Those scores are not bad really. You might try setting the memory timings in BIOS a bit more aghressive. You can sometimes squeaze an extra 5% or more out of the performance. You might also try to overclock it a bit by raising the bus speed. Again this boosts performance quite a bit depending on teh overclock. Even a small boost to 140Mhz (from 133) can give you a nice 5% boost in performance do to increased memory, bus, and CPU speed. You might be able to reach 150Mhz or higher, but don't count on it. My KT266A board did not like even 140Mhz all the time with my AthlonXP 1600+ and generic PC-2700 DDR. You could also overclock your GeForce4 Ti 4200. 275/550 is a pretty easy overclock and will give a nice performance boost.
With my KT266A board and AthlonXP 1600+ at stock speed and my GeForce4 Ti 4200 at 275/550 I managed 10300 in 3DMark 2001se. When I upped to an AthlonXP 1800+ at 1.85Ghz and an nForce2 board I jumped to 12000. Not a big jump for an extra 450MHz and a better chipset. Of coarse my games like UT2003 run much smoother now (even with KaZaA running in the background). Benchmarks do not always show the true performance. The nForce2 board really made things execute snappier (best way to describe it) and smoother along with jumping the performance quite a bit. The faster CPU game some extra horsepower for some higher framerates while the chipset seems to have increased the minimum frame rates more (along with the max frame rates a little bit).
You can always get another motherboard and memory, but really is it worth the 10% (extra) performance boost for the $200 you will likely have to spend.
Last edited by Todd a; April 3rd, 2003 at 11:12 PM.
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