 | 6124 | 5897 | 5385 | 4483 | 3572 |
| 1500MHz GF3 | 6218 | 5919 | 5503 | 4489 | 3595 |
| 1500MHz GF3 oc | 6550 | 6320 | 5877 | 5038 | 4132 |
I've included the scores for the 1333MHz benchmarks as well, 3DMark isn't affected that much by CPU speed, its more the FSB and the graphics card speed that affect it. But as you can see the scores increase as you would expect.
Finally for the overclocking I've done the obligatory Quake3 Benchmarks, again I've included the default results from 1333MHz as some kind of indicator to the performance increase.
| Quake3 Demo1 | 640*480 | 800*600 | 1024*768 | 1280*1024 | 1600*1200 |
| EHQ 1333MHz | 141.1 | 139.5 | 128.2 | 93.6 | 66.2 |
| EHQ 1500MHz | 145.1 | 142.3 | 130.1 | 93.7 | 66.2 |
| EHQ 1500Mhz oc | 145.2 | 144.1 | 135.8 | 106.5 | 77.9 |
Overall overclocking the Geforce 3 has some pretty good effects and at the core speed of 230MHz and memory speed of 530MHz the card was completely stable, this is a pretty good overclock for an already very fast card. The difference in speed is as always very noticeable in the higher resolutions, up till 1024*768 overclocking makes very little difference in Quake3, above that and the framerate goes up quite a bit, a leap from 66 FPS to nearly 78FPS in 1600*1200 in full detail is very fast indeed, the new memory architecture of the GeForce3 is certainly working for Quake 3.
