Where's the bottleneck

[3Martini]

I never intended for this system to be a barn-burner, but I had hoped that the 3DMark would be better than a wimpy 2283 (and that was my best run).

Retail Pentium 4 Processor 520, LGA775 - 2.80 GHz, 1Mb L2-Cache, 800 MHz FSB
Abit AA8 3rd Eye 925X
1 GB Corsair DDR2 (2 x 512)
2 Western Digital 160GB SATA drives in RAID0
Antec NeoPower480

Here is a link to my PCMark http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm04=2654902
And here is the link to 3DMark http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=248033

Do these benchmarks seem too low?

I noticed on my Futuremark test results that the FSB is 204MHz - shouldn't this be 800 MHz? Could this be the problem?

All of my pre-purchase research led me to expect much better frame rates with the 6600GT. Is the bottleneck my videocard or cpu?

 

[Pete]

Do you have AA or AF forced on via the drivers? I think you should be around 3000 in 3DM05 with a 6600GT and that CPU.

Your FSB is fine. It's 200MHz "quad-pumped."

 

[sbuckler]

FSB should be 200 if running at default speeds as it's quad buffered (200 * 4 = 800), 204 means you're running a 2% overclock. Don't know what scores you should be getting but remember reviewers often test with very high spec machines (e.g. a very high end athlon with some very expensive low latency memory) which will push up the scores quite a bit. If you want higher scores try overclocking - the cpu and graphics card should be capable of overclocking well. Might want to try newer graphics card drivers as well if you haven't already (66.81's seem pretty stable).

 

[3Martini]

Thanks for the feedback. AA and AF are disabled and the nvidia settings are on "performance."

The default BIOS settings are mildly overclocked (Abit default settings?!). Maybe I'll try to step it back to 200MHz and see if that helps. And then maybe I will go the other direction and see what happens when I crank it up a little. The Abit board seems pretty nice. There is an Overclocking utility (UGuru) which makes OC easy. But I haven't figured out how to get it to retain the settings.

I realized later that I forgot to mention what graphics card I am using. It's the AOpen Aeolus 6600GT (PCI Express).

I had planned on building an Athlon 64 with Radeon 9800Pro (MSI Neoforce2 board). In retrospect, I think this would be a better performer. I opted for Intel Prescott because I want to use this for DV editing and I heard the Intels were better at that.

All in all, I'm pretty disappointed. I paid too much for lackluster performance. But I guess it happens.

 

[CU]

Around 66.5 or 66.7 nvidia's drivers got a hugh increase in 3dmark05. What driver version are you using?

 

[Ronin]

I'm not sure if you had a chance to look at my thread, but in order to give you a comparison on a similar system (with a faster CPU):

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...3472&enterthread=y

Check that out.

 

[jimmy43]

Make sure you'r not running a whole bunch of sh*t in the background. Also disabling HT might help. Check all your bios settings. Make sure the ram has proper timings and things like that.

 

[3Martini]

Awsome...I thought I had the most up to date nvidia driver, but I was wrong. After updating to 6.6.8.1 my 3DMark shot up to 2919! That's a huge improvement! Man I hope they keep on releasing updates like that!

Thanks Ronin for your thread, it really helped to compare systems. I had already done so on Futuremark Orb, and my system trailed the pack. That's one of the reasons I started thinking that I had a lemon.

I am much more satisfied now. Maybe if I do OC a slight bit I can get a smidgen more.

Thanks!

 

[Concillian]

Look here and you can see that your CPU is not likely to be limiting anything. This is with an x800xt, but you can see that even the AthlonXP is giving very playable framerates when it is "limiting performance"

With the possible exception of UT2004, your CPU will not really be impacting your gaming framerates.

 

[sbuckler]

Don't put down your processor too much, it might well overclock a long way (say to 3.5) as long as your motherboard is working correctly - check the bios is the latest, remember to change the memory divider from 1:1 to something lower cause it probably won't hack such a big o/c. Leave hyperthreading on as that's the big redeeming feature of P4's and is why some in the know still buy them even through similarly priced athlons are faster (if you don't want to do two things at once anyway).