Crappy Video Card Performance.. Need help please..

[duritz]

My System:

AMD Duron 1.0Ghz CPU
ECS K7S5A Motherboard
512MB DDR PC2100 Ram
Soundblaster Live 5.1 MP3+

Yesterday I decided to spend $130 on a new video card. My choice was a PNY Geforce 4 TI 4200 (64mb ddr version)

I plugged it in, installed drivers, ran a game. Everything seemed ok. All the sudden my computer went boom and after hours of troubleshooting I found out my power supply was only 235 watts trying to run my system with the new card. I got a 300watt power supply, all is ok now.

However I'm getting really bad frame rates in most of my games. Especially UT2K3.

Running the benchmark I was consistently getting the following (give or take a tenth) in any resolution...

flyby 77.36
botmatch 24.69

that was in 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480. I tried setting it to opengl and got the same results. I even overclocked my card from 250/500 to 270/540 and there was no increase in fps.

I ran 3dmark and got 5990 marks which is halfway decent from what I heard. A friend who has a geforce 2 mx 400 gets 2901 marks but he gets 35fps in ut2k3.

I ran Battlefield 1942, and I don't know the command to show fps but it seems pretty laggy... I ran Army Operations and the fps is around 20, and I ran UT2K3 (single player and multi) and I get around 20fps, average around 17.

Vsync is disabled. Anistropic filtering is off. Antialiasing is off.

The fps stays the same even if I enable vsync and those other options...

I began with the 30.82 drivers, and am now using the 40.41 drivers.

What else can I try? I'm about to return this card b/c my Geforce2 GTS 32mb ddr card ran similar. Have you heard of anything like this?

Thanks for any replies.

Duritz

 

[sykopath79]

Army Operations and UT2k3 are pretty hefty on CPU power as well as GPU, so it could be that your Duron is holding you back. If overclocking your card doesn't increase FPS, then your card is not the bottleneck.

 

[Doctorweir]

Right...your UT-scores are just fine...blame your CPU

Which VidCard did you use before? Did you reinstall your OS after swapping cards?

 

[FluxCapacitor]

I don't think you're going to see much increase in video performance unless you upgrade your CPU as well. That's the real reason you're not seeing much difference between your old and new video card. Here's how I know:

Running the benchmark I was consistently getting the following (give or take a tenth) in any resolution...

When your frame rate doesn't drop as you increase your resolution, it's telling you your CPU is the limiting factor.

Might be worth your money to get yourself an inexpensive 1800+ or 1900+ XP. An XP would also make much better use of your DDR RAM, unless you're currently overclocking your Duron to 133MHz FSB...

Edit: for spelling