Need some serious help! (note: big picture)

[clockworkmep]

Ok hey every1 nice boards. First off thank god i found a sane forums all of you seem very kool (i've been parusing the boards earlier today)

Ok here's my problem. I have a pretty good machine, but it does not seem to get all the performance it should. Esp in programs such as 3dMark 03 or 3dMark 05. I relize that some of these programs are graphics card intensive but when i score this low in 3d Mark, i'm starting to wonder what I can do. I'll start by posting my computer specs to the finest degree. (I wont say sound, hard drives, or other perferials. Only the essitentials)

AMD Athlon XP 2700 (Running at 2.17 ghz) (barton box came with cpu heat sink)

1.5 gigs of Kingston PC3200 ram (3 dimms)

MSI K7N2 Delta-L 400 FSB (supports up to 3 gigs of ram in 3 dimms as well as dual channel)

BFG GeForce FX 5500 256 Meg VRAM (I have overclocked it from time to time without much success, it does the overclocking but no real im provements)

WIN XP Pro SP 2

Those are all the specs that should be needed.

Now moving on I want to know what I can do to boost it's performance. I have read somewhere that I can overclock AMD's easily. However every single time I do overclock anything, when i restart my monitor goes yellow (cpu hang)

I can get my PC to go at 2.19 ghz but after that it just CPU hangs. I have also tried overclocking my ram also no luck.

Please if there is anything that I can do please let me know. I hope someone can help me get more out of machine.

Note: I am buying the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in the next week
Note: Nothing was running when i did the 3d mark 05
My 3d mark 05 score is attached. It's very very sad! :confused: :(

[vee_ess]

That score is actually not too bad for a 3DMark 05 score for that class of card. You have to consider that synthetic benchmarks are rarely accurate and that the scoring is seemingly exponential, strongly favoring high end cards.

[Jason425]

Yea that kind of makes sense, since 05 has all top of the line features and the fx series didn't even have as many features as the 9700 series.. my 9500 got like 1500 in 05 when it was OC'd a bunch


oh and running all that crap while benchmarking doesn't help either..

[clockworkmep]

I wasn't running that stuff while i benchmarked. I only get a score of 1,600 on 3d mark 03. Only 3d mark 01 gives me a decent score of 12,000

[Jason425]

aka direct x 9 stuff which I was referring to

[clockworkmep]

any other ideas folks?

[clockworkmep]

Ok this morning I decided to take a look at what and if any overclocking I could do... I got brave and decided to play russian roulette with my system. I started by changing my Award Bios to high performance defaults... then proceded by changing the Vcore from HxW to 1.65V

Then I went to advanced and changed the performance to manual and began changing the FSB up by 3 or 4 mhz. It didn't POST above 185, and it wouldn't go into windows anything above 180, and it randomly restarted at anything above 177. So it is at 177 now. From 166 to 177 doesn't seem to much of a gain but surprisingly it did help.

I also changed the AGP apuncture size from 128 to 512

Then i decided to see what kind of extra overclocking i could do to my graphics card. I use normal drivers (no forceware) and had to download a reg key to be able to over clock. I installed it... and then clicked detect optium frequencies. It started at 290mhz vcore and 400mhz memory...it changed it to 316mhz vcore and 470mhz memory.

I then ran 3Dmark 03 (i have been told several times that 3DMark 05 only gets 2000+ on godly systems and it wasn't fine tuned yet.)

And I got incredible speeds on tests that normally ran terrible. I usually got 5-10 max 15 fps on Proxycon I got an average of 22 FPS!!! The orge one also got way higher score with 21 average FPS. The Plane battle got a high of 96 FPS...(not much difference)


Here is my test pre fine tuning it:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v426/sexygal342353463464/2.jpg

Here is my last test with all the tuning:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v426/sexygal342353463464/1.jpg

[StinkyMojo]

hmm.. that agp aperature size seem a little too high..

[clockworkmep]

hmm.. that agp aperature size seem a little too high..

not sure what performance that setting actually did... i could turn it back to 128 and find out...

[StinkyMojo]

This is why I thought its too high: http://www.rojakpot.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?Lang=0&bogno=32

[Jason425]

I keep mine at the same size as the video memory

[clockworkmep]

This is why I thought its too high: http://www.rojakpot.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?Lang=0&bogno=32

hmm ill look into it! :)

[omegatotal]

first off, get cpuZ ( www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php ) and see if your memory is running in dual channel mode. if not, pull one of those sticks of memory, most nforce motherboards that only have 3 dimms dont run dual channel when all three are populated... so check your manual on the dual channel config and pull the stick thats in the odd slot (so that you have the 2 in the right slots for dual channel mode....)


then second put your apature size at 256 with that much memory and that card you dont need anything bigger

the loss of 512MB ram shouldn't make a diff in the benchmarking, but if you are running cad apps and other 3d/rendering apps or video/photo editing software, u might notice the difference as the program might swap more...
see if that helps you get the scores you want

just my 2 cents

[gnogtr]

I still believe that you're running about right. When I had a AMD XP 3000+ and 9800 Pro, I could only get around 18,000 on 3dmark2k1. The 9800 Pro makes your card cry, so I wouldn't expect too much more. If you want, it would make sence to start upgrading, maybe AMD 64, or new line video card....

[StinkyMojo]

nice input guys.. but I think hes long gone now :)

[gnogtr]

Wow, I didn't notice the date...