CPU bottlenecking?

I managed to squeeze a few fps out by tweaking my ram with cacheman...so could this be RAM bottlenecking? My ram is ECC, but ECC is disabled.

PSU

A 200W Power Supply. I really do think that is it right there. If this was my system at home, I would replace that 200W PSU. Honestly. The Geforce 4 is a very power hungry GPU, and along with everything else in your system will use more then 200W under a heavy load, which will affect system performence, and in some cases cause the system to lock up. Again, if it was my system I would replace that 200W PSU.

Ayasha

Shaft,

Vassil just got a Ti 4200 64mb card & his #'s tripled mine. Your 4400 didn't tho'. The odd thing is his card only had 50,000 more lines than mine but yours has 124,000 more. His floodfills double yours & his random pixels (1,200) almost does, tho'.

I don't have any answers, but I do think you should try to find another computer to install the card in & run Fresh again on it. Anyone on the Dell boards running a Ti 4400 & experiencing the same problems?

MSI isn't any help? Your floodfills should be ~8.2million, not 3.7.

Hang in there bud,

Dells use different PSU connectors anyway, so it would be very expensive to replace.

If it was my video card, how are my 3DMark scores so high? They're higher than average for my computer specs. And rendering those 3D environments is more realistic than drawing what it does in the Fresh Diag tests. There are people on the Dell boards that have no problems with the power supply, as it is supposed to be very efficient. I'm on a limited budget, so I need to pinpoint the problem and take care of it. I never get system lockups, btw, even when completely maxing everything out...so my PSU can't be that bad.

get a new card

Well at this point. Take the card back in for a new one. Say it is defective. Then if the new card does this get a refund and save a little more for a 4600

That's not gonna happen. You must not have read this, but I had the problem with my Geforce 2, also.

Shaft,

I'd forgotten your GF2 was doing this also. :rolleyes: Too many 'other' things, ya know?

Something I'm not familiar with, but I read a thread mentioning it here: AGP apperture size. I don't remember anyone mentioning it in this thread & I'm not sure if you can adjust it on your machine, but I thought I'd mention it & maybe you can research it or someone may read it here & discuss it.

If I find any info on its effects & settings, I'll post here & let ya know.

I can set it to 64 and 256, but there's no difference in performance. The vid card has 128mb of ram on it, so it probably doesn't utilize much system ram.

Shaft,

It happened to me! My vid card messed up yesterday. I ran Si Sandra & it said the same things: no 3D hardware acceleration, etc.

I went to 'start' > 'run' & typed in dxdiag.exe. It ran Direct Draw but would NOT run DX! I went back into Si Sandra & opened up Direct X. It showed I had 3 monitors hooked up. 2 'default' monitors & the actual 1 monitor I have. Huh? It showed one 'default' monitor was controlled by my on-board video & one was controlled by the GF2 MX400, but w/o DX capabilities.

I right clicked on 'My Computer' > 'properties' > 'Device manager' > 'display adapters' & found my 'on-borad' chip was 'enabled'. I had disabled it in all hardware profiles & had to do it again. I then clicked on 'monitors' & found 3 there. 1 was disabled by disabling the 'on-board' chip, but I had a 'default' monitor' that shouldn't have been there. I removed it!

I rebooted the system & rechecked & the 'on-board' & the 'default' it controls were still disabled. The GF2 & the monitor I have were enabled. Good. I then ran dxdiag.exe again & couldn't run DX! Direct Draw worked fine tho'. Hmmm

I checked to make sure DX8.1 was installed (it was) & decided that maybe changing drivers might help. I had been running 29.20 but had a zip file of 28.32. It was late & I was tired so I installed 28.32 right over 29.20. No Det Destroyer, remove program or nothing. :knock:

It worked! Si Software shows 2 monitors, 'Device Manager' shows 1 disabled, dxdiag.exe runs Direct Draw & DX again!

I installed a 256 RAM chip 2 days ago & evidently it somehow (I'm thinking) caused Windows to detect another monitor & assigned the GF2 to it w/o the DX extensions. Maybe nwiz (the nView manager) got corrupted in the 29.20 driver too ??? & that is how I got all those monitors showing up. Running 'Fresh' only showed a slight 'drop' because it was running the correct card (GF2 w/DX) & monitor, but the game I tried (that is how I knew something was wrong) was on the bad 'default' monitor.

So, I'm running the 28.32 driver right now & it has allowed me to oc to 220 (29.20 'locked' @ 220) & 'Fresh' is even higher than before. I've shut down nView also since I only have 1 monitor hooked up. I ran 29.20 for 6-8weeks w/o any problems, but I'm staying w/28.32 for now.

HTH,

I have 3 default monitors showing up, but I don't have an onboard chip. I've tried multiple drivers (including the 28.32's, but now I'm on the new 29.42's), but they didn't help. I'll try disabling those default monitors to see what happens.

I disabled the monitors and noticed what seems to be a slight increase in performance. It didn't completely solve the problem, but it seems to have helped.

In order to feed your obsession with the FD benchmark , I just did it again after disabling those monitors my results went from...

Random Pixels 700 KPixels/s
Lines 438,333 Lines/s
Circles 9,244 Circles/s
Rectangles 21,035 Rectangles/s
Texts 309,553 Chars/s
FloodFills 3,775,840 KPixels/s
Draw 34,678 KPixels/s

...to...

Benchmark Result
Random Pixels 533 KPixels/s
Lines 167,333 Lines/s
Circles 16,051 Circles/s
Rectangles 79,346 Rectangles/s
Texts 707,363 Chars/s
FloodFills 6,692,160 KPixels/s
Draw 38,092 KPixels/s

Shaft,

Hmmm. That is some big changes. I'm seeing rectangles @ 4x but lines dropping 2/3's. Floodfills are way up too. Can you plz run FD twice in a row? Sometimes I have noticed my card 'starts' @ 366pixels on the 1st run, but the 2 time thru it goes to 433.

If we can get the Random & the Lines back to where they were ...

Try a game, run FD twice, make sure hardware acceleration is still at full, run Cacheman & please have some more good news.

What are your thoughts from what you are actually seeing? What has made the biggest difference?

HTH & thanks for the info,

I did run it twice in a row with the same results. The biggest difference was in RTCW where I gained up to 20 fps on one of the open area maps. Max Payne gained a little less than 5 fps.

Shaft,

Well now! 20fps isn't anything to sneeze at, even 5 on Payne is better.

I'm glad you're seeing improvements, now if we can get the 'Random' up I think the lines will follow. Are you up to a *little* oc 'test' to see if the #'s change? I'd like you to DL 'Riva Tuner' from www.guru3d.com & 'see' what the card is presently clocked at. No ocing 'til we find that out.

I realize you have a new card & don't want to oc it, but if we do a *slight* increase & the #'s jump ...

Slow but sure, we're getting there.

It's already overclocked to 300/650 from 275/550, so I don't want to o/c it any more.

Shaft,

Hmmm. That's a 9% oc on the core, which I agree is safe & should give some improvement.

I do think the 550 to 650 (18%) is a tad on the high side tho'. Try bringing it down & run FD between the settings 'til the 'random' starts to improve. I *think* if you slowly 'tweak' w/Riva your #'s will get better. I know mine have.

Enjoy,

My vid card is the coolest running 4400.

The ram o/c is perfectly safe. The ram used on the card is some of the coolest around, and many websites have done extensive benchmarking with it at 680. I tried using the default settings, but the FD benches didn't go up (they actually went down, not suprisingly), so I returned them to the oc'd settings.

I'm either going to try upgrading my PSU to a 400 Watt ATX using an adapter so it'll work on my Dell mobo, or the 1.4ghz Tualatin Celeron using a Powerleap adapter...or both. I'll get to the bottom of this sooner or later!

The new 1.4ghz Tualatin Celeron is now in and my problem has been significantly reduced. I no longer drop below 30fps, so my games are almost always smooth. There seems to be some bottlenecking left from my aging chipset, but nothing drastic. The upgrade has definitely extended my computer's lifespan until I get the money to get a good AMD system (maybe next year).

I have the same problem, I upgraded to a PNY Geforce 4 TI 4400 from a geforce 2 gts and the performance stayed the same. Lots of people are having this problem(CHECK THE LINK BELOW). I upgraded to a 350W PSU from a 200W Dell PSU, I also upgraded my MOBO.

http://discuss.madonion.com/forum/s...2&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=1&vc=1

I hope someone here can help!!!!

Here are my specs.

I bought the system from Dell.

PIII 1000 Mhz
Intel D815EEA------> Upgraded to an Abit ST6
512 MB PC133
40 GB Western Digital HD
PNY Verto Geforce 4 TI4400
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
3COM 3C905C-TX
Mitshubishi Diamond Plus 72 17' Monitor
Samsung DVD-ROM SD-612
SONY CD-RW CRX140E
200W Dell PSU------> Upgraded to a 350W PSU
Windows XP Home Edition