Cant enable Fast Write

[Guest]

Hi, I have a PNY GF3 Verto AGP. It is AGP4x compatible, I have a Soyo K7V Dragon+, 256 M Corsair XMS 2700, Athlon XP1800+ oc'd to 140 MHz FSB stable. Only add-on card is a modem. Problem is, WCPUid and Sisoft Sandra 2002 say fastwrite is not enabled, but I have it enabled in the bios. Also says Sideband addressing is not enabled (not sure how to enable this). I have the latest detonator drivers, and the latest mobo drivers, and the latest chipset 4in1 drivers. Any idea what I am missing here. Dont have the GPU oc'd yet, but I can only eeke out about 85 FPS in Q3 timedemo (point release 1.31) at the lowest settings. Doesnt make much sense to me. Any help is appreciated.

TIA
Todd

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by toddbuckles on 02/27/02 00:43 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

bump


If you can't make it GOOD, Make it Look Good

 

[eden]

Fast Write and Sideband Addressing are often more troubling than helpful and decrease performance. You're better off without them on.

--
For the first time, Hookers are hooked on Phonics!!

 

[Guest]

I respectfuly disagree.

FastWrite is a function of the GPU which allows the GPU itself to communicate with the chipset/cpu rather than data being sent to the memory, and then the AGP master getting the data. A significant increase in performance can be realized by using FW.

Sideband Addressing, likewise, allows data to be transmitted seperatly from address information to and from the system memory, in a different pipeline. This allows concurrent transmit of Data and Address info, also yeilding significant performance increse.

I would agree that both can be problematic on given systems, and impossible to use on some. I do not think that is the case with my system however, I just do not know what it takes to enable them.

FW is enabled in the bios, and I am not sure how to enable SBA. Maybe they are enabled, and Sisoft Sandra and WcpuId are misrepresenting the info, but I tend to think they are correct, and I am overlooking something (probably obvious).

Thanks for the reply though, I appreciate your time, and any further help is appreciated.

TB



If you can't make it GOOD, Make it Look Good

 

[Oni]

find a good 3rd party nvidia card tweaker. My friend uses one to enable both functions, next time I see him I'll ask him which one he uses, but for the most part they are all the same.

"Why can't I be the man? I mean, I DO have harmony balls..." -epoth

 

[OldBear]

<A HREF="http://guru.realgn.com/files/" target="_new"><b>This</b></A> should work.
Gforce tweak utility.


<font color=blue><b>You get what you pay for...all advice here is free.</b></font color=blue>

 

[Kidane]

Yes, in theory, they're both better than sliced bread and they make your Q3 fps go up to a million. In practice, IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE! Just like there's really no performance gain between AGP 2x and 4x. It's all marketing and/or bragging rights. Seriously, I wouldn't worry too much about it, it really doesn't affect performance and often it causes instability.

Kidane


Det finns inget dåligt väder - bara dåliga kläder

 

[Unolocogringo]

fast writes and side band addressing is also driver dependant. It is also chipset dependant,motherboard dependant.And sometimes bios revision dependant.
Like most have said the most common gains when using these is a 2% or 3% increase in performance in the best of scenerios.
I have used sever programs to enable these for benchmarking purposes. But for every day running i find them much too unstable at stock speeds much less overclocked speeds.
Wpcredit is a chipset editor and wpcrset is a program to load these settings on startup. They are by H Oda the author of wcpuid. You will have to find what values you will need to change for your board. Wcpredit will change values in windows, run a few tests to check for stability. if you want to run the settings on startup run wpcrset from your start up files when windows boots.

I aint signing nothing!!!

 

[flamethrower205]

Don't enable either cause what will happen is 1 minute into a game, right when ur about to beat teh boss, ur comp crashes and restarts. GF3 doesn't have any of those on,b/c it causes issues, thus don't enable. Hell, I could give u a hardware mod for it too, but a freind tried it and got tons of instability.

Sig of the week.

 

[Guest]

Sorry it took so long to respond, there was a death in the family.

On the lighter side, after a ton of research and hundreds of settings, here is what Ive found works best for MY machine, not neccessarily every machine. I would like to preface with, upon upgrade of Q3 Areana from PR 1.31 to OSP 1.01, I realized a gain in FPS from around 85 to around 197 at my original settings, FSB 140, no Fast Write, no SideBand Addressing.

First, I enable both SBA and FW using a tweak utility mentioned in this thread named, oddly enough, GeforceTweakUtility. Upon Reboot, both Sandra and WCPUID showed the features enabled. Worked great, and averaged a gain of 20 FPS (over 10 demos) on Q3, to 217, about 10%. Also was able to boost 3DMark 2001 to 6389, form an original of 6168 (I think I remember that number right, but lost the results of the original, so it is an estimate) However, I noticed, as many said previously, that the system was unstable, crashing to BSOD (in 2k noless) numerous times.

My first impulse was to disable both, but then decided on more research. I found that SBA doesnt work so good on an overclocked AGP bus, because the sideband that carries the address information is a bottleneck, and info can not keep up, thus data reaches the destination prior to address information, this equals lock up, or crash. This is not a problem for mobos that can seperate the FSB from AGP bus clock settings, but on my Soyo K7SV Dragon+, I cant, so I reduced the FSB speed to 133, which set the AGP bus back to 66. Run the computer awhile, still with SBA and FW enabled, no crash, stable as a rock. The tradeoff however was 204FPS on Q3 (Avg of 10) and a paultry 6267 on 3DMark.

Sooo, what happens if I turn off SBA, leave FW on, and pump my clock back to 140 FSB. Well, this seemed to be my combo. I get a rock stable system, Avg 211 FPS on Q3 (again, 10 demos), Avg 6411 on 3DMark (that is correct, this one actually went up, though I an mot sure why, but I only ran 3 times, cuz this is a long hummin test), and am very happy.

In conclusion, I would say that SBA and FW arent the evil things some seem to think, for someone not pushing the mobo above factory clock, I think SBA will usually work fine, and FW seems great either way, although I have read on some systems FW is detrimental also. Here is where each person needs a little time and patience, and can get the best out of their systems.

Please keep in mind these are only my findings, and may not work with every system. Also, I would sincerely like to thank everyone who took time to respond to my original post. Your help was invaluable.

Sincerely
TB

If you can't make it GOOD, Make it Look Good