AGP Aperture Size for mobo with "no option" to change in bios

[Mavrick007]

My friend has a Gigabyte 7vax mobo, 512megs of ram, an Athlon XP 2200+, and a Radeon 9700 Pro card and he's getting only about 6400 marks in 3d2001SE.

His Gigabyte mobo doesn't have any option anywhere in the bios to change the aperture size and in software it says that the size is set to 0.
He is pretty irate that he has such a decent little system but is only getting about 1/2 of the 3dmarks out of 3dmark2001SE.
Yes, it's a synthetic benchmark and it doesn't mean that his games are running poorly but they could be running better and it does have some relevance to
how other people's systems rate compared to each other.

Anyone have this board? What's up with the lack of an AGP Aperture setting? Any ideas why his system is running 3dmark so poorly?
Nothing is overclocked in his machine but it's all running at "correct" stock speeds and it's running pretty stable, just not as fast as it could.

 

[earthman]

I don't see how it could be 0 since the address table is usually 12 megs, but with a card like that, I don't know that it would have that large of an effect anyway. With a 128 meg card, an aperture over 32 is usually unnecessary.

 

[Jeff7181]

I bet he's got AA and AF turned on. I think a P2 450 with a 9700 Pro could score 5000 =)

 

[squidman]

OR he has AGP 1x engaged, AGP acceleration disabled, and be runnig the test at 1600x1400 with 4aa and 16af

 

[Mavrick007]

Heh I though of all that too, but even if he was running at those settings, it would still be higher than that cause
the 9700 Pro doesn't lose as much in 3dmark by using AA and AF like the GF4 does.

You know I don't think the AGP setting would matter much if it was 1x, 2x, 4x, or 8x in 3dmark cause
there have been tests done to dispell the myth that the bandwidth is really being fully saturated.
Try 3dmark on your own card at the different AGP settings and you will notice a small amount of change but not that much.

I was reading a review of AGP Aperture done with cards using the different settings from 4Megs to 256Megs and it does make
a difference in certain applications like here and here.

I thought he might be trying to run 3dmark at higher resolution, but it defaults to 1024x768 so I don't think he changed it.
I will have to check to be sure. Even then, I would expect his score to be higher than that with the 9700 Pro from what I've seen in other benches in articles on the web.

 

[Jeff7]

The usual question: chipset drivers installed?
Also, the ATi drivers have a SMARTGART tab in the advanced section of display properties; what are the AGP settings there?