After much complaining and researching (not necessarily in that order...) instead of taking the 8500 back I ripped out my motherboard and plopped in a new Asus A7N266-E with nForce 420-D Chipset and a stick of Corsair DDR333. Man they sure make intense looking sticks of RAM... anyway, I got the DDR333 for 2 main reasons. First, I figure if I do it this way I will KNOW FOR CERTAIN that the memory itself can NOT be the main cause of bottleneck. And also, if I decided to eventually get some kind of KT333MB I'll already have a stick to throw into it. Anyway, i'm now running my good old 1.3Ghz Athlon at 1442Mhz. I may increase another notch but i'm going to run it like this for at least 2 weeks and see what games blow up because of it. The final result = i'm now satisfied with the Radeon 8500 considering its extremely low cost. I just ran a favorite game of mine, Rally Trophy, with everything maxed in the game. 1280x1024x32. The Radeon has 2xFSAA Turned ON, at Quality not Performance, and Anisotrophic Turned ON as well... and... ; ))) Very nice. Runs real nice and looks just amazing. I tried this before I swapped MB's and I think I was getting about 1.2 FPS, MAYBE... Worse than a slide show. That is over now. The only thing I couldn't turn on was Cubic Reflections. This caused a bit of jerkiness in places which is hard to deal with at 110Mph in a forest on a road 10feet wide. So, with a decent system and a very cost-effective video board I think this will do just fine for at least a year or so. This will make my Wife happy i'm sure. She says the PC seems to be a never ending tunnel of money. But since I 'make' money with it and provide a nice place I don't get bitched at *to* much about it ; )
The only trouble I had, which was a huge pain in the balls (just really tedious) was having to reinstall Windows 2KPro. After I installed the board and fired it up I got a BSOD saying it couldn't find the boot device. Sort of strange since it was booting from the boot device to get that far anyway. In debug mode it always reached the same spot, almost finishing its initial ASCII graphic bar at the bottom then boom, blue screen of death. After a few minutes of messing with it and figuring I could use a clean partition anyway I just blew it away and reinstalled. So now I'll blow away my PQDI of the old image and make one of this one. I know it's not related to Video but I heartily suggest using Power Quest Drive Image to anyone that tends to 'break' or otherwise screw up their OS on occasion. It is nice having a bit-for-bit image of my boot partition from lastnight sitting in a file waiting to be installed at the drop of a hat if something catastrophic occurrs.
- I have come here to kick ass and chew gum, but I broke my foot and my teeth fell out ; (
The only trouble I had, which was a huge pain in the balls (just really tedious) was having to reinstall Windows 2KPro. After I installed the board and fired it up I got a BSOD saying it couldn't find the boot device. Sort of strange since it was booting from the boot device to get that far anyway. In debug mode it always reached the same spot, almost finishing its initial ASCII graphic bar at the bottom then boom, blue screen of death. After a few minutes of messing with it and figuring I could use a clean partition anyway I just blew it away and reinstalled. So now I'll blow away my PQDI of the old image and make one of this one. I know it's not related to Video but I heartily suggest using Power Quest Drive Image to anyone that tends to 'break' or otherwise screw up their OS on occasion. It is nice having a bit-for-bit image of my boot partition from lastnight sitting in a file waiting to be installed at the drop of a hat if something catastrophic occurrs.
- I have come here to kick ass and chew gum, but I broke my foot and my teeth fell out ; (
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram