Bottlenecking Computer

[afirawker]

Yesterday I went to my friends house and traded some of my old computer parts for some classic SNES games. Now he is running an AOpen mobo with a Pentium Celeron 533mhz and he has 3 sticks of SDRAM; 256, 128, and a 64 MB stick. His video card is now a Radeon 7200 and hes using his old HDD and optical drives. His old computer was an ASUS mobo with a PIII 450mhz proc and 128, 64MB stick of SDRAM and his old video card was an ATI Rage Fury Pro (8MB). Before he could not play Enemy Territory or Warcraft III, however he could play Astereia (i dont know if thats how you spell it) but after installing the newer equipment he can play WC3 and ET but Astoria went from 20fps to 10fps. I suggested that seeing as his HDD was fragmented to hell and needed a reformat he did that and is now getting 14fps. Whats the problem is is that graphically intense games like ET and WC3 seem to run smooth but Astoria with its SNES looking graphics is pretty choppy.

I almost forgot, the HS fell off the 7200 and is now being held there bya few strings (its on there pretty good) and electrical tape. Do you guys have any ideas or suggestions?? Should we try the P3 450 or is the Celeron 533 better??

Thanx in advance

 

[TheMostWantedPolishTwin]

try putting the P3 - Celly runs at 66MHz FSB while the P3 runs at 100MHz FSB...

 

[mobiux]

Originally posted by TheMostWantedPolishTwin
try putting the P3 - Celly runs at 66MHz FSB while the P3 runs at 100MHz FSB...

Agreed.
The higher fsb more than makes up for the lower mhz's

 

[jacuzz1]

The celery is inferior due to its tiny l2 cache the 450 has 512 the celery has 128 if any depending on the model

 

[afirawker]

Just put in the PIII 450mhz processor and now its running at about 18 fps. Do you think the video card could be causing it to run slower??

 

[ilkka]

Originally posted by afirawker
Just put in the PIII 450mhz processor and now its running at about 18 fps. Do you think the video card could be causing it to run slower??

Are the settings now what they used ti be?

 

[afirawker]

Yeah the graphics settings have stayed the same...

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by afirawker
Just put in the PIII 450mhz processor and now its running at about 18 fps. Do you think the video card could be causing it to run slower??

there's no way, that's a really big UPgrade in video. You sure you installed the drivers correctly? Cleaned out the old ones, then installed the new?

and did you do a Repair installation after swapping mobos?

 

[afirawker]

No we did a reformat and are using the Catalyst 4.2s by ATI. Hes running win98 do you think that could be the problem?

 

[afirawker]

Bump

 

[jacuzz1]

ATi Catalyst drivers are highly optimized. Windows 98 does not benifit from more than 256 meg of ram. I suspect the ATI driver is having an issue with the high level of avaialble ram and yet the memory cannot be properly utilized do to the win98 limitations.

Win 98 requires a reg hack to take full advantage of anything over 256. Try dropping your ram down and see how well the video card behaves.

 

[jacuzz1]

Yes I know that ms says 98 can recongize up to 2 gig however there are modifications needed to do so. Do some research you will see i am correct and its a possibility the issue is affecting your video performance becuase of the ati driver

 

[afirawker]

How is the ATI drivers causing the problems when Warcraft 3 and Enemy Territory run smooth and those games are more graphically intense then Aspereta?? And no win98 cant use more then 512MB of RAM not 256 and my friend is only using 450. I used to be able to run fine with 360MB of RAM....

 

[jacuzz1]

You need a reg hack. Just try droppng down below 256 , you have nothing to loose. The driver may be so optimized for the os that the ram over spec is fouling up fast writes (by the way disable fast writes) or how it address apg aperature. ITs just a theory that may be off the wall but you may uncover something else while you check it out.

 

[jacuzz1]

Make sure all the shadowing settings are disabled as well.