ATI Radeon HD 4890 very low FPS Left 4 Dead

[alxmarcond]

Okay, so I bought this card off of Newegg expecting to be able to run pretty much everything on max settings without any problem, and thats what all of the benchmarks indicate when you go look at them. Now, heres the thing though, I am in the middle of building a system and so far all i have bought is the GPU, Case, PSU and HDD so I am still using a two year old motherboard (ASUS NARRA2 nForce) with an Athlon 64 x2 4000+.

Now my question is, does bitching card + crappy CPU = epic fail?

I am truely confused because i can run Mirrors Edge on maximum settings (no Physx obviously) no sweat, runs around 50 to 60 FPS the whole game, and I can pull crysis on all high with x4 AA and still get 20ish FPS, which is what i am getting in Left 4 Dead. A nearly six year old engine should not need the same power as, well, crysis. I run CoD 4 and 5 60 FPS stable the whole time. Could it be the combination of a nForce mobo with an ATI card? Or is it truly just the fact that my CPU has aged?

P.S. I know some people had problems with the AA in Left 4 Dead and I disabled it but i get the exact same FPS. Also, this isn't single player so its not that my computer has to control the director and all the zombies as well, online play. Its also interesting to note that Garry's Mod gets stable 60 FPS for me.

 

[shubham1401]

Check CPU bottleneck by OC'ing your CPU.If you get a boost in framerates then certainly the CPU is a bottleneck for that game.

I don't know much abt L4D but I have heard that it is a CPU intensive game.

If that doesn't works then check temperatures.

 

[alxmarcond]

my temps are fine, idles at 40, underload its around 55 to 65, how should i go about OCing my CPU? my BIOS is pretty crappy (AwardBIOS) and it doesnt have any advanced options..

 

[shubham1401]

Try AMD Overdrive.........

 

[alxmarcond]

oh wow thanks. how much higher should i clock it? just a tad each time and see what happens? I have an Antec 1200 so cooling wouldnt be too hard to compensate for.


EDIT: meh... i get an error when i start the program, "AMD OverDrive cannot detect AMD 7-series chipset on this computer." will google around to see if theres anything i can do to fix this but.. seems like ill just have to live with shitty graphics on left 4 dead until i can nab up a motherboard and a CPU.. Any suggestions as to what CPU i should get so that i can avoid this issue in the future? i plan on using crossfire for a second 4890 in the future if that changes anything.

 

[shubham1401]

2.8Ghz is what ppl have taken it to without changing the vcore.
Also See the FSB option in the bios.Increase it in small amounts.


CF down the road will need an i7 or a PII.That depends on the budget.

 

[gamerk316]

The source engine is more CPU dependent then most newer games. I'm thinking CPU bottleneck.

 

[redwine01]

cpu bottleneck hands down. L4D is much more dependent on cpu than crysis. As it is and old source engine and u know old games requires cpu more than gpu. Definately ur athlon XP is bottlenecking the game. that 4000+ is not even close to run any heavily cpu dependent programs or games. if u run strategy games like redalert3 having lots of army u will see what i mean ur pc will crash even with gtx295. So yes ur cpu is bottlenecking the card hands down. U must change ur cpu.

 

[alxmarcond]

well, the problem is that my motherboard is a stupid HP mod of ASUS NARRA2, but im going to download dosbox and hack my bios to manually unlock the options (software guy here, very obviously not a hardware ) and then ill just do a nice little OC. Thanks for all the help guys

 

[Guest]

I will have you know I ran left 4 dead on a AMD 3800+ , 2GB DDR500, ATI 4870 512 on max settings for quite some time just fine. I did have the cpu OC'd to 3.2ghz however...

After a while i got fed up with bottle necking and bought a core i7 to allow my 4870 to really shine and shine now it does.