Please Help me

Hey guys and gals

I just bought a Radeon 9800 PRO (I know the new cards are out, but they are too pricy for me right now) and I'm a little paranoid that things aren't working perfectly. When going through the Benchmarks here at Toms Hardware, I'm used to seeing frame rates for the 9800PRO over 100 (at least in older games) but I'm not seeing too much of that.

I started up Return to castle wolfenstien as a first test, figuring it would be easy for my new card. I fired up FRAPS to keep an eye on my frame rate. I was a little surprised to see that the game was only around 91 frames per second. that was pretty close to what I could get on my old 9000 PRO. just to see, I tired bumping up the settings to the max resolution on my monitor, and it still was around 91 frames per second, then I tried 4xAA and 8xAF, and STILL it was around 91 frames per second.

A few other games are performing below what i would expect too. Far Cry doesn't work too well in some spots (the start of the demo level is real slow) and with all of my games, Whatever I do to the resolution though, these games run about the same. I can put on low textures or high ones, and the framerates are always the same.

I scratched my head and then wondered if I'm being held back by the rest of my system. I'm running an Athlon XP 2000+ on an MSI KT4V motherboard (VIA KT400 chipset). Is the slower processor and 266MHz Front side bus to blame for less than expected performance, or is my video card actually a little screwed up.

Any advice you can give me would be great, thanks guys!

Of course, you can blame your CPU. When they review Video cards, they usually do it with the fastest CPU available to make sure the CPU is not the bottleneck.

Read this article :
<A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/index.html" target="_new">http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/index.html</A>

If you wnat to get the most of your card, I strongly recommend you CPU upgrade, your motherboard supports Barton 3000+ with the latest BIOS. You can easily buy one with DDR333 or simply try overclocking your actual CPU. Change the multiplier in the BIOS and if necessary change your CPU voltage to 1.7/1.75 Volts. Usually, all Athlon XP chip can run at 2.0GHz minimum with no or little voltage increase.

Do you already have DDR333? If you have DDR333 you can change your FSB to 166MHz.

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This is correct. But be advised that OCing FSB, if done via BIOS software, may have undesirable effects since it results in OCing of AGP and PCI bus too (unless your BIOS allows you to lock AGP and PCI bus settings). Some hard drives may fail and some VGA cards may malfunction.

However, on some motherboards it is possible to OC the CPU while locking AGP and PCI using Jumpers. See your documentation for that.

<font color=green>"The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages." (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct)</font color=green> <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Slava on 05/10/04 09:48 AM.</EM></FONT></P>