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Swapped GPU and RAM ==> Worse performance??

M

malfeee

n00b
Joined
Jul 12, 2007
Messages
44
Okay, so we were painting my brother's room so we had to take his PC and stuff out. While it was disconnected we decided to take out his craptacular Nvidia 5200 and swap it with my old 6600LE. We also took out his old 2gb of RAM and put in my old XMS Pro 2gb of RAM. Everything seemed gravy. We hooked his PC up and had some trouble getting the 6600 LE to be identified, however after running Driver Cleaner and re-seating the card we got it going fine. I installed the latest official 6 series XP drivers. Eager to see how much better games like DoD:S would run, we fired up Steam and tested her out.

His performance is now about 2x worse than it had been. His FPS averages at about 10 at 800x600, even with a performance-oriented autoexec. I previously had the -heapsize command in his launch options, optimized for 2gb RAM, so I tried taking that out to see if for some reason it was causing problems. It changed absolutely nothing.

I'm at a loss of what to do. I was going to try re-installing his old 5200, just to see if there's some problem with my 6600LE. If that changed nothing I suppose I'd swap the RAM back out.

After that I have no idea. He's saving for a new PC now that he has a job, but still. We expected better performance for him, not worse.

Anyone have any ideas?

His basic specs are:

AMD XP 2500+ (bottleneck maybe? but why would performance be worse than that of the 5200 then?)
6600 LE // 5200
2x512mb + 1x1gb Corsair XMS RAM

Thanks. :/
 
its just my opinion but format c: i have experinced the same thing many times, u swap out a vid card clean all the drivers out ect... and things just don't work right, now i never change a peice of hardware without a fresh install. it also helps get rid of all the crap that can pile up in windows.

like i said just my opinion.
 
Hmm, well that's not an option right now. :(

I think I'm going to try and swap out the cards and possibly the RAM tomorrow.
 
What do you mean by the "official 6 series XP drivers". if your refering to the drivers from windows update page then thats your problems, those drivers are basicly 2d only drivers, they dont have all the 3d stuff in them you need to get the most out of your video card.
Go to Nvidia.com and download the drivers from there, that way you get the full 3d functionality and the performance you should!
 
...yes I meant the official, nvidia drivers...

Sorry for not specifying, I wasn't aware anyone actually ran on just 2d drivers. :p
 
I think part of the problem is the 6600LE is not much faster than the 5200 is.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=361&card2=153

The other part is DOD Source just like Half Life 2 probably runs all geforce 5's/FX's on the DX8 code path. While the 6600LE is running the DX9 code path. Your best bet is to force the 6600LE to run in the DX8 mode.

edit: fixed 6200LE->6600LE
 
I suspect it is the ram. There might be a compatability issue. Put the old ram back but keep the video card and see how that works.
 
its because the 6600 is running correctly, where as the FX5200 slaps itself down to the direct X 7 or 8 codepath. force DX8 or 9 in source games and you should rocket back up there :)
 
Hate to tell you guys, I had his game running on DX 8.1 even before we swapped cards. I used to run at 8.1 in CSS and DODS on my old 6800GT just for the extra performance. :(

Codex, not sure what you mean, but he's on XP SP2 anyways. :) What I meant by the autoexec if you were confused, was that he's running an auto-applying config that changes several graphics options that you normally have little control over. The configs usually work wonders for people, but seemed to have absolutely no effect with it running or not.

I'm trying to swap stuff tomorrow afternoon probably. I don't really see how it could be the RAM. I made sure prior to swapping the sticks that they were the same speed and everything. I think they were all PC3200, or whatever the old "standard" used to be. Both his old sticks and my better ones were extremely similar.

Even if the jump from a 5200 to a 6600 isn't that large, why would his performance have decreased? He was able to run somewhat smoothly at an average of about 30-40 fps I think on his old card. Now it's about 20-30 less on average. :eek:


Thanks for the help anyways.
 
Most of the time when you have issues its the drivers, so thats the first thing people tell you to check. However, it doesn't take much time to run Memtest to make sure the RAM didn't get damaged when you moved it to the other computer. Also make sure your BIOS didn't do some funky RAM settings. More than likely its something else, but its good to eliminate those possiblities.
 
lol shouldn't run that crappy at all. Clean out all the drivers and reinstall the chipset or possibly if it keeps doing it...reinstall windows ;)
 
AA and AF are definitely set to app-controlled. I'll try memtest tomorrow, though the memory passes his mobo's memtest on every boot. :(

Then I'll try reinstalling drivers, and finally swap out crap. Grr, I hate when PCs don't work due to weird errors.
 
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