Need some serious help! (note: big picture)

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!

[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..

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

any other ideas folks?

[StinkyMojo]

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

Originally Posted by StinkyMojo

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....ang=0&bogno=32