Hi Folks!

Seeing as I got a lot of helpful replies last time I posted, I thought I'd try you out on this one!

My ECS K7VZA mobo is supposed to support fsb of 200/266mhz.
My Athlon 1.2 (I think) runs at 133mhz (yes?).
There are some great games coming that I want to have a bit more performance for.
My Graphics card is a Hercules GeForce3 64mb DDR, and I have 512 mb Crucial cas2 pc133 ram.

I dont want to buy a new graphics card, as I think the GF3 is good enough, but is it possible to get more out of the system by doing something about either the fsb of my mobo, or changing the settings of my Athlon?

Failing that, will changing mobo and/or Ram make much difference?

FYI, Any hardware tweaks/swaps, I'd get the guy that built my system to do

Thanks for looking...

This is correct Athlons run a Double Data Rate Bus i.e. 133x2 = 266Mhz. This is independant from the Memory Bus which runs at either 133Mhz (SDRAM) or 266Mhz (DDR-SDRAM).

Without overclocking your processor, have a look at your BIOS settings. For example AGP 4X Mode should be enabled, your Crucial Cas2 RAM also needs to be set at CAS2 in the BIOS if it isn't already.

You should also try my tweaking program, which lets you enable the Coolbits tweaking tab in the NVIDIA drivers (So you can Overclock your Graphics Card), and allows you to enable AGP Fast Writes.

You should run 3DMark2001SE http://www.madonion.com between tweaks to see the effect of your tweaks.

Cheers, Th3M1ghtyD8!

All these are done, and the cpu is running at 1.27 by playing with the core voltage settings.
I will only overclock the graphics card as a last resort, though to be honest my system currently handles everything thrown at it ok; maybe I'm worrying too much. The games I'm hoping to run in super-smooth-high-detail are Splinter Cell, Combat Flight Simulator 3, and many more probably!

Current 3dmark 2001 score: 5702

Re: Re: fsb/ram/mobo-performance?

I'm not sure that that's true, you know. A Duron only supports 200 MHz bus and if paired with PC2100 DDR-SDRAM I am sure that it only runs them at PC1600. Apologies if I am wrong, but I don't believe that the bus and the memory can be run asynchronously...

Depends on the motherboard. Some have the option. On most of the duron/sdram systems I have built, the duron runs at a 200mhz DDR bus, whilst i could set the ram to run asynchronously at 133Mhz. I Believe the same is probably true of most newer motherboards, especially performance ones.

I think the problem is probably the RAM bandwidth/ CPU speed, which is limiting your graphics card. My system seems to suffer from this as well (Dual P3s@1Ghz/2GbPC133/GF3Ti200 = approx 5000 marks), whereas most DDR systems I've seen with GF3s score around 8000. If your motherboard supports running your RAM at higher speeds i.e. >133, then you could try that and reduce the CAS latency to 2.5 or 3 which might give you a boost (but it might not). I don't know whether faster RAM with a high CAS latency is better than slower RAM with low CAS latency.

Ok, slight change of approach here...

This weekend I'm getting a new GeForce4 ti4200 64 DDR (PNY Verto) board fitted I know I said that was a last resort, but it was a bargain!!

Now I'm thinking xpAthlons are getting cheaper and cheaper, and I'm not sure what speed my mobo will support yet, but ignoring that, are there any xpAthlons that seem to work better or worse than others (ignoring the faster-is-better for the moment)?

You are still limited by that PC133 SDRAM. you may be able to improve some areas with the new Vid card or a new CPU but overall performance will be limited because of that RAM. Some things will be faster but others aren't going to change until you upgrade the mobo.

Motherboards have supported seperate CPU and memory buses for a long, long time. In the mid socket 7 era, especially when 100mhz FSB was first being released, you could get many motherboards that supported having the CPU bus at 100mhz, and the memory bus at 66mhz 75, 83, 95, or vice versa. It helped a lot when SDRAM was really... ... I will just say, "lack of quality" for lack of a better term.