FAO Skii

[Zak33]

Post your FULL system spec here.....mobo, chip, heatsink, card, hdd, clock speeds, setting in BIOS etc.....the LOT

Operating system, how many drives, on what eide cables etc...

We'll get that PC going for NO MONEY

[Zak33]

another thought....if you wanna SEE what the sharpness thing is all about, I have a Rad9000 NON Pro spare....its aint fast enough really for gaming, but its got 128mb of DDR on it for moderate gaming. (its 200 core, 200DDR mem)

I'll lend ya it, if you wanna try the IMAGE quality thing.....Deckard will tell ya that Radeons are sharper than Geforces...so will I....but you gotta SEE it first hand. Its MOST noticable in Windows, not games.

Some of our more techy blokes here (Agent for example) will explain just WHY the resistors on the card make such a different to digital to analogue conversion , and some Ti4200 cards were very rough I had one.....*makes me shiver* yeuch. Some though are MUCH better for only a few pound more. Which one have YOU got?

So if ya want to borrow it, just to SEE if you can notice it, PM me

Cheers dude..right...post those specs....sorry about side tracking.

[Trash Man]

Not sure what this post is about, apart from Skii have a bit of trouble. But I can say with out doubt the my ATI card is much better in 2D than my old Ti 4400. Looks a treat on my 454 Pro in 1280X1024@120hz.

[Zak33]

Originally posted by Trash Man
Not sure what this post is about, apart from Skii have a bit of trouble. But I can say with out doubt the my ATI card is much better in 2D than my old Ti 4400. Looks a treat on my 454 Pro in 1280X1024@120hz.

He's not having trouble as such....BUT if two or three people with similar setups, have totally diff results, he then KNOWS he's lagging a bit.

If not...its new card time.

I totally concur about the 2d quality....I noticed it in seconds of going backwards...ie from a Rad8500 to a 4200....its was literally blurry along the task bar edges and around small fonts

BUT other cards are better.....Deckard has a Ti500 Geforce3....its a Creative one....more dough at the time, but SO MUCH NICER than others 'I've seen. But HE could see the Radeon effect. HOWEVER....maybe Skii is happy with what he's got other than the performance....I think he's just got a log jammed PC too many installs

[Agent]

Don't think i have that MegaPost™ (copyright Saracen) any more Zak after the nuke, wasn't expecting the forums to go bye bye otherwise i would have backed it up

Will have a look about though

[Skii]

ok m8 (Deep breath)

XP Pro
Latest Nvidia Dets
Athlon XP2200
Creative Gf4 Ti4200 64Mb
C-Media 5.1 PCI Soundcard
Elite K7S5A Mobo
512 DDR PC2100

HDD Seagate 20Gb 7200 Baraccuda (Operating system)
HDD Seagate 10Gb 7200 Baraccuda (spare storage)
Both on same IDE cable

Bios set to defaults (onboard sound + modem disabled)

[Skii]

BTW thanks for the offer Zak - I'll see if I can squeeze some more out of this set up

YGPM

[Zak33]

right.....K7S5A....used one of those.....not bad at all, capable of either DDR or SDRin seperate slots. Not lightning fast, but competant.
C Media 5.1 card...bound to use CPU cycle in games (tell me if I'm wrong, someone ) but that is NOT relevant with 3d amrk 2001 cos its not got sound on Benchmanrk test.

How old is the XP install? How full is the main disk?

Do you run games/benchies off the primary HDD or the secondary?

Have you installed something like Power Strip to try overclocking that card?

How much STUFF is on your PC? How many things run in the back ground? What does the bottom right hand corner of your desk top look like, in the task bar?

[Skii]

Well the hard disk is about half full, the XP intall being about 7 months old now. Only program Program running - AVG Antivirus,

Not overclocked at all on the GFX side - I do have 'Riva tuner ' installed somewhere though

[Zak33]

Have you tried the old Cntrl Alt Del and chosen Task Manager...and then Processes.

How many things you got running?

And do you have a firewall.......is your PC trying to access the web all the time? Mine does...poxy WinBlows XP always wants to talk to Mr Gates about stuff Im up too.

Also, AntiVirus is quite heavy on cpu cycles too.....

but.....gotta say......

I think.....scrub your spare HDD (back it up clearly) and then do an install onto it.....and see how much faster it is .

Maybe borrow a HDD from someone.....

[Zak33]

Originally posted by Skii
- I do have 'Riva tuner ' installed somewhere though

a haaaa...check it is not setting the card to the speeds of an older card.

I had it once....benchmarked SLOWER with new card.....

was using iold registry settings from another card

Anyone know what clock and mem his card should be defaulted too?

[Skii]

Gonna have to sit down on my home pc and have a look at the task manager tbh m8 - I'll get back to yah

[Agent]

Grab a copy of StartupCPL Skii - it will show you what is being loaded at startup, and with more power over what you want to do with then over MSConfig.

Also, defrag your drives.
You have 2 HD - make sure you set the swap file to be active on both of them - that will speed up anything that uses it a fair bit.
The C-media SC is all software/CPU based - so make sure you have the latest drivers for it.
The motherboard is probably the biggest bottleneck in that system. That board is generally known to be stable, but not the most speediest.
If your RAM is branded, it might help to sell your motherboard, and grab a low end NF2 based board (say the NF7 non S version) which can be found for about 60 quid in some places. IF you sell that one for about £25-30, you'd have a nice board which is much faster, somewhat better sound (wont be hugely different if not getting the S version), and good over clocker.
You could then push your RAM and CPU to its limits, gain performance from the new board and generally all around being more "nippy". Thats only an option though if your willing to get a new board.

Other than that, its just overclocking everything until you reach its limits.

[Zak33]

Agent's good.....he knows

[Skii]

Cheers Agent m8

I'll give that proggy a whirl - Yeah the motherboard isn't exactly he nippiest so that might have to be my next upgrade tbh

[Zak33]

Can you get a spare HDD and do a fresh install of XP just to see?