Slow performance with 6600gt

Hello, recently, i upgraded from my old geforce4 ti 4200 to a geforce 6600gt. For some reason. Most games (especially UT2004) perform worse then what they did with my ti and sometimes they even ran better on my old pentium 3 and gf4 mx4000! I am also having problems installing stuff like COD4 Demo and NFS Pro Street Demo. Everytime i try and run the installer, it extracts most of the files, but then says that one of the files is corrupt and the installation fails. Ive tried downloading the demos from numerous sites with no success. They extracted fine with my ti 4200 (i couldnt actually play the games with the ti obviously). Im wondering if the problem is with my power supply. It is a Thermaltake XP-550 430 watt. I read somewhere that this power supply isnt actually a 430. Apparently its a 300 watt that just says 430 watt. Could this be a problem with my power supply? Or would it be something else? Ive tried different video drivers and chipset drivers with no success.

My System Specs (Just incase you need to know)

Motherboard: Asus P4S133 (SiS 645 Chipset)
Ram: 512MB PC133 SDRAM
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 1.6Ghz (Overclocked to 2.32Ghz)
Power Supply: Thermaltake XP-550 430 watt
Video Card: Sparkle Nvidia GeForce 6600GT AGP 128MB
Hard Drive: 20GB IDE (Upgrading to a 320GB soon )
Case: NZXT Alpha with side window

Also, I ran 3dmark 2001 on the system and i only got 8500 marks. Shouldnt i be getting close to 20k? My system has also locked up a few times.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Nissanman

Try reverting back to the CPU's nominal speeds and see how the performance changes

Tried that, didnt help, it just made it run even slower. The card is not overheating at all. It sits round 60 - 65 degrees under load which im sure is normal for a 6600gt.

plus with my ti 4200, i got a score of about 7700 in 3dmark 2001. So installing this 6600GT didnt really give a me a good performance boost. But it should have. Im still wondering if my power suplly is to blame?

in terms of the 3dmark score you have an average pc dated for the year 2001. Your 3D mark score isnt going to go up much just because you upgraded to a 6600GT. With my setup I'm playing CoD4 max setting at about 65fps.

I would imagine you may get around 5ish frame rates even on low settings when s**t hits the fan in an open field on that game.

My suggestion is to take that 80 bucks you're going to spend on that HD and put it towards a pci E mother board.

that still doesnt explain why this video card is running so slow. My friend has a radeon 9600xt which is quite a bit slower then the 6600gt and not once does his frame rathes ever drop bellow 15. On medium graphics.

I just dont understand why this video card is running so annoyingly slow. I thought it was the power supply but then i read in a forum somewhere where a guy with a 7900gt was using this same power supply with no problems. Could it have something to do with the SiS chipset i have?

I know this card isnt great, but it should have walked all over my ti. In one level on ut2004, i only get about 15 frames. The ti 4200 i think got close to twice that.

It could possibly be chipset drivers. But you have to consider a few things like a cpu bottle necking top performance of a card. More than likely not your issue, but it happens. Since you've been able to test the mobo with an older card that actually works better we know its a card issue maybe pertaining to the chipset or the card itself. I'm curious. Going to look into it on the net.

This might sound daft, but have you been to the NVidia website and updated your driver? Only the one supplied with the card will be out of date even though you have just bought it.

Yes, currently i am using the 81.98 drivers. but i have tried many. Including the latest driver. I am not one to use the drivers that come with the card as they are almost always very old. However, i have just reinstalled windows as i have now got my new 320gb hard drive. So i will see how games run tonight. I bet they run the same though.

Not true. COD4 on my old PC runs perfectly at medium detail settings and on low, it runs at >60FPS most of the time. That PC has a 6600 (non-GT) and a Pentium 4 1.7GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM.

There's something wrong with your 6600GT I think.

Its a budget card,, meaning for desktop consumers hm,,

well, i finally got cod4 demo installed and working. It was running fine yesterday, at a nice playable framerate. But after turning my pc on this morning it barely ran at 1 frame. Totally unplayable. Im really starting to get f***** off with it now. But im still wondering if it is the power supply. Sorry bout the language by the way. Its just this comp is really annoying me.

im ganna take it round to my mates in a couple of weeks to test his power supply in it (he has a proper gaming power supply, not a cheap generic thing like me) so i'll see what happens.

Ok, i tried my mates power supply in my computer with no change. But i also tried installing the card in his computer and it ran flawlessly like a 6600gt should. It was so much faster then his radeon in all games (including cod4) so i know now that there isnt something wrong with the video card. Im wondering if the problem could be caused by my cpu? Could my cpu be too slow? Being that its a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 overclocked to 2.4Ghz, it seems like it could be the problem.

Ive got a LAN in a couple of weeks so id really like to get this problem sorted before then

Btw, My friends cpu is a pentium 4 (prescott) 3Ghz overclocked to 3.6ghz.

Moderator edit: there have been 2 previous instances of double posting. Use the edit button instead of replying to yourself if you are not bumping the thread (in which case please wait at least 24 hours before doing so).

Try downloading GPU-Z and check what speed your AGP slot is running at. That seems like the more likely problem to me from what you've stated so far.

My agp slot is running at 4x which is the fastest it goes on my board. I dont really see how this is the problem as this is a 4x/8x card and theres really no performance difference between 4x and 8x. Only about 5 frames.

Im still thinking that the cpu is the issue here. Is it possible that my cpu is too slow for my video card?

Nah, I didn't mean that, sometimes the AGP slot gets clocked down to 2x for some cards, and that severely limits the performance.

As for your CPU, I doubt it. My old PC has a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 and the 6600 on it runs fine. But if you can, replace it with your friend's CPU and see if it helps.

Using my friends cpu isnt possible as my motherboard cannot support it, even with the latest bios. I might look around for a 2.4ghz cpu with the 400mhz bus and overclock that. That is the fastest my motherboard will support with my current bios revision.

I notice that your computer is running SD-RAM for memory.

I am thinking the 6600GT is running faster on your friend's computer because of the Prescott and the DDR memory. SD-RAM is a lot slower than DDR-RAM. Older Pentium IV motherboards used SD-RAM and Rambus Ram. Newer Pentium IV motherboards used DDR memory and perhaps DDR2 memory. In synthetic tests like 3DMark, having faster memory increases your score by a lot.

Perhaps your CPU and memory are bottlenecks for your computer.

To use the faster DDR memory, it would require an upgrade of at least the motherboard (i.e. P865 or P875). The CPU might have to upgraded to a newer Northwood "C" stepping or Prescott. That might cost a lot of money to upgrade for older tech.

I was thinking it was driver issues at first too, but the OP said he reinstalled his OS on a new hard drive. The OP was still getting the same problem. Perhaps the problem is just hardware incompatibility between the Asus P4S133 and the 6600GT.

ok, its probably more then likely that its my cpu and ram thats causing the card to run slow. But the slowness isnt the only problem i have with this card. I am also having a hard time extracting some files as i said at the start of this thread. What could be causing that?. Those very same files extracted fine with my ti so they arnt corrupt.