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x1950 pro AGP slow?

F

fusion29

n00b
Joined
Nov 25, 2006
Messages
22
Hello i was on a 9800XT and just recently upgraded my video card to a Sapphire x1950pro AGP 512mb and a Mushkin 550W power supply. Everything is installed correctly and the card is up and running but i have seen no real difference in FPS from my 9800XT. Not only that but my friend has a x800 and is running considerably better in terms of FPS. I play quite a bit of Battlefield 2 and run 1280X1024 75Hz and get only about 40 FPS and in some cases it will drop to about 15 FPS. . My friend runs the same settings and gets 60-80 FPS. Also when i switch to the lowest settings i only go up about 10-15 FPS. The FPS stays about the same no matter what resolution i change it to. My question is, What is the problem I am having? I'm led to believe that my CPU is not strong enough for the card.

My CPU is:

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP 512 (7.1 drivers)
ASUS K8V SE Deluxe with the most recent Bios (1008.004)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
550w Mushkin Power Supply (20A on each 12v Rail)
2X Western Digital 120Gb IDE hard drives

Friends Computer:
Pentium 4 2.4 (O/C'd to 2.9)
x800 pro
Soundblaster Audigy 2
400w Power Supply
2GB pc3500

My Scores:
Aquamark3: 51000
3Dmark06: 4061

Nothing is over-clocked, my monitor runs at 75Hz, V-sync is off, AA is application controlled, Anisotropic is Application controlled. Everything is at default

I tried OC the CPU but i have no video lock, so i was told that i should stop OCing.

If there is something i am missing let me know. Thank you and hopefully i can get some input.
 
fusion29 said:
I'm led to believe that my CPU is not strong enough for the card.

My CPU is:

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP 512 (7.1 drivers)
ASUS K8V SE Deluxe with the most recent Bios (1008.004)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
550w Mushkin Power Supply (20A on each 12v Rail)
2X Western Digital 120Gb IDE hard drives

Friends Computer:
Pentium 4 2.4 (O/C'd to 2.9)
x800 pro
Soundblaster Audigy 2
400w Power Supply

My Scores:
Aquamark3: 51000
3Dmark06: 4061
Click to expand...

I don't think it's your CPU at all. It's better than the one your friend is using. How much system ram do each of you have? As far as your 3DMark score goes, it's right about where it should be. I get 4300-4500 with my slightly overclocked 3700+.

I would start from scratch and do the obvious thing first. Use Driver Cleaner and remove all ATI Drivers and Control Center. I would then intstall Cat. 6.12 and stay away from the 7's until you get your problems sorted. Seen to many issues with Cat 7's so I wouldn't use these for troubleshooting.

If this doesn't work, than I would move on to the Power Supply. Your Mushkin should be OK, but you never know. How old is it? PSU's degrade over time. I have seen more than one post where someone replaced their power supply with a better one and their performance took off after that. You may also want to try unplugging as many non-essential devices as you can and see if problems go away. You could also rearrange your molex connections and change theway power is being distributed. Almost forgot to ask, how do you have the Sapphire connected? Using a PCI-E connection from your PSU or are you using a splitter to Molex. If so, how do you have the Molex connections plugged in?
 
Personally these cards are not very impressive. I just bought one myself to replace a dead x800GTO.
I also am a huge BF2 player, and I used to run at 1024x768 on medium settings and get decent fps.
Now I have to run at 1680x1050 (LCD replaced an old CRT) and on medium settings I get decent fps.

For double the price and much more raw power, I would have thought I would have been able to bump this card up to mostly HIGH settings...Guess not.

And yes, I did reinstall Windows, using XP Pro, tried Vista, Vista performance was a little worse.


honestjohn said:
I don't think it's your CPU at all. It's better than the one your friend is using. How much system ram do each of you have? As far as your 3DMark score goes, it's right about where it should be. I get 4300-4500 with my slightly overclocked 3700+.

I would start from scratch and do the obvious thing first. Use Driver Cleaner and remove all ATI Drivers and Control Center. I would then intstall Cat. 6.12 and stay away from the 7's until you get your problems sorted. Seen to many issues with Cat 7's so I wouldn't use these for troubleshooting.

If this doesn't work, than I would move on to the Power Supply. Your Mushkin should be OK, but you never know. How old is it? PSU's degrade over time. I have seen more than one post where someone replaced their power supply with a better one and their performance took off after that. You may also want to try unplugging as many non-essential devices as you can and see if problems go away. You could also rearrange your molex connections and change theway power is being distributed. Almost forgot to ask, how do you have the Sapphire connected? Using a PCI-E connection from your PSU or are you using a splitter to Molex. If so, how do you have the Molex connections plugged in?
Click to expand...
 
honestjohn said:
I don't think it's your CPU at all. It's better than the one your friend is using. How much system ram do each of you have? As far as your 3DMark score goes, it's right about where it should be. I get 4300-4500 with my slightly overclocked 3700+.

I would start from scratch and do the obvious thing first. Use Driver Cleaner and remove all ATI Drivers and Control Center. I would then intstall Cat. 6.12 and stay away from the 7's until you get your problems sorted. Seen to many issues with Cat 7's so I wouldn't use these for troubleshooting.

If this doesn't work, than I would move on to the Power Supply. Your Mushkin should be OK, but you never know. How old is it? PSU's degrade over time. I have seen more than one post where someone replaced their power supply with a better one and their performance took off after that. You may also want to try unplugging as many non-essential devices as you can and see if problems go away. You could also rearrange your molex connections and change theway power is being distributed. Almost forgot to ask, how do you have the Sapphire connected? Using a PCI-E connection from your PSU or are you using a splitter to Molex. If so, how do you have the Molex connections plugged in?
Click to expand...

I have ran Driver Cleaner pro numerous times. The drivers i am using now are no different than the ones i had before. The drivers i use now are from the sapphire CD.

The PSU is brand new and i have 1 molex connector going to each molex connection. My buddies 2.4 is also overclocked to a 2.9. He also uses pc3500 memory. (2 Gigs) But really, he has nothing else that is better than what i am using.

Thanks for the replies, Keep them coming.
 
How are other games playing? Try another game and see if it stands up to benchies around the net. Make sure you also download any patches out for BF2.
 
I can not get more RAM, as i would think 2GB would be plenty. Also i can not really Overclock due to no AGP lock on my motherboard.

Battlefield 2 is up to date and i have tried a couple other games (Lord of the Rings Online Beta, Company of Heroes, World of Warcraft) with different settings. It seems every setting returns the same FPS, and that is about 40-50. When reaching a high graphic area i drop to about 10-15 FPS.

The card runs fine and is playable, but i really don't think i am getting the full performance out of the card. While hoping to gain FPS from a 9800XT, I simply have gained nothing, I mainly just want to know people's opinion if my CPU is the cause for bottleneck or if something else could be wrong.
 
Alrighty, i have a new question. Do the AMD 64 chips have drivers and updates? I see something on the AMD website for AGP drivers and other drivers, but i'm not sure if they are for my Processor. I can't recall installing any processor drivers, unless windows update installed them. The only thing i can recall installing were the Asus MB Bios,drivers, X1950 pro Drivers, and Sound Card drivers.

If i do need these drivers, which ones do i download and is there a way to find out what i am currently running?
 
get rid of those sapphire drivers and go get the 7.2 catalyst drivers from ati. i beleive the 7.3s are comeing out tomarrow, so you may want to try those too.
 
What's the speed of your memory and how is it configured? Is all of you're memory matched and is it running in Dual Channel mode? I'm a Intel man but I understand AMD also has a 1T-2T setting that makes a big difference.
 
I am on Windows XP Home SP2.

I have 2 GB of Corsair XMS 3200. It's running single channel at 100.1 Mhz
 
Is your AGP slot 8x? I think your problem may lie in your AGP bus speed, which could be at 4x. Find out.
 
What is the make-up of your ram and why are you in single channel? Is it mismatched in sizes or using an uneven number of slots?

I have 3GB of Corsair XMS memory in a 2x512 and 2x1024 configuration. It's two matched pairs running in dual channel at 2-3-3-6. If I was to run in single channel I'd cut my memory bandwidth in half and definetly slow my system down. That may be one of your problems. What slots on your MB have ram and home much on each slot?
 
fusion29 said:
I am running at 8X. Checked that already. :(
Click to expand...

Fusion, your memory is not the problem and 2 GB is plenty. I guess Phantom didn't read your specs in the first post, otherwise he would have realized you were using a socket 754 motherboard like myself and dual-channel memory is not an option. Did you make any headway yet with the suggestions you've been given?
 
The motherboard i have (socket 754) does not support dual channel. I believe the socket 939's do.

I believe the memory i have is TWINX2048-3200C2PT
 
honestjohn said:
Fusion, your memory is not the problem and 2 GB is plenty. I guess Phantom didn't read your specs in the first post, otherwise he would have realized you were using a socket 754 motherboard like myself and dual-channel memory is not an option. Did you make any headway yet with the suggestions you've been given?
Click to expand...

I haven't really made any headway. I was thinking about going to the ASUS 1007 bios since the 1008 bios i have is Beta. Also i am trying to decide if i should update the CPU driver to the one listed on the AMD site. The one i have now is from Microsoft, so i am a bit confused on that.

I can not score over 51000 on aquamark 3. Not one of my FPS tests is above 50 FPS either. Does this seem normal?
 
fusion29 said:
Alrighty, i have a new question. Do the AMD 64 chips have drivers and updates? I see something on the AMD website for AGP drivers and other drivers, but i'm not sure if they are for my Processor. I can't recall installing any processor drivers, unless windows update installed them. The only thing i can recall installing were the Asus MB Bios,drivers, X1950 pro Drivers, and Sound Card drivers.

If i do need these drivers, which ones do i download and is there a way to find out what i am currently running?
Click to expand...

Don't know if you've done so yet, but you may also want to re-install your motherboard's chipset drivers / AGP Drivers....

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

And that's a good idea you had about going to 1007 the non-beta BIOS. You may also want to play around with your aperture setting in the BIOS. I found my Pro liked 256MB the best.
 
I think i am running my memory at DDR200. Will it make any difference to go to DDR400? If so, why is my Motherboard only limiting me to DDR200?
 
I want to thank all of you for the help as i have solved the problem. I now ran 67000 IN AQUAMARK which is 16K higher. It turns out i had my Memory in the DIMM 2 and DIMM 3 slot. I was able to switch them around and run them at 200Mhz instead of 100MHz.
 
fusion29 said:
I want to thank all of you for the help as i have solved the problem. I now ran 67000 IN AQUAMARK which is 16K higher. It turns out i had my Memory in the DIMM 2 and DIMM 3 slot. I was able to switch them around and run them at 200Mhz instead of 100MHz.
Click to expand...

I was going to ask you last night why you were running your PC3200 memory at only 100.1 mhz, but I had to hit the sack. Kids have to get up at 5:15am to get ready for school. Glad you got it sorted out.

And my apologies to Phantoms. You may have been wrong about the Dual-Channel thing, but you were definitely headed in the right direction to sort out the problem.
 
Hmm..... it seems as if a new problem has arise. I run a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS with the current drivers and my sound is all distorted and messed up. I basically have no sound and you can barely hear it. Any reasons why I have no sounds? Does it have to do with me changing the memory?
 
You may have knocked the sound car loose when you moved the memory into different slots. Make sure the card is fully seated.
 
The card is funny seated. When the music plays its all distorted and heavy crackling. I've never had this problem and it does it in both my headphones and 7.1 speakers.
 
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