Poor performance from 6800XT

[PCMarine]

Hey all,

So I recently purchased an open box AGP Asus nvidia 6800XT from newegg. I popped it into an Athlon XP 2600+, 512mb ram (PC-133) PC which previously ran a GF4 Ti4200. My main purpose for the upgrade was to play HL2/source games well.

The computer works fine in windows, but when playing source games, the performance is nothing like I expected. FPS is in the 10s-30s (optimistically), usually regardless of settings(!), and overall marginal, if any, improvement over the ti4200.

Does the card throttle the power if it gets hot? underpowered (running a antec 330watt trupower)?

Thanks for any help

 

[PurdueRy]

benchmark it

 

[PCMarine]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
benchmark it

good call, didnt even think to do that... though I cant get to that till tomorrow evening

 

[2Xtreme21]

Did you use driver cleaner when removing the old drivers?

 

[ForumMaster]

first i would suggest, it to get a new mobo with support for DDR ram. it will have a significant performance increase. BTW, did you connect the card to the PSU? a 6800 usually requires more power via a molex connector. also, i would suggest you upgrade your PSU to something with more amps on the +12V line.

 

[PCMarine]

Ok, so I benchmarked the system. I also unlocked the extra 8 pipelines and all of that jazz and scored 3055 in 3dmark2005. CS Source is better after unlocking the extra features, but still isnt as fluid as I would expect.

Any thoughts?

 

[pkrush]

Your main problem is not enough RAM, and what you do have is too slow. However, adding faster RAM would require a new motherboard, which would require a new CPU since Socket A boards are getting scarce now. Your best bet is probably getting a used Socket A motherboard with DDR slots and 1 gigabyte of DDR400 off the FS/FT forums.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

You did realize that "XT" on a video card with an nVidia GPU means the opposite of what it does on an ATI, didn't you?

XT=LE = "Lousy Edition" with a slower core speed, slower RAM, etc. It needs to be both Overclocked as well as unlocked to be "almost" equal to a 6800 plain GPU. Also, the AGP bridge adds an extra slowdown compared to a PCI-e version.