A little trivia for y'all....

[Snowball2]

Duron 750(100mhz FSB)
Abit KT7-RAID
128 megs of Crucial ram
Voodoo 3 2000 AGP
Soundblaster Live Platinum 5.1 w/Live drive
3com ethernet card
Maxtor 20gig
2xCDROM(Generic and Yamaha CDRW)

OK well here's the trivia. Above is my new system. I have another Pentium machine also. Well I was doing a little graphics testing with the new Duron setup and I was a bit disappointed. In 3dmark 2000 I wasn't getting good scores at all compared to the 6000 I can pull with the Pentium and geforce. So I figured it was just the Voodoo. I tossed my geforce into the KT7 and fired it up. I was using the Detonator 3 drivers from nVidia and I had the most recent VIA 4-in-1 package. First test on 3dmark 2000 and there was no change at all...it was producing the same exact graphics the Voodoo was. The scores were the same(shamefully 1800 was the best I was getting).

So I searched more to try to correct the problem. I made sure all devices had no conflicts and were seated right in their slots. I made the bios revision to WW for the Abit...which has a catch 22. Make sure you have a cpu fan that reaches at least 2000 RPM or it the system won't post. Otherwise you end up like me driving to the nearest CompUSA searching frantically for a fix. Tried a few different beta drivers for the geforce. Nothing has made a difference yet.

Now I'm no genius but that usually constitutes a bottleneck somewhere in my setup. I have 2 ideas. First is the CPU. Durons are ok but hardly the graphics cruncher that the TBird is. Not a big enough pipeline to render some fast graphics. My other idea is the SB Live. I've heard random occurnces of Live!'s actually impairing the graphics capabilites of a computer. Otherwise I'm stumped. Ideas?

Spanks in advance,
Snow

[nunyadam]

did you check to see if your agp is set to 4x?

[Snowball2]

No it wasn't set to 4x. I'll try that now. I've heard that 2x and 4x is a negligible increase in graphics though. Would it really make it that bad disabled?

Spanks for the reply,
Snow

[cyclone2]

http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/tnt-geforce/index.shtml

[OuTpaTienT]

Well, I don't have much advice other than to say keep searching and keep asking. Something is definitely wrong with your system. Sure the Duron is weaker than a Tbird, but come'on it's not going to make THAT much of a difference.

My first guess would be the V3 is the bottleneck. And when you tried the Geforce did you completely remove the V3 drivers?

Just so you know how far off the mark your machine is, I have a Athlon classic with a TNT2 and get a score of 3400+.

[This message has been edited by OuTpaTienT (edited 02-25-2001).]

[Snowball2]

Yeah I first installed the normal VGA default drivers, rebooted, then shutdown. Then I installed the geforce and the drivers, rebooted, and tested. Definitely a clean install for the card. If the voodoo is the bottleneck then why is the geforce showing no improvement?

Snow



[This message has been edited by Snowball2 (edited 02-25-2001).]

[OuTpaTienT]

Again, did you remove the V3 drivers?

I've seen people claim that the V3 drivers can interfer and degrade performance of GeForce cards.

[Dputiger]

First of all, Outpatient is right. 3Dfx cards will interfere with GeForce cards (and vice-versa).

Secondly, you need to update your Via 4-in-1 drivers--make sure you are running 4.28.

Thirdly, a Duron 600 Occed to 880 and using a GeForce2 MX runs 3DMark at over 6000. I know, because I built a system at those specs less than two months ago using the ABIT KT-7 RAID.

And finally, why on earth were you using a fan with less than 2000 RPM?

[Snowball2]

It wasn't detecting my fan is what the problem was. I had to get one that gave it readings. Yuck.

OK I have the Via 4-in-1 4.28 installed. Voodoo is back in so how would I go about completely removing the geforce drivers? I've installed a million videocards and I don't think I've ever had a problem with old drivers. I think I'm just missing something obvious here as this thing isn't even close to it's potential.

Oh yeah 4x wasn't the trick. It didn't give me any extra frames or anything. AND I'm going nuts now that I know I could be pulling so much better graphics. Ugh. My search goes on. Thx everyone for the help.

Snow

[Dputiger]

Go to DOS.

C:\Windows\System

Del 3Dfx*.*

That'll kill ALL 3Dfx driver files, guaranteed.

[samwichse]

1800? Wow, something's screwy because I can get that with my Athlon classic 750 (with 2/5 speed cache) and a crappy ATI Rage 128 based video card. Mabye try hitting the side? Works for me when worse comes to worse.

[MiKe85]

no clue http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif


Mike