advice for a noob: fx5200 --> 6800gt upgrade

[petesamprs]

Hey guys,
I think I found the bottleneck in my system
Just upgraded my fx5200 for a pny 6800gt on my p4 3ghz, 1gb system. New card running fine on my stock dell (250W psu). Runs pretty loud though if the room is quiet.

Scores upped on benchmarks like this:
3dmark03: 1111 --> 10658
Aquamark: 7954 --> 54901

Would you guys agree this is about the size jump I should expect?
Next question: How do I monitor my card temps if I want to start o/cing it? Motherboard monitor seems to only monitor case/CPU...what about the card itself? Is that through the nvidia desktop software?

thanks.

 

[platinumike]

I have the bfg 6800gt, xp 2100,768 mb ram. My 'mark 03 scores are almost identical to yours. Btw, how much did you pay for the pny version? anyways, I think you defintly got a good size jump, just make sure fastwrites are disabled and your runnig at the highest agp interface your mobo supports. To monitor your temps, if you have drivers installed, it should be right click desktop->properties->settings->advanced_> and you should see your vid card in a tab. click the tab, and on the left look for tempature settings. Otherwise you can use speed fan or some other program. Let us know how the oc'ing goes!

 

[petesamprs]

wow, good info. thanks. I got in on the compusa $60 off $400 so paid $340 before tax. Tax was a big hit to NY though (about $29). Shipping free.

Originally posted by: platinumike
just make sure fastwrites are disabled and your runnig at the highest agp interface your mobo supports.

any idea how i do this?

 

[DusterAZ]

You can disable fast writes in the BIOS. If your AGP is set to AUTO you should be fine. If you click the system details in 3DMark03 it will tell you what your AGP and fast writes are set at. From what I can gather, disabling fast writes will usually allow you to overclock your video card higher. But if you don't plan on overclocking then I would just leave things as they are as long as everything is running fine.

 

[petesamprs]

Cool. So is this what my 3dmark systems details say:

AGP
Revision 3.0
Rate 4x, 8x (8x enabled)
Available Rate 0x0000000c
Selected Rate 0x00000008
Aperture Size 128 MB
Sideband Addressing supported (enabled)
Fast Write supported (enabled)

Guess i'm ok on AGP but need to disable fast writes. How?

 

[petesamprs]

I don't see anything in BIOS about fast writes. Would it be called something else? Can i change it through the OS?

 

[Appledrop]

for fast rights, check your vid card properties in the display panel of windows. (right click desktop, properties, settings, advanced, look for Fast Rights)

i'd set AGP apeture to 256mb in bios if you can too.

 

[petesamprs]

Thanks. I got it through RivaTuner. It's sorta sad how you buy a $400 video card and you still can't MAX out settings in a lot of games and still maintain 30+ fps. I'm dropping to around 20-25 fps on the more graphically stressful parts of Theif 3, MS Flight Sim 2k4, NFS2U when every possible setting is MAXED.

go figure.