What CPU are you using? That seems like the most obvious culprit.
I got 11662 with a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz Prescott, I think I was using 71.89 drivers.

True, CPU is a thing when it comes to benchmarks. Main problem back in the days was, that both nv and ATI tuned their drivers to perform best in synthetic benchmarks aka 3D-Mark xxxxx . Maybe you'll reach a higher score with a lower driver version. 55.xx seems very high for a GF4, propably nv removed the "cheats" in the code...

You should also check your chipset drivers, OS, clean system, timings of your RAM and yes, most important the speed of your CPU if you want compare your system against others.

I tested it on different installs of Windows XP and got similar results so that's not the culprit. My CPU is an Athlon XP 2600+ at 2.1 GHz. Gonna check older drivers, might be the problem because I remember that with 93.71 I barely got 9000. I'll post an update once I check other driver versions.

Alright, I got better results with older drivers. Detonator 45.23 gave me around 10800, and 43.45 hit about 11000. Might drop even lower, like 28.32 should probably do 12000, unless I hit a CPU bottleneck.

Just out of curiosity, do you have some links to those reviews? 12500 sounds quite high to me.

You should definitely downgrade your Forceware drivers, drivers coded for GeForce FX/6000 series and onwards hurt DirectX 7 performance and that is a big part of 3DMark2001SE.

For reference, I wanted to know just how far this card can scale in 2001 SE with enough CPU power.

This is with 56.73 drivers which come "stock" with Windows XP SP3. No overclocking was done.
I prefer not to use older drivers that cheat to make results comparable with other (usually newer) cards from both Nvidia and ATI.

watson wrote:

I prefer not to use older drivers that cheat to make results comparable with other (usually newer) cards from both Nvidia and ATI.

I read somewhere recently after researching this myself that the vogons-lauded 43.45s are safe to use.

I don't exactly remember where I found these reviews. Anyway, I'm currently gonna stick with 43.45 which should be good enough. I also noticed that my scores do improve with CPU overclocking, although I can't go too far, 2,15 GHz is as far as it went giving me a marginally better score.

Here's a small Database with User-Scores from back in the day and even up to GeForce GTX 580 SLI Systems.
https://www.pc-erfahrung.de/tuningperformance … rk-2001-se.html
12xxx to 13xxx are totally possible. I might test my retro-rig later on too.

Well, I can definitely confirm that 43.45 drivers are faster. To the moon we go:

Here are my Scores:

Config: Abit KT7A @ 150-MHz FSB/RAM, CL2 everything on Turbo, Athlon XP-M @ 1800-MHz, 1,28VCore, GeForce 4 Ti AGP x8 @ default (GPU 250-MHz/ MEM 513-MHz) and of course 43.45 Drivers.

Intellisample @ HQ

Intellisample @ HP

Tested some Drivers with a higher and lower version but 43.45 seems really the best.

Pretty low score - the Athlon is starving on low memory bandwith. If only my SB-Live would work under plain dos, but it's a known limitation with newer boards. SB-Live and DOS are no problem with an Abit KT7A. Correct drivers are needed.

Something strange happened

Didn't alter a single "bit" but my score raised wtf

even higher but this time with a light overclock

performance gain over time hehehe 😎

A little update, after getting quality DDR400 ram, set it to 2.5-3-3-7 and running my cpu at 400 MHz FSB x11 multiplier (xp 3200+ speed) i managed to get 11764 with 43.45, so everything is about correct

NeffePS wrote:

Anyway, I'm currently gonna stick with 43.45 which should be good enough.

If you're only going for the highest 3DMark score, then yes. For games, the newer drivers might perform better.
Case of benchmarketing.

Well I actually noticed a little bit of performance improvement in games too, not that it really matters because the performance is still great even with 93.71. Nevermind, thanks guys for all the advice