Upgraded video card, little improvement.

System Specs:


Win XP Pro
P4 Northwood 2.8 @ 3.08
1gb PC3200 RAM (2x512)
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard (i865PE)

ATI Radeon HD 3850 AGP 512mb -- upgraded from Radeon 9800pro




I upgraded the card because I wanted to play some games (Dirt, Bioshock) that required pixel shader 3 or 4, I forget which.

After upgrading the card I was disappointed to find that Dirt runs slow as.. well, dirt. Even at 640x480 and all the settings turned down I'm still only getting 15-20 fps. After a little research I found that many people are having problems with the game. So fine.

Now I just got done playing some Call of Duty 4, and it appears that whether I'm playing it at 1024x768 with low settings, or 1680x1050 with high settings I still get around 20fps. At the low settings this is hardly, if any better than I was getting with the 9800pro.


The only drivers that will work with this card are the ones supplied by PowerColor, because apparently ATI's drivers don't support the AGP version of this card. Although I think the drivers it came with are the 8.6 catalyst, which isn't too old, so I don't think that's the problem. (I tried editing the .inf file in the ATI drivers to no avail)



I was planning on adding another gig of RAM when I get the money, but from what I'm seeing it seems like my processor is bottlenecking my performance. I could slap in a 3.4ghz Prescott, but I really don't have the money right now.

I was thinking with a 3ghz processor my PC would be up to the task of playing these games.. so what gives?



I also see that I'm still running DirectX 9.0c, so is this my problem? Is 10.1 even officially out? Or is this just for Vista? I'm confused.

 

After doing a little research about DirectX 10 and Microsoft's claim that it's only compatible with Vista, I downloaded and installed it. I wasn't really expecting much. Although I think my performance improved a little.. either that or I found a sweet spot in my settings. Anyways, Dirt is still running slow, but I've got it to a 26fps average at 1024x768 which is surprisingly smooth for a racing game. It's playable, but most of the eye candy is not there.


In COD 4 I've got it averaging ~36fps at 1280x1024 but it still slows down to ~16fps in really heavy action. This holds true even if I'm face to face with a wall, so it looks like CPU bottleneck to me.



Maybe I'll get my hands on a Thermalright XP-90 and see if I can squeeze a few more mHz out of my existing CPU. Too bad the P4 3.4 EE is still like $400.. I guess I'll have to set my sights on a Prescott core after x-mass time..

 

39 views and no comments. If everyone just agrees with me I would at least like someone to back up my thoughts.


Anyways, I doubled my OC to 3.36gHz and that seems to have helped a bit. After 20 minutes of testing the CPU maxed at 54C (1.64v). That's with the OEM heatsink/fan, which surprised me.





(Ohh, yeah.. clouds and water look nice on DX10. I still can't run 3DMark Vantage, and now 3DMark 2006 won't load, but all the games I've tried so far work just fine)

 

Throw in another gigabyte of RAM in there while you're at it. It'll make a bigger difference than you think.

 

If I remember, the 3850 is a mid-range ATI card of the last gen. Maybe it doesn't have the horsepower to run those games. I think Mimsy is right, that another gig would help. DX10 and DX10.1 is Vista only. WinXP is DX9.0c. To be honest, you are prolly better with WinXP & DX9C than Vista and DX10.1. Definately if you already have performance issues.

 

I'll start saving for the RAM. I am running DX10 on XP now and it seems fine so far.

 

RAM is so cheap now, it shouldn't take more than a couple of days to save up for a GB

 

DDR is actually not quite as cheap as DDR2 is, and that's a DDR board.... at least the P4P800 E Deluxe ni the computer I'm on right now is

You can get a 1GB kit of good brand RAM for between $50 and $60 at Newegg right now. Try to match the specs of what you have installed as closely as possible.

 

For my AGP card (1950 pro) I use Catalyst 7.6 drivers. They are older, but they don't have any issues with AGP cards, try downgrading to those. Most people recommend under 7.8 for any newer AGP card.

 

WOW,Can you tell us how did you do it?
DX10 on xp?Very interesting.

 

The Kingston HyperX RAM I'm currently using just went down from $57.99 to $37.99, so I guess now's a good time to buy..



I'll try going down to the 7.6 drivers. I thought it was kinda funny, the 8.6 drivers that came on the disk with the card are the latest working drivers I can find. But I guess it's a pretty new card so it's not that weird.



As for DX10 on XP.. I just did some googleing. I think it was called DX10 rc2 fix 3 (the newest one I could find). I'm not quite sure about the files cause it's only about 6.5mb, and I have the feeling there's more to DX10 than that. But it just updated a couple of dlls, and I swear there's a total improvement in the appearance of water, clouds, fire, and smoke. Maybe it's just something with my new card, but I didn't notice the difference until after I did the DX10 upgrade. So far I haven't had any problems.. although after about 15 minutes of full screen flash video on hulu my system crashes. I dunno if it has anything to do with the DX10 update (still working on that problem).




Anyways, if anyone cares, I ran into some stability issues @3.36ghz and instead of raising the voltage any higher I figured I should just back off a little. Now I've got it at 3.31ghz and I ran 3DMark06 all night last night without a problem. I got 4771 3DMarks with a clean boot (4590 with everything running). I've also overclocked my new video card a little. I haven't tried turning it up anymore, so I might squeeze a little more out of it in due time.

This card seems like it should have a heat sink on the rear of the GPU. It just has this little foam pad stuck to it, which seems like it would actually hold heat in. At the default clock speed and nothing running I touched it with my finger and it was scalding hot. So that's another thing I'll have to look into..




I'm gonna attach my system specs and let you guys see if 4771 Marks is a little low. I looked and there were people with similar systems getting 6000+, but they also had 2gb of RAM and processors running around 3.8ghz. I don't think I saw anyone with an overclocked 2.8ghz northwood getting higher scores, so that's some consolation. And I'll give an update once I get another gig of RAM going.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=99390&stc=1&d=1225343191

 

Which version of 3dmark are you using?

 

3DMark06 version 1.1.0 with the default settings.

 

Got my extra GB of RAM in now.. 4790 3DMarks. Not much of a difference in 3DMark, but I bet it'll help more so in games, especially Dirt cause I saw it was using 600mb+ before.