A long time ago I has a GForce2Ti card, passively cooled with HUGE glued on heatsinks that ran at GPU/mem 268/240Mhz clocks stable. But one day I decide to cut a supposedly unused part of the board to gain better airflow in the case from the top right corner of the card. The card still works, but instead of 64MB of videoram I got now only 32MB and the game Return to the Castle Wolfenstain started jerking because there was suddently not enough videoram for textures...
So I wanted a quick solution and bough this cheapo FX5200 card and regret that ASAP. It was notably slower, even I managed to overclock it from default 250/166 to 295/205... This disapointment lead to the buy of Radeon 9100 that lead to even bigger disapointment with speed and drivers problems in SoF2, ma favorite game at the time, but that is another story.

So, that is how I got the card, lol. It was used sometimes for testing purposes, the Zalman heatpipe cooler is, however, sometimes limiting - the card did not fit everywhere, but I will work on that later (if ever, lol)

Overview of the card:


Now during the ECS sponsored OCW contest to reach the lowest 3DMark 2005 score ( http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=62120 ) I thought I could use the card to gain lowest score of all participiants, perhaps even WR when I use the crappy slow VIA C3 CPU in Abit BX133-Raid mobo I recently recapped
But in serious downclocking the card become unstable. Obviously the G-Luxon caps are the culprits. There they are:


The card use these caps:
Gigabite FX5200
---------------
5x 1000uF 6.3V d10 G-Luxon
1x 510uF 4V d8 Sanyo Os-con
1x 100uF 10V d5 Nichicon VR



Obviously the Os-con polymer is great cap and since I have no bigger/betteer polymer ATM, it stays. It is obviously used for the GPU voltage.



That is probably why I can clock the GPU as low, as t 8Mhz and it still working well in 3D Memory is another story. With 66Mhz it never pass 3DMark (took 12 - 16hours with stressed machine, so, go figure...) and at 60Mhz it can't even initialize 3D! With G-Luxons, of course.

Now with Samxons GC:


It can run 3DMark at 50Mhz! Any maybe lower, I did not tried the full test yet and maybe it fail still, because it is just like in half, so... We see. Neverless it is a clear change for better overclock/underclock as they are basicaly the same. Both put a lot more stress on voltage regulators



I used 1500uF Samxon GX d10 caps to bump the capacity a little, because I believe it is important when downlocking a lot. But the card design is very odd. First at all, it reverse the markings on PCB. In all other cards/mainboards the white half of the circle on PCB bellow a cap mean the "-" polarity. On this board (and on the FX5600XT one, check there: http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=58455 ) it is REVERSED!
But that is not all odd. Notice how far (first photo) are the caps form the rams! This is not very good. Caps have to support the voltage as close to the place where it is being "consumed" as possible. Having them on other side of the card is not exactly good design. Perhaps that is why Gigabite is not printed over the board anywhere? They are ashamed of the design, probably, and rightfully they are!



See this? Someone realized that the rams need additional support, and get there ready a place for another cap, but for the cost reasons it was never included. That of course call for adding a nice SMD d8 polymer there to support the voltage filtering and get better the overlock/underclock
At least something around 470uF will help for sure. This place is connected directly in parallel with one of the Samxon GC 1500uF (top right one), so...



So at least I laped the core well



And now let's try score really, really hard!


This that get me score 31 points was only a start!

i missed the overall point, can you say it in 10 words or less?

He was reviving an old card, with some re-capping, to enter into the OCworkbench 3Dmark05 competition!

I got score 6 3DMarks 2005 now!

Samxon caps rule! Now testing 4Mhz for core...

Abit BX133-Raid, VIA C3 Nehemiah 66 x 9
Gigabite(?) FX5200 8/50Mhz



3DMark 2005 6 3D marks / 8 CPU marks, GPU at 8/50
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=2985939
(link get invalid as soon, as I post better score )


If someone dig anywhere a VIA C3 Nehemiah 1000Mhz one for me and I get the better/bigger polymers, I might be able to score the ultimate ZERO score :biggrin: :wink: But the run probably took like 16 hours... or more, lol.

Oh, 4Mhz GPU end up in BSOD... What about 5Mhz then?

Incredible!

Heheh, and I got ideas how to get lower and I mean NOTABLY lower, but... I just need another caps upgrade and the VIA C3 Nehemiah 1000Mhz one
Then I can attack the magic barrier - numero ZERO

I'm REALLY thinkign about getting my "junk" system working with 05, use the 5200 PCI, it'll be paired with a K6-2 500 (underclocked of course) and PC100 ram...actually I've got a 200mhz K6 here somewhere hehehehe.

if you need, I have a VIA C3 600MHz Samuel core. If you need it, gimme a ring

Ive got a couple PC66 sticks of ram that I may use when if I try this, that coupled along with a FX5200 and a "probably" underclocked 1.3 Athlon should be quite low... (maybe not as low as 5, but quite low)


It's gonna be a bummer Trodas when you have redone all of your hardware, you won't have anything to do with your time...

cchalogamer - did K6 have SSE? 3DMark 2005 require SSE. It won't run on Duron, for example...


kingdingeling - I would definitively want it 600Mhz VIA C3 sounds bad enough for me, the only catch is probably the SSE. Old Samuel cores have 3DNow! but not SSE, IIRC. That would spoil the 3DMark 2005 score...
But there are other 3DMarks!


Andrewr05 - sounds like a plan Get it going! And don't worry, there is plenty of hardware to fix. Todays a new JetWay V400DB come, caps busted pretty badly, lol I will having hard time to catch-up with the supply, lol. It is cool getting the junk for free and making it work, but it is very time and caps consuming task
Getting the right caps is hard, too. Just try buy Sanyo Os-con SEPC 820uF 2.5v d8 caps

if you need it, I also have a Gigabyte mATX board of some sort that works with it. It does have quite a few overclocking options. Lemme know

Good luck on that stuff, it sounds like fun!

btw, do P3's work? I might get a P3 500MHz sometimes these days!

I had no idea that underclocking could be so interesting!

This is a great thread!

Recapping an old board in order to do worse... priceless!

****** of course it doesnt...there's a monkey wrench for it...humm
/me looks to see what the lowest SSE supporting CPU I have is

The lowest SSE cpu's are the 180 µm Celerons...

I'm pretty certain the first Celerons to use SSE were the coppermines... the slowest coppermine Celeron is 533 MHz... the first Pentium III with SSE is the Katmai which started at 450MHz I think, it's 0.25 micrometre (250 nm) tech... the Celerons being 0.18 micrometre (180 nm)

the 533 Celeron may well suck more than a 450 MHz P3... although I think the Celerons used a 66MHz bus and high multi... and the P3's I thought either used 100 or 133 MHz and less multi... so who knows how that all pans out when underclocking to like 16 MHz bus speed or w/e lol

WOW, instant classic imo.

"How low can you go"

Isnt it possible to solder off some Mem, lowering your score even further.

Yes, this is possible. The mem is not hardcoded in bios or anywhere else, so unsoldering like 3 pieces... will work for sure However that is not what I want, because sooner or later I do another mod to the card, replacing the solid polymer cap and adding another polymer to gain maximum OVERCLOCK from it.
3DMark 2003 WR is too low, IMHO Time for a little bump