Help! New 7800gs Agp card - waaay slower than it should be.

first thing.

did you completely clear out the old ATi drivers??

make sure you have, and use driver cleaner pro if you have to.


Does rivatuner read the same clock speeds??

out of curiosity what was your 3dmark06 and 05 scores??

cause i wanna see if my low scores were due to just fast write or a complete cpu bottleneck.


cause when i had that card if anything my in game performance fell compared with the 9800 pro

and my 3dmark05 score was about 4000.....thats right 3dmark05 not 6.

my set up was similar with a p4 2.5 ghz and 2 gigs ram. Only thing is that my old mobo did not support fast write. so just want to check if that makes a biiig difference.

i sold it before i had a chance to test it out on the new one  

then i got a x1950 pro which got about 6000 on 3dmark05. then i changed my mobo and cpu and it jumped all the way to 10121, and in game fps was fantastic on all my regular games.

Thanks for the quick reply.
RivaTuner reads core clock at 275mhz....not as bad as what 3d06 says, but still not good. 3d06 score was about 2500.

All of the ATI files are gone, but I haven't used DC pro yet. Will do that in a few minutes.

Will try to completely clear out ALL drivers if this doesn't work.

I cleaned out all of the drivers......ATI and Nvidia, and ran Driver Cleaner Pro on them. Re-installed the latest drivers.....still the same result. I guess now I'll just try to re-install windows, and see if that helps. There's no way that this card should be topping out at 30fps in WOW, at 1024 x 768, right? Surely it should perform at a higher level.

I increased the 2d clock in Riva Tuner to see if that helped at all, but it didn't. (didn't think it would, anyway)

Any other ideas? Just a bum card?

This is my 1st NVIDA card.........might be my last if I can't fix this.  

when u used driver cleaner, did you run windows in safe mode?? cause usually that gets rid of some of the more "i am not gonna leave your system" files.

The 30 fps may just be due to a fps cap in game. i dont have it myself...so i dont know if it does.

I play command and conquer3 with my x1950 pro and that has a cap at 30 fps, so no matter how high or low i put my settings, it stays at 30 fps. I'll try and see if i can find some codes to unlock the max fps and see if that works.

as for your 3dmark results....well they are quite low. Umm....do you know of anyone that has a much better cpu with a agp slot that you can try out the card in?? Cause im still pretty sure your cpu is really dragging that card down aswell.

Also now days most gpu's actualy reduce their core clock if they are not being used for 3d applications. So you ca monitor the speed with rivatuner while your on your desktop, then open your game and see if the speed changes.

apparently the cap is more around 60 but i dont have a code any way.

soooo, try reducing all your in game settings, then see what ur fps is, and see if you get the same when everythin gis maxed out or almost maxed out.

If you do, then your card is being bottlenecked by the rest of your system (specially the cpu)

Unfortunately, you're right about the cpu being the bottleneck.........I replaced the card with a x1950 Pro agp card yesterday. Got almost the same result in WOW, but my 3dmark06 score went up to 3500. On the bright side, now I'll finally upgrade the rest of my system, though I guess now I need a motherboard that has an AGP slot.

Dunno. Maybe I'll just re-sell this x1950pro once I go out and get the cpu/ram/motherboard, because I don't want to stick with AGP. I'll get reamed on the re-sell though. ; ;

Another good thing - I've already upgraded my psu to run this new agp card, so I won't have to worry about that. :wink:

Yeah, definately your CPU... I just got a EVGA AGP 7800gs and it runs WoW full settings at 1280*1024 res about 45-60 fps (most of the time it is 60 fps). I have it paired with an Athlon 64 3200, though.

Nice card though, if you get the G71 core with it. I am able to OC the core from 430 (factory oc) to 500 mhz, with absolutely no problems. It could probably go another 20 mhz, but I don't want to be greedy. It didn't start showing artifacts until around 540 mhz. At 500 mhz, the core's temp never goes about 54c. But, even at factory settings, it runs WoW higher than 30 fps. The ram oc's well, though I haven't gone to far, yet... 650 is the factory speed, I got it at 680 with no problems yet.

Good luck with the new system though.

A bit of a side question and not an issue for me anymore, but is it really the CPU that's the bottleneck or the motherboard's 400MHz FSB?

A little background: About nine months ago, I had an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ running at 2.2 GHz (socket A). I picked up the EVGA 7800GS and got absolutely horrid performance (sound familiar?). I dumped the old motherboard/CPU and upgraded to a socket 939 motherboard with 800MHz FSB and an Athlon 64 3500+ (also running at 2.2 GHz) and got the performance I was expecting.

So again, I ask: Is it the CPU or the motherboard?

-Wolf queries

I agree. Both the motherboard and the cpu are decrepit and they need to go. The high quality ram and gpu are being strangled. Time for the upgrade.......

Thanks, guys for all of your help.  

To an extent I think it was your CPU and Mobo, holding it back. I had a X800gto with an Athlon XP 2600 (266 FSb). I never really thought the performance was horrible, but when I did jump to the Athlon 64 3200, the increase in performance was noticeable. You can't really say it was one or the other... it is just the architecture of the older chips. They can't put out as much as the newer graphics cards can handle.

On a side note, if you have a 939 cpu, shouldn't your FSB (or HTT) be 1000mhz? Unless you are overclocking and lowered the multiplier...

I installed an eGeForce 7800 GS DDR3 256MB in my P4 2.4 GHz Soyo Dragon Lite. I saw frame rates up over 50 fps in Wow. I usually saw 20 to 30 fps with my eVGA 5700LE. Unfortunately, I also saw artifacts and tearing with the 7800 GS. Worst of all, however, I had freezes and lockups with GS, and sometime crashes to desktop. I bought the GS because I wanted to upgrade so that the video card was not the limiting item, and to get the advanced shaders.

If anyone can help with BIOS settings, or other adjustments that could let me use the 7800, I would love it. Otherwise, I'll have to dump it and go to a lower performing card (ouch!).

Try using VSYNC if it is off, having it off will theoretically increase your cards throughput, but will sometimes cause problems on screen.

Your freezing and lockups are likely the result of an inadequate, ancient power suppy.

I'd agree with the power supply issue. I was using a Cooler Master 450 watt PSU with mine and frequently got lock ups until I got a better PSU.

-Wolf sends