Upgraded from 9800SE to 6600 gt with crappy performance

[CrappyLuckMan]

My system
420W psu
MOBO: ASUS A7S333@294mhz DDR fsb, 4X agp 2.0
RAM: PC2100 768MB
CPU: XP 2600 t-bred@2.2ghz
7 80mm fans

Hello everyone. I bought an ATI 9800se from powercolor like 6 months ago I soft modded it to a 9800 pro@400/360mhz. I play America's Army and the game was updated with new maps and better graphics. I'm getting very low fps in particulary one map where fps ranges from 15-70. I could barely play Doom 3 or Dues ex 2 with this card and setup.

I went and bought a XFX 6600 gt and installed it a day ago. I played AAO and performance seemed slighty crappier. My fps drops to 10 sometimes and even when I have 20-30 fps the game freezes for a fraction of a second like something is stopping my mouse from pointing my weapon in the game, even though fps is desent. This happend with my ati too, It might be something causing instability? Doom 3 is a little bit smoother with better quality and my 3dMark03 score is 7480. I installed 71.84 Xtreme G drivers and it's still the same.

I overlocked the card to 580/600 and gained a lil more performance (in nature benchmark I went from 31.6 to 51.2 fps though). I played with the settings except AA and no change in America's Arym performance. I heard enabling AA boosts fps with this card but I don't think so. I've defragged my pc too with no avail.

My bios settings are: Dram turn around Fast (rest 'normal' cause it wont even boot), AGP fast writes on, 4X agp, and 128MB ram for AGP mem.
I installed fresh XP with sp2 like a few months ago when sp2 came out. I run Kaspersky anti-virus and use Adware to remove spyware. I really don't know what to do esle to "unlock" the thing holding down my fps. It might be just bad luck which I have plenty.

Thank you for reading this sad story.

 

[hans030390]

get different bios (maybe)

RAM isn't great (try some PC3200)

AGP 4x didnt work well with this card on my cousins setup

it's an XFX card...what do you expect?

 

[mwmorph]

delete

 

[mwmorph]

you have a bottleneck at so many places, i dont know where to start.
your 4xagp slot kills off 5-10% performance.
your 2.2ghz tbred kills 5% perfromance
your ram, depending on config can kill 5-10%performance depending if you are using 2 or 3 sticks, and what latencies you are using

AGP apperature should be as high as possible. switching from 128 to 512mb will do some good rendering wise.
check your bioses and all drivers espically your chipset drivers. check yuor settings.

Also, Unreal Engine games(like America's Army run MUCH faster on a ATI card than a Nviidia card as do most Direct X games. For OpenGL games liek DOOMIII, NV cards will win.
This is a benchmark of UT2K3, the engine America's Army is built on.
http://www.ixbt.com/video2/over2k4-ut-1024.shtml
I Know it looks weird, that the 9800pro beats out a 6800ultra in UT2k3 but, this is form a pretty respectable russian video card reviewing website.

Originally posted by: hans030390
get different bios (maybe)

RAM isn't great (try some PC3200)

AGP 4x didnt work well with this card on my cousins setup

it's an XFX card...what do you expect?

dont get pc3200 ram. it will only run synced to the chip bus. running async kills performance on amdxp.

xfx is bad, but no way your card runs crap just cause it's xfx.

 

[CrappyLuckMan]

My mobo supports PC 2700 but 266 mhz for cpu fsb though Im at 294 now. If I get pc 2700 of 1 gig stick can I overclock and see better results? The prob is I think im stuck at 294 no matter cause once I push it by 1 mhz (148 non ddr fsb) my system wont boot at all.
Oh and right now I got a 256mb and 512 mb stick.

 

[mwmorph]

I'm telling you the card is at fualt. Nvidia sucks at Direct X games compared to ATI. Just like ATI sucks at openGL games compared to Nvidia. that's why the 9800pro runs better at America's Army(Shares the Unreal engine technology with Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, which are Direct X 8.1) and the 6600gt runs DOOMIII(a openGL 2.0 game) better than the 9800pro

 

[JBT]

The mobo won't boot any highier than 147 because your PCI/AGP bus is WAY out of wack. If I were you I would lower the multi on the CPU set vdimm to 2.8 and set the FSB at 166. Having the FSB above ~160 should turn the 1/5 divider on and get your PCI bus back to spec. what brand Ram is it that you have? I had some Crucial PC2100 that would run at 192 (384 DDR) no problem with vdimm at 2.8.

 

[CrappyLuckMan]

no vdimm I cant change any voltages.

 

[Melchior]

You upgraded a perfectly fine 9800 Pro to a 9800 Pro equivelent on steroids. If you wanted a boost, sell your 9800 Pro and buy a 6800 GT or soemthing.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
I'm telling you the card is at fualt. Nvidia sucks at Direct X games compared to ATI. Just like ATI sucks at openGL games compared to Nvidia. that's why the 9800pro runs better at America's Army(Shares the Unreal engine technology with Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, which are Direct X 8.1) and the 6600gt runs DOOMIII(a openGL 2.0 game) better than the 9800pro

I would say this is not true, the 6600GT is every bit as fast as the R9800P in most D3D games.

 

[CrappyLuckMan]

Originally posted by: Melchior
You upgraded a perfectly fine 9800 Pro to a 9800 Pro equivelent on steroids. If you wanted a boost, sell your 9800 Pro and buy a 6800 GT or soemthing.

it's not a 9800 pro it's a 9800se

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: CrappyLuckMan

Originally posted by: Melchior
You upgraded a perfectly fine 9800 Pro to a 9800 Pro equivelent on steroids. If you wanted a boost, sell your 9800 Pro and buy a 6800 GT or soemthing.

it's not a 9800 pro it's a 9800se

Modded to a 9800 pro. You read well.

 

[mjrpes3]

Just last week I went from an ATI to an nvidia card and had major issues. I had an the 9600 and went to a 6600GT. I noticed performance actually decreased with the upgrade, especially in the game I play a lot, Quake III Arena (OpenGL based). I had uninstalled all ATI drivers and my windows install was pretty fresh, so I was a bit flustered.

Eventually I did a fresh install of windows, and performance greatly improved because of it... benchmarking I did showed performance nearly doubled in Quake III Arena. It seems like residue device drivers left from an ATI card can affect performance when installing a non-ATI card.

Granted, your ATI card is much better so the performance benefits you're going to see by going to a 6600GT aren't as obvious. Perhaps this issue doesn't even apply to you.

EDIT: here's the thread I made about this (non AT forums):

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2660

 

[CrappyLuckMan]

Ok thanks, Ill reinstall this pos OS and try again.