AMD64 3700+ with 2x 7800GT, why doesn´t it eat the graphics?

[falsterbo]

I have:
Asus A8N-Sli Premium (the newest with cool-pipe) (Bios Rev. 1009)
AMD64 3700+, 2,2GHz, 1024Kb cache, San Diego
2x Corsair TWINX1024-4400C25 DDR550 512Mb (400MHz @ 2-2-2-5-7-9-1-2-1T @ Auto-voltage)
2x Leadtek GeForce 7800GT 256Mb in SLi (Overclocked to 475/1150MHz)
Maxtor DiamondPlus10 250Gb, 16Mb cache, (This one is for all my apps, games and Windows) [SATA2]
Do.not.know.brand 250Gb [ATA133]
Seagate 160Gb [USB2.0]
Lacie Porsche 250Gb [USB2.0]
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Elite Pro with Logitech Z-680 5.1 (1010Watts)
Do.not.know.brand DVD-play/burn
Hiper Type-R 580W with support for everything
Antec P-180 (the newest)

Screen: Samsung SyncMaster 192v, 8ms
Mouse: Logitech MX-1000
Keyboard: Logtech MX-3100

[3DMark05: 10 800p]

---------------------------------------------------------

If I play Battlefield 2 with the newest patch, then I cannot run the game at maximum settings, because it laggs like if the cpu cannot handle the game.
Why can´t I run all games at the highest settings? I thought my system could handle it, thats why I bought it...
Any solution to this?

I am wondering if the cpu ain´t good enough, because my old P4 530 3,0GHz clocked to 3,82GHz could handle almost the same settings in Battlefield 2 and that was with a Geforce FX 5950 Ultra 256Mb (from 2003)... Or have I got some wrong settings somewhere?

My second question is why I cannot overclock my computer? I can change all settings and that is a lot with the A8N-Sli Premium, but if I pull the FSB over 210MHz, then my SATA2 harddrive stops working. Is there any solution to this problem?
My memory can hanlde speeds up to 275MHz (DDR550) without any problems as long as I run it at 2.75v...

 

[PX7800GT]

I thinks its your memory , Battle Field 2 NEEDS at least 2Gb of memory too run smooth and with out ant lag !!
upgrade your system to 2Gb DDR and you will be able to play BF2 at 1600x1200+4xAA (at maximum detail ) Just Like Me !!

 

[swifty_morgan]

I know your old video card isn't trying to render what the new one is. I know the 512 cards can handle it all, at high end.

Perhaps you were over estimating what all your components could give you ?

Whats with all the harddrives ? I would have gotten a raptor to use for my main hd. 10,000 rpm does make a noticeable difference.

I never used an external hd before, but I read they are signifigantly slower than others.

Back off on your settings a little. I doubt it's going to make that much of a difference.


The mobo is fast, I used to have one.


Try 2 gigs of value select...........or 2gigs of ocz platinum......

 

[laitainion]

iirc the SATA thing is because some of the SATA ports on the nforce 4 aren't locked, so they take their speed from the system bus, and if I remember correctly the article/post said that ports 1 & 2 should be properly locked. Of course, this is just from memory from something I read 6-12 months ago and may have been for the nforce 3, but if your SATA drive isn't on ports 1/2 give it a go.

As for the BF2 isssues, have you got the latest graphics drivers? I seem to remember some bug fixes for it in the last few updates. Maybe the SLI profile for the game is incorrect, a quick way to check it is just disable SLI for a moment, you can do that now without rebooting, see if that helps, and if it does I'm sure a seach in google will turn up the correct SLI profile to use.

Hope this helps, let me know how you get on. Nice setep, should go like the wind once these issues are resolved

Edit: Just checked the motherboard spec in detail, seems you have an SiS SATA controller on there too, since it's seperate from the main nvidia MCP chip, it might be possible to run your SATA drive off it, assuming you have it enabled in the BIOS and all.

 

[falsterbo]

So you mean that I should try to put my SATA2 harddrive in the other chipset ports? Not in the first four that is controlled by the nvidia chipset.

I am also going to turn off SLI and see what it does in Battlefield 2...


Answers coming soon...

I have external harddrives, because I need to transport them from two homes with a laptop...

 

[mfurse]

Try switching cool n quiet off and testing battlefield - might be throttling the CPU unnecessarily.

Also check the temps of the two cards, they might be throttling if too hot, although this is a long shot because they don't throttle until they reach 100 degrees or summit (unlikely!).

Sounds stupid....but is SLI enabled i.e. ticked in the drivers/enabled in bios/the sli bridge is installed? Things to check is all! Not trying to insult your intelligence!

edit: you said its patched, I didnt read it!

With regard to your OC - try finding a place where you can lock the PCIe and PCI buses to 100Mhz and 33Mhz respectively, also check your chip can do it by lowering the memory speed to 100 or something ridiculously low then upping the bus, also...don't forget to drop the HTT/LDT bus multiplier to 3x as it is supposed to run @ 1000Mhz or less and can cause instability if too high...

Just set the memory and HTT multipler low whilst testing the processor out, you can tweak them up later i.e. your chip can do 240Mhz FSB, so tweak the HTT to 4x 240 = 960Mhz, and memory timings might be able to be tightened a little @ 240 since your corsair can run at 275.

Overclocking with Athlon 64's is a little different to the P4's because of the memory controller being on-chip and the HTT being a bus for component communication and not the memory.

A really good guide (OK its for DFI boards but explains ALOT) is available here: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20823

My $0.02!

Matt

 

[falsterbo]

I turned of SLI and ran Battlefield 2 at max quality @ 1280x1024 (my screen cannot do any more).
In the first minute of gaming it was impossible to shoot anyone because of the lag. But after one minute or a litte more it started to get smooth, but one small lag every 5 second or something. It´s like it needed to load graphics or something then...

So now I am going to restart my computer, turn of cool & quiet, search for something to lock PCI and then turn on SLI again and see what it does.

Does someone know the command in Battlefield 2 so that I can see my FPS?

 

[falsterbo]

I did a quick reboot and stoped into the bios settings.

I found:
PCI Express Clock - could be set to Normal or 100<MHz
PCI Clock Synchronization Mode - could be set to Auto, To CPU or 33,33MHz

I didn´t find anything with locking SATA ports, but I turned on the Silicon SATA Controller that has control over SATA ports 5,6,7 and 8.

I am going to try to put my harddrive in one of those ports and see if it is locked then... I have it in port 1 now and that is the nForce4 chips port.

What is S/W Dram over 4G Remapping and H/W Dram over 4G Remapping ? Should they be enabled or disabled?

---------

To get my graphics right I changed SLI from Auto to Dual Video Card so now it forces SLI to show up in Windows.

In Windows I turned off SLI and also changed the profile for Battlefield 2 from Quality to High Perfomance. (I cannot see any difference in the game)
In Battlefield 2 I turned on show FPS with the command|| renderer.drawfps 1 ||and it showed that with one card (no SLI) I got about 20-55 fps all the time and some drops to 10... With SLI turned on it boosted up the perfomance. I now got about 30-100 fps!!!

So for the first try on one server with everything on the max and 64 players running by I got the first place!!! That was so nice, because there were no lag at all!

----------

Back to the overclocking stuff. If i want to go from 2,2GHz (standard for my 3700+) to about 2,6-2,8GHz, what should I do? If my harddrives sata is locked...

Should I turn the CPU frequency to 237MHz and the multiplier to the maximum and turn down the HTT to 4x?
CPU Speed: 237 * 11 = 2607MHz
Ram Speed: 237 * 2 = 474MHz
HTT Speed: 237 * 4 = 948MHz

Am I thinking the right way?



EDIT: I also turned the Cool & Quiet off.

 

[luminaris]

Try relaxing the RAM timings a little and make sure the PCI-E frequency is locked at 100. Sometimes you have to take things backwards to make others move forward.

 

[CompGeek]

Well,the CPU is simply too slow for 2 7800GTs.
As for the poll question:
2x7800GTs>>> 7800GTX in the applications that support SLI.
The p4 OC to 3.8(BTW temperature? anyway cool OC) should be a BIT weaker than 3700(equivalent of 3.7 GHZ) in games and equal at other stuff.
A 5950 while old still packs quite a punch. Your older sistem is much more ballanced and will perform well in CPU and GPU or CPU only stressing games . The newer will perform a lot better in very GPU hungry games( like Fear).
Oh and do not expect AMD(3700)>> Intel(3.8) in games. A few frames per second is not what i'd call a big improvement. If that P4 CPU was stabble at that clock i'd have upgraded the GFX on that system and waited for AM2 or Conroe.

And what do you mean by maximum? 8xAA and 8Xaniso? For that you probably need at least a AMD 64 4000+(or oc at that speed)/FX-55/FX-57X2 4400/X2 4800/ FX 60/Opteron oc or an Intel 955,XE or 6/9xx OC(with good cooling). The GFX card usually bottlenecks at that kind of settings but certainly a 2 7800GT should still leave a lot of stress to the CPU.
In other words
The gfx cards SHOULD NOT bottleneck your CPU .
So stay with those gfx cards and firstly change memory.
If that doesn't improve much then you could upgrade the CPU though be mindfull that the 939 socket is getting a little oldie.

In fact,if i were you i'd stay with what i have untill Conroe arrives then upgrade both memory and CPU and change mobo.

 

[falsterbo]

Okay so what you are saying is that I need to raise my CPU to atleast 2,6GHz?

I haven´t had any AMD in my life except for the oSne I have one and my first feeling of it was bad. Many of my friends tells me to buy AMD, because they are better than Pentium. Now when I have bought myself an AMD, I can tell you that it sucks compared to my old P4 @ 3,82GHz. If the AMD gets many programs at the same time it just goes crazy... The P4 is much much better!

So know I need to clock my AMD to higher speeds because it sucks, very nice to see that when you have bought a cpu that costs a lot of money.

Temp on the P4 is idle 32-38c and pressed to the max 50-58c...

Anyone know what speeds I can go for on my AMD64 3700+, my memory can handle almost everything...

 

[CompGeek]

You should be able to get at least 200 mhz clock boost out of your CPU.
And the 3700(stock) doesn't really suck(that's coming from an Intel fan) but it can't keep up with a 3.8 ghz P4(that was OCed) in some stuff which is no surprise really.
At 2.4 Ghz it should perform at least on par with the current P4.

BTW Nice temps! I dunno what's up with the Intel heating problem. For some of us they don't overheat(don't pass 60) at all .
And i'm not saying that you need to,i'm saying that if you want all bells and whistles on at some games the CPU might slow your rig down.

 

[falsterbo]

The most funny thing is that I do not have water cooling on any of my machines...

It runs @ 3,8 on air

 

[falsterbo]

If I get my AMD64 3700+ to 2,6GHz, which Intel cpu can I compare it too then?

EDIT:
Could my solution be 2Gb ram?

 

[mfurse]

Try Tom's CPU comparison chart at: http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html to the see a 2.6Ghz Athlon64 (i.e. FX-55) against Intel's chips.

With regard to getting your chip to 2.6 - I would follow that DFI guide, the steps contained in it are summarised as:

- Lower the HTT to 3x

- Lower your RAM speed to 100Mhz

- Lock the PCIe bus to 100Mhz and PCI bus to 33Mhz

- Begin upping the FSB in small increments and running superpi 32M test and OCCT non-torture test (about 30-45 mins each), and 3Dmark 01, 03 and 05 in Windows to test each speed for basic stability (not saying its fully stable but its a good quick test) - don't worry about the speed of results...

- Keep upping until itll wont post or wont boot into windows...then drop it back a bit or begin upping the Vcore a little...not too much. If the machine won't boot it may need a cmos reset and then go to the last setting that did work...bit of a pain but my machine took about 100+ reboots to finally get my opty 170 to 2.8Ghz stable! All trial and error...

Once you find a stable frequency the processor can reach then you can start to work the memory frequency and timings up bit by bit, confident your processor is OK at that frequency - remember just cus your memory can do 275Mhz @ 2.5-4-4-8 it MAY NOT on an overclocked A64 because the memory controller is working overclocked on the chip... so it may need slacker timings or a divider to run at 2.6Ghz - at the end of the day the memory bandwidth is not such a big performance downer as a lower clock speed!

I thoroughly recommend that DFI overclocking guide though - despite you having an Asus board alot of the information contained in it will be applicable.

Good luck! [/img]

Matt

 

[falsterbo]

So my best choice is to buy more ram. The memory costs around 2500 kr (swedish money) or 312,5 US Dollar.

 

[CompGeek]

On air!? Holly wakamoly.
A 2.6 Ghz AMD will probably be the equivalent of a 3.6+-0.2 ghz Intel Chip(and considerably more in games).

While more memory does help,spending a lot of money on low latency memory is not the way to go for you because you're gonna dump that memory sooner or later,replacing it with DDR2. That's provided that you make upgrades every half year or so.

 

[harmonica]

yes you need 2GB ram,


greetz

 

[falsterbo]

I am not buying cheap shit ram, when I already have PC4400/DDR550 rams... Either no ram or two 512Mb of the same sort till.

-----------

Back to the overclocking part, I have now discovered that my harddrive will run on higher FSB, but I don´t know if it is locked or not...

I tested to pull the FSB to 210MHz, but my harddrive didn´t work then. So I pulled it back to 205MHz and it worked. Just for testing I took down the HTT to 4x, instead of 5x and pushed the FSB to 210MHz again. Now it works...
So do you think my harddrive (SATA) is locked or not? I don´t want to crash it, not because of the money (I will get a new one if it crashes for free). It´s because I don´t want to reinstall everything again!

So how much can SATA handle? Or is it locked?

EDIT:
Or maybe it cannot crash? It will only start at the right Hz?

 

[Heyyou27]

As others have said, you need more RAM. Also, did you get a good deal on those 7800GTs? Tigerdirect had some sort of bundle like that, giving a powersupply and two 7800GTs for about 600$. (Turned it down for the faster evga 7800GTs)

 

[falsterbo]

No, the harddrive didn´t work... I restarted the computer and it was gone. So now I am back to standard settings.

I tried to run the harddrive in SATA-ports 5,6,7 or 8. But all of them were locked to another chips (not nForce) and it required Raid...

So anyone have a Asus A8N-SLI Premium and a SATA harddrive and have been able to clock the cpu/motherboard/ram?

 

[falsterbo]

No I didn´t have any deal... They costed me about 340$ each.

 

[BaronMatrix]

I did a quick reboot and stoped into the bios settings.

I found:
PCI Express Clock - could be set to Normal or 100<MHz
PCI Clock Synchronization Mode - could be set to Auto, To CPU or 33,33MHz

I didn´t find anything with locking SATA ports, but I turned on the Silicon SATA Controller that has control over SATA ports 5,6,7 and 8.

I am going to try to put my harddrive in one of those ports and see if it is locked then... I have it in port 1 now and that is the nForce4 chips port.

What is S/W Dram over 4G Remapping and H/W Dram over 4G Remapping ? Should they be enabled or disabled?

---------

To get my graphics right I changed SLI from Auto to Dual Video Card so now it forces SLI to show up in Windows.

In Windows I turned off SLI and also changed the profile for Battlefield 2 from Quality to High Perfomance. (I cannot see any difference in the game)
In Battlefield 2 I turned on show FPS with the command|| renderer.drawfps 1 ||and it showed that with one card (no SLI) I got about 20-55 fps all the time and some drops to 10... With SLI turned on it boosted up the perfomance. I now got about 30-110 fps!!!

So for the first try on one server with everything on the max and 64 players running by I got the first place!!! That was so nice, because there were no lag at all!

----------

Back to the overclocking stuff. If i want to go from 2,2GHz (standard for my 3700+) to about 2,6-2,8GHz, what should I do? If my harddrives sata is locked...

Should I turn the CPU frequency to 237MHz and the multiplier to the maximum and turn down the HTT to 4x?
CPU Speed: 237 * 11 = 2607MHz
Ram Speed: 237 * 2 = 474MHz
HTT Speed: 237 * 4 = 948MHz

Am I thinking the right way?








Wehn you start BF2 do you have any other programs running? Well, you'll have the NIC, Firewall, etc. If you have any windows with Flash that's your problem (it was a problem I had). Turn off Firefox or IE with Flash.
EDIT: I also turned the Cool & Quiet off.

 

[madden95]

Eh, my suggestion would be to stop fiddling around with your other components and get some more ram, to get BF2 running well, you need to up it past 1gb.

 

[CompGeek]

Have it your way then.
2 GB memory for a memory hungry game. It should make the game runing well on max.
When in the game press Ctrl alt del and look at CPU percentage and memory usage. That should give you a clear view on what you have to upgrade.