Performance below normal? You be the judge

[SwiftWind]

I have the following:
AMD Phenom 9600 (2.3Ghz?)
ECS GeForce6100PM-M2(V2.0)
4GB PC6400 Low Latency ram
BFG 8800GTS 512MB OC

In 3DMark06 I get 8800. When I play TF2 with 4x MSAA and 4X Aniso I get somewhere between 20-40FPS at 1680x1050.

Yes I know the motherboard sucks, but it shouldn't affect performance that much should it? Right now the current mobo does 2000MT/s, I suppose I could upgrade to a 5200MT/s motherboard but I don't think it has any relation to gaming.

multitasking wise and loading apps is really fast. Its just the fps thats killing me.

Ideas? Do you think changing the mobo is the answer?

UPDATE: I changed the motherboard to an Asus M3A and the score went up to 11160 3DMarks!!!

Thanks for the help everyone!

 

[Peezee]

Actually, I'd say it's the motherboard. Many factors on a motherboard can easily determine performance... Could you provide a link to the motherboard specifications?

 

[JPB]

Originally posted by: Peezee
Actually, I'd say it's the motherboard. Many factors on a motherboard can easily determine performance... Could you provide a link to the motherboard specifications?

Is this the motherboard ?

 

[Piuc2020]

It's likely a driver problem.

 

[SwiftWind]

Originally posted by: JPB

Originally posted by: Peezee
Actually, I'd say it's the motherboard. Many factors on a motherboard can easily determine performance... Could you provide a link to the motherboard specifications?

Is this the motherboard ?

Yup, thats the one.

It's likely a driver problem.

Driver as in video driver? motherboard driver?

I think updated to the latest drivers but I'll double check that now.

 

[Lithan]

Uhh... I have a 8800gts and I run bf2 at the fps cap 24/7.... so yeah 20fps sounds like somethings really messed up.

Is the onboard turned off and bios set to us pci-e properly? Been years since Ive used a board with gfx onboard, but seems likely to cause conflicts if not.

 

[SwiftWind]

Originally posted by: Lithan
Uhh... I have a 8800gts and I run bf2 at the fps cap 24/7.... so yeah 20fps sounds like somethings really messed up.

Is the onboard turned off and bios set to us pci-e properly? Been years since Ive used a board with gfx onboard, but seems likely to cause conflicts if not.

Unfortunately shutting off the onboard video isn't even an option on this mobo , but it is set to use PCIEx first..

 

[Lithan]

That sounds problematic to me. Probably the pci-e slot/ 8800gts card isn't getting all the memory addresses it needs to work properly.

 

[SwiftWind]

I did notice CPU-Z recognizes my RAM as PC6400 but says its running at 400Mhz.. In the BIOS there's only an option to set it as DDR2 800. No other timings what so ever.

 

[SwiftWind]

Time to buy a new mobo?

 

[SwiftWind]

see update!

 

[tvdang7]

wierd why would a motherboard be that much of the blame? i know it could be if it was faulty or something but yea..

 

[SwiftWind]

Originally posted by: tvdang7
wierd why would a motherboard be that much of the blame? i know it could be if it was faulty or something but yea..

I don't think it was faulty. I think its because the Asus motherboard is 5200 HT/s using a newer chipset (A770 vs 6100). I'm guessing the ECS mobo would still probably rock for non-phenom cpus.

 

[tcsenter]

I doubt the HT alone was responsible for a 25% performance hit in applications that should be a lot more influenced by the graphics card than the HT frequency. The ECS board supports the full PCI-E 1.x bandwidth of this card as well as the ASUS board does.

It sounds more likely to be some BIOS glitch, possibly related to MTRR settings and 4GB RAM. Did you ever test with just 2GB installed? If you still have the board, you might want to test 2GB. If something has improved significantly, then its a BIOS issue that ECS should know about.

It may even be due to an older AGESA library that has some serious performance issues with Phenom. The latest BIOS for the ECS board is dated DEC 2007. There have been at least two updated AGESA builds released in 2008; 3.1.6.0 and 3.1.7.0.

 

[SwiftWind]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
I doubt the HT alone was responsible for a 25% performance hit in applications that should be a lot more influenced by the graphics card than the HT frequency. The ECS board supports the full PCI-E 1.x bandwidth of this card as well as the ASUS board does.

It sounds more likely to be some BIOS glitch, possibly related to MTRR settings and 4GB RAM. Did you ever test with just 2GB installed? If you still have the board, you might want to test 2GB. If something has improved significantly, then its a BIOS issue that ECS should know about.

It may even be due to an older AGESA library that has some serious performance issues with Phenom. The latest BIOS for the ECS board is dated DEC 2007. There have been at least two updated AGESA builds released in 2008; 3.1.6.0 and 3.1.7.0.

I never did test it with a single stick of 2GB. Its a bit too late to test it now but the motherboard is practically new and it is running the latest BIOS patch.

I thought about another possible reason though. The ECS BIOS did not have any option to turn the TLB Patch on or off. I'm not sure if was applied to the latest bios on that board but if it was, that would be a big reason for the performance hit.

P.S.

What's an AGESA library?

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: SwiftWind
What's an AGESA library?

AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture. Its AMD's BIOS code that it releases to mainboard and BIOS companies for supporting AMD processors.