Extreme low FPS in Oblivion.

Those aren't you're specs at all!!

Is that a socket 478 or 775 P4? Is it a Northwood or Prescott core?
Is that DDR or DDR2 RAM. What is the CAS timing of this (quite critical on Intel platforms)?
Is that GeForce 7600GS AGP or PCIe, 256Mb or 512Mb?

Let me guess have an educated guess:
P4 CPU socket 478, Northwood core, 512Kbytes cache
DDR Ram, 2x 512Mb CAS2.5
7600GS, 256Mb, AGP
Do I win a prize?

Maybe you could confirm these 'real' specs for your system first!!

Thanks

Bob

I played on a system nearly identical to the low end one you described. I was able to run oblivion at 1024x768 at fairly high settings and got a consistent 30 fps. Chronologic, you could be experiencing a driver installation issue. Is performance in windows slow? Have games always run this poorly on your setup? You should definitely be getting better performance. Overheating is always a potential issue as well.

Hi

Sorry I am suffering a bit from sleep deprivation!!

Uhmm CPUz (Google on it) is a simple utility that shows what CPU stepping, frequency, cache you have; motherboard model/manufacturer and data on RAM manufacturer and detailed timings. It would be useful to see the output from this!!

Maybe you could also run the Windows XP diagnostic tool for DirectX issues: dxdiag. Just type in dxdiag
at the RUN prompt on the START menu. It will run through and test for conflicts between drivers and test the 3D drawing API's for DX7, DX8 and DX9...

What nForce drivers version are you using - perhaps this could be an issue? Especially so if you system is stable for CPU intensive tasks but slow with games!!

Bob

Hi Chronlogic,

I see I was on the nose with your system specs (heh heh).

SIS and VIA Chipsets are generally the budget end of the market. That is the BUDGET end!! I would personally only buy Intel (CPU) boards with Nvidia or Intel chipsets...

Your FSB is only 400Mhz so RAM isn't operating in dual channel mode. The P4 suffers a lot with RAM latency as the pipeline in the Northwood core is like 28 stages or so!! I used to run a Northwood and they are OK but only at 800Mhz FSB (dual-channel 400FSB 1:1 memory).
The board only supports 4x AGP which is going to cause you all kinds of issues as I am sure that graphics card would only work properly in an 8x slot (isn't the 7600GS a bridged PCIe board??)


I would loose the lot and get a budget new build system (1.6Ghz Core-2, 2x1024Mb CAS-4 DDR2 800+ RAM, older P31 board and an entry level 512Mb card)!! Maybe Santa could help out :;-):
A bad motherboard old motherboard is going to remain bad whatever you throw at the system!! (BTW It is really worth spending extra and getting a MB with solid capacitors as these age much more slowly than regular Electrolytic capacitors.)

Just my $0.02!!

Bob

Yeh,

My only point was really the system so old it would be hard to find a decent board. I think you would be struggling on E-bay to find a good socket 478 board for the right price (i.e. cheaper than upgrading to a much better system).

The alternative is an AMD socket 939 upgrade where you take your existing RAM with you and buy say a AMD Athlon XP 3800+ (Ebuyer.com have them cheap) and a decent socket 939 on Ebay. I am doing this for a flatmate who has good (CAS2.0) DDR Corsair RAM. I got him a DFI board NForce 4 board + Athlon 64 x2 3800+ CPU. Not a bad deal for about 80 GBP. Mind you RAM prices are so depressed just now that its probably not worth the bother for your value RAM!!

Also the CPU architecture of the Northwood is really crap compared to the Core-2 architecture which has its neat multiway issue (Superscalar) versus a really deep pipeline (Superpipelining) that gives high clocks but also high latency for on-die L1 Cache misses and instruction flow changes (branch instructions).

I am fobbing off my old P4 Prescott system to my sister... It does have one advantage in the Winter it heats your bedroom up to about 100C!! Ahhh probably one the worst processors Intel ever produced!!

For new systems Gigabyte, ASUS (not ASUSTEK), DFI all do good stable motherboards. You really gets what you pays for with the ol' MB. You will find chip boards that the BIOS won't even let you OC the CPU/FSB!!#

Bob

You should definitely be getting better frames. I had a Northwood @ 2.4Ghz with 1gb of ddr333 and a Radeon 9800 128mb and it was running great on medium-high settings at 1024x768