Mark: You need to replace the Northbridge heatsink. That should allow you to raise VDIMM to 2.9, drop to CAS2, and hopefully bring your other timings to 2-2-6. That will be a big speed increase.
Phil: GTA3 is a bastard of a game, since it is a poor port from the PS2. ATi cards seem to have a few issues with it, though upgrading to the latest Catalyst drivers will help immensely ... some of the earlier ones broke that game. It also uses a lot of memory, so running your memory faster and adding more available will help alot. I'm running it at max settings on my 8500LE now that I have the rest of my system optimised.
19000+ 3Dmarks are attainable through exotic cooling. These are people that are running phase change cooling (Prometia, etc) on their CPUs, high-end watercooling/peltiers on their GPU and bridges, and overclocking their hardware beyond the realm of sanity. This, unfortunately, is out of the range of normal people such as you or I, since we don't have massive amounts of cash to dump on expendable hardware and exotic cooling mechanisms.
With the 9700 Pro on there, you'll prolly see 3Dmarks in excess of 16500 on the overclocked setup we discussed earlier. If you overclock the card, you may see over 17000.
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#!/bin/sh {who;} {last;} {pause;} {grep;} {touch;} {unzip;} mount /dev/girl -t {wet;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} echo yes yes yes {yes;} umount {/dev/girl;zip;} rm -rf {wet.spot;} {sleep;} finger: permission denied
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