My first AMD 4800+ Velocity Micro

Pegi

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 31, 2005
Messages
249
Have always had Intel. My first foray into the AMD world and purchased a Velocity Micro 4800+ dual core with 7800 GTX SLI, the ASUS A8N Premium motherboard, Zalman heat sink, 600 wt power supply, 2 meg ram, and the X-Fi soundcard.

It's a very nice machine but I don't feel wowed and I don't know if my expectations were too high or if I need to do more with settings. Some comments: It's used half for games and half for other things (word processing, internet, whatever). I specified with Velocity that I did NOT want anything overclocked and I believe they followed this guideline.

Game performance has been a little disappointing. Don't know if it's a dual-core factor or soundcard factor (more on that later). I installed Dungeon Siege 2 and Guild Wars. GW performance was crummy at first. I'd take a few steps...the game would seem to freeze slightly...and then speed up again. Lots of little hesitations like that. I know they just had an update on the GW server so the bit of lag might be related to that. Had the same thing with Dungeon Siege 2. Based on readings on this and other forums, I downloaded the Microsoft hotfix for AMD dual cores, installed, and made the registry changes. Also installed the newest Nvidia drivers (I think they're 81.85). I think it has improved somewhat but just overall it certainly isn't running any better than my old Intel 3.2. Is that pretty much what I should expect until games really support dual cores?

The X-Fi card. Sigh. Creative says there's a problem with some Nforce 4 boards and the X-Fi, despite some folks having no problem. It works, I get great sound (the positional surround sound aspect is absolutely wonderful), but I *also* get a background static-y type popping sound. Not static exactly. It's more like the sound effect you hear when there's a bonfire in your game, that little snapping of the flames. I get that when there's no fire. It's not all the time. You'll hear it for a few seconds--it will clear--then you'll hear it again. At some point during gameplay, the sound will start to hiccup and loop, causing the game to freeze, requiring a hard boot. Velocity is sending another X-Fi, although I have no real expectations it will work and may have to backtrack to an Audigy. Again, can any of my game issues be related to problems with the soundcard or is this just a complicating factor?

Also, could SLI be a detriment in this case? Meaning, if a game doesn't support SLI (I think I read that Guild Wars doesn't), it might actually be causing game slowdowns?

When I minimized Guild Wars and went to Task Manager to have it use only one core, I thought it seemed subjectively to run a little better, too. Is this something one needs to always watch with dual cores? Shouldn't WinXP be handling that?

Any advice would be helpful. Feel a bit unsure of myself due to being new to the AMD arena and unsure of the dual core scenario.
 
i would say one thing, except for theX-fi drivers: switch to windows 64. it sounds like most of your problems are OS related. :(
 
Pegi do me a favor, can you run 3DMark2005 and tell me what scores you get with that setup no OC? I wanna see what the difference between the FX57 and X2 4800 is in 3DMark, I was getting in the 12k range with no OC but my GTX arwe KO versions. I'm in the process of getting an X2 for the FX57 but i'm not sure what to expect with the SLI and the KO cards, somehow I expect the CPU to be a bottleneck for my GPU's.
Let me know. Thanks.
 
are you running the nvidia multicore enabled drivers?


and xeneize, your sig is a bit long, think its 10 lines max?
 
I just downloaded and ran 3DMark. I'd never run it before so it may not have been as clean as it could have/should have been. Anyway, neither the CPU or GPU are overclocked. The score is 11,786.

The Nvidia drivers I'm using are the newest ones, which I believe are for multicores...the 81.85.

Afraid going to win64 isn't an option right now. But any tips or tweaks for optimizing what I do have would be appreciated.
 
Pegi: That is an awesome score for stock, looks like I could push 13k with water cooled OC. Now i'm happy, thanks man.

Elysian: Signature fixed ;)
 
Xeneize, is that really a good score? When I look at the comparisons at futuremark, it seemed awfully dismal. But I really want to keep things as stable as possible for right now. Would those scores more or less indicate that the system as it stands is running as well as can be expected and any problems or quirks I have might be related to either my OS or the individual game/program?

And, by the way, I don't think anyone has ever called me "man" before! <grin>

Peggy
 
Pegi said:
Velocity Micro 4800+ dual core with 7800 GTX SLI, the ASUS A8N Premium motherboard, Zalman heat sink, 600 wt power supply, 2 meg ram, and the X-Fi soundcard.

Well, 2 meg of ram might be slowing it down... jk i know thats a typo. Have you done all the standard tweaks to your bios? Have you set your profiles properly for each game? If GW is semi freezing every few seconds, does the drive light come on during such times? Is there any processor affinity you can assign the game? Just a few thoughts i had..
 
you should be getting more than that. should be more than 12K.

try running 3dmarks on one of the core only and see if that makes any diffrence.
 
I get popping and cracking with my XFI too. :(

Athlon 64 3800+x2
ASUS A8N-SLI
 
swatX said:
you should be getting more than that. should be more than 12K.

try running 3dmarks on one of the core only and see if that makes any diffrence.


Nah that seems about right my FX57 with 7800 GTX KO (490/1300) Scored 12300 with Stock CPU.
 
BS9: You get popping and cracking with the X-Fi, too? When I spoke to the tech at Velocity, he said he had never heard of the problem before. Have you resigned yourself to living with it or have you tried anything? Does ASUS have a bios update?

Rook: I haven't done *any* bios tweaks. I have had this machine now for a total of 3 days. As this is my first AMD machine (always had Intels), I am hesitant to change anything without good reason. I had hoped that coming from Velocity it would be good to go upon receipt.

I haven't set *any* profiles for games. I've never used profiles. I just go into the game and make any options in-game. I know that there is a Guild Wars profile in the video card options. If I chose the GW one, what options would you suggest I specify? Isn't it cumbersome to have to chose a profile before playing a game and then go back to global settings when you're done? I'd be glad to try it if it would help. If you could steer me toward the best settings, I'd appreciate it. It's not exactly freezing, per se. It's a hesitation after a few steps. I think it has gotten better after the Microsoft hotfix.

And, yes, it is 2048 MB. Sheesh!
 
Pegi said:
Xeneize, is that really a good score? When I look at the comparisons at futuremark, it seemed awfully dismal. But I really want to keep things as stable as possible for right now. Would those scores more or less indicate that the system as it stands is running as well as can be expected and any problems or quirks I have might be related to either my OS or the individual game/program?

And, by the way, I don't think anyone has ever called me "man" before! <grin>

Peggy

IMO the scores are great considering you are stock with GPU and CPU, I was expecting less than that from a 4800+ and 430/1200 GPU's.

Check this out:
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1027953890&postcount=2352

The top 10-20 are highly OC machines mostly FX57. Download nMonitor (nTune) and checkout the Temperature fro CPU and GPU will give you a good idea on how stable your PC will run.

Note: Sorry about the "man" should have known better :)
 
The XFI cracking and poping i believe is a known problem. I dont know if there is any help with that. Better off checking the Audio forum here for that. Other than that problem. The score is decent. But lets get serious here. I get 8500 on my test and I run every game no problem. There shouldnt be any hiccups running those games. I think maybe you should download a program called CPUID, take some screen shots of all the tabs, and let us see what that is reading for setting from your BIOS maybe there is a settting screwed up in it.
 
flynlr, I had read that post and I did apply that hotfix and make the registry changes. I actually did feel there was some improvement after the hotfix, although I *don't* have Cool 'n Quiet installed. Perhaps I should install that? I guess it all ties in to my original question. While it's better, it's not totally smooth and I wondered if perhaps that was a function of bad settings, bad sound drivers, or whatever and is this the best I can expect? I do run games whenever possible at my desktop native resolution, 1920x1200, but this setting never caused me any problems with my old Intel and Nvidia 5900. With SLI, I thought I'd be iceskating.

I'll have another X-Fi card in a few days to test out. If that's still a nogo (and I imagine it would be), I might just backtrack to Audigy.

Rhollister, I did download that CPU program. I'd be happy to post screenshots if you'd like to take a look; just tell me how to go about it.

Peg
 
Pegi said:
BS9: You get popping and cracking with the X-Fi, too? When I spoke to the tech at Velocity, he said he had never heard of the problem before. Have you resigned yourself to living with it or have you tried anything? Does ASUS have a bios update?

Rook: I haven't done *any* bios tweaks. I have had this machine now for a total of 3 days. As this is my first AMD machine (always had Intels), I am hesitant to change anything without good reason. I had hoped that coming from Velocity it would be good to go upon receipt.

I haven't set *any* profiles for games. I've never used profiles. I just go into the game and make any options in-game. I know that there is a Guild Wars profile in the video card options. If I chose the GW one, what options would you suggest I specify? Isn't it cumbersome to have to chose a profile before playing a game and then go back to global settings when you're done? I'd be glad to try it if it would help. If you could steer me toward the best settings, I'd appreciate it. It's not exactly freezing, per se. It's a hesitation after a few steps. I think it has gotten better after the Microsoft hotfix.

And, yes, it is 2048 MB. Sheesh!

Yep, I didn't get any popping / cracking with my A64 4000+ and Asus motherboard but I do with the A64 x2. I'm still hoping for a fix from Creative but we will see!
 
dam u ppl and ur ubercomputers getting a bajillion 3dmarks. i ran my comp (2.8ghz p4, fx5600 (not ultra :(), 512mb ram) and got a whopping 370! haha... :(
 
Soymilk said:
dam u ppl and ur ubercomputers getting a bajillion 3dmarks. i ran my comp (2.8ghz p4, fx5600 (not ultra :(), 512mb ram) and got a whopping 370! haha... :(
yours is probably better than mine. i have a gf4mx right now ;)
 
bs9: This is probably totally coincidental and I'll have to eat this message tomorrow, but for what it's worth, I just played 2 hours of Dungeon Siege 2 and one hour of Guild Wars and in both games the X-Fi was virtually static free. Without that background crackle, it is a wonderful surround sound card. What did I do? Nothing that should affect the X-Fi! I downloaded and ran 3D Mark, downloaded and ran that CPUID program, and then went ahead with R00k's suggestion and set up the profile for Guild Wars. I used the one included with the 81.85 drivers and checked a buncha stuff. From there, went on to GW and, like I said, probably coincidental, but the popping was gone.

Game performance wise, DS2 was fine, relatively smooth. GW was overall smooth except sometimes during combat I would still occasionally freeze with sword held high for a second or two and then the action would proceed. But it is Sunday night, probably servers are busy. I should try Half Life 2 and see how that plays.

EDIT: Wanted to add...there are many threads on the Creative board now about the X-Fi problems, but it appears that X-Fi is causing performance problems, notably stuttering and slowdowns and lagging, all the things I've been complaining about. All my concerns might well be traced to this card.

Does anyone know--regarding priorities--why Guild Wars is automatically set to "low?" I changed it to high (should I perhaps choose real time?) but when I minimized the game a few minutes later to check on the priority, it had gone back to low.

Last question...there are two internet ports on the motherboard. I'm assuming one is as good as the other. But should the one that is not used be disabled?

Peggy
 
ahh the onboard ethernet if using the marvell port make sure you have the latest driver version. there was an unstable marvell driver a couple months ago. you should be able to disable the port not being used in the bios.
 
Pegi said:
bs9: This is probably totally coincidental and I'll have to eat this message tomorrow, but for what it's worth, I just played 2 hours of Dungeon Siege 2 and one hour of Guild Wars and in both games the X-Fi was virtually static free. Without that background crackle, it is a wonderful surround sound card. What did I do? Nothing that should affect the X-Fi! I downloaded and ran 3D Mark, downloaded and ran that CPUID program, and then went ahead with R00k's suggestion and set up the profile for Guild Wars. I used the one included with the 81.85 drivers and checked a buncha stuff. From there, went on to GW and, like I said, probably coincidental, but the popping was gone.

Game performance wise, DS2 was fine, relatively smooth. GW was overall smooth except sometimes during combat I would still occasionally freeze with sword held high for a second or two and then the action would proceed. But it is Sunday night, probably servers are busy. I should try Half Life 2 and see how that plays.

EDIT: Wanted to add...there are many threads on the Creative board now about the X-Fi problems, but it appears that X-Fi is causing performance problems, notably stuttering and slowdowns and lagging, all the things I've been complaining about. All my concerns might well be traced to this card.

Does anyone know--regarding priorities--why Guild Wars is automatically set to "low?" I changed it to high (should I perhaps choose real time?) but when I minimized the game a few minutes later to check on the priority, it had gone back to low.

Last question...there are two internet ports on the motherboard. I'm assuming one is as good as the other. But should the one that is not used be disabled?

Peggy

I forgot to mention that in Battlefield 2 (the only game I've tested so far) I get absolutely no static or popping while IN GAME. I do however get the static and popping on menu screens, when maps are loading, etc. Makes no sense to me!!
 
I've gone back to my Audigy 4 Pro for now. I started to notice skipping in Battlefield and was tired dealing with the static & popping while listening to MP3's. If someone finds a fix please post it! :)
 
I share your annoyance with the X-Fi. My crackling noise is back, although it's so low as to be almost not noticeable. However, on occasion the sound will go into a loop and freeze a game up. I do want to point my finger at the X-Fi as the culprit for the lagging problems I'm seeing in games, rightly or wrongly. I just don't know if it's a problem with their hardware, a conflict with the Nforce 4, a problem with their drivers, or even some sort of interference here, although I doubt the last one since there are so many others with the same problem.

In any event, I'll check out a new X-Fi on Thursday night. If there's no change, I may well see if I can't trade it out for an Audigy ZX. I hate that the problems I've had with this card has adversely affected my pleasure in a really beautiful new computer. Velocity does a great job of putting these boxes together. Wires are neatly bound up and tucked away. A really nice-looking machine.
 
I just noticed that there are new Nvidia chipset drivers just released for the Nforce4 motherboard so thought I'd try that related to the X-Fi problem. It says--just like all Nvidia graphic drivers--to remove all current Nividia graphic drivers before installing. Does that mean I need to uninstall my 81.85 Nivida drivers (that's the only Nvidia software in my add/remove). If so, when I uninstall that and then install the chipset drivers, do I then reinstall the 81.85 drivers? And if I update these chipset drivers, do I need to update my bios?

EDIT: Nevermind...I went ahead and uninstalled 81.85, installed the chipset, reinstalled 81.85 and it made no difference as far as the X-Fi is concerned. Ah well.
 
Thanks for the update. Sucks it didn't fix the issue!!

I guess we'll just keep hoping for the magic fix from Nvidia, or Creative. I'm not holding my breath though!
 
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