Terrible Frame Rates - NVIDIA 7600 GT AGP 8X

[Vlad788]

Hello Everyone,

I've had a 7600 GT AGP graphics card for nearly a year now, I have gotten it last December. But anyway since then I have never been able to get the frame rates i thought I would've gotten with the card. When I play games like Counter Strike Source or Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Half Life 2, etc, I get at most only 50 FPS. (When I'm lucky) Most of the time it lags and drops down to 20 or even 10 FPS, which stinks. I've spent so much money on upgrading several parts on my computer to no avail. The frame rate issue is really terrible because I talk to my peers who play the same games I do about it and they say that their machines are doing great with lower end cards installed. And some of them have lower end systems too! So thats really frustrating to hear. So I really don't understand why this is happening. Again it is an AGP graphics card on an AGP system, I know that AGP is starting to phase out, but I'm a poor college student without a job and I really cant' afford to upgrade my computer right now. So is there any hope at all? Some people have suggested reformatting, but I don't think that would solve a thing, since I've always had the problem from day one. Here are my detailed system specifications:

Processor
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Socket 478 Prescott CPU w/HT Technology

Graphics Card
XFX NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB

Motherboard
SOYO P4RC350

Power Supply
Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600W SLI Ready ATX12V v2.01 Power Supply 115/230V
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817182032

System RAM
Corsair 2GB DDR SDRAM

Any suggestions on what to do? Thank You.

 

[Vlad788]

I've noticed today that when I play the game one of the Processor Cores runs at 100% whilst the other core remains low at 20%. So I'm wondering if that could perhaps be an issue? Maybe its bottlenecking the card? But why would a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 Socket 478 bottleneck that card?

 

[pcnthuziast]

A friend of mine told me that the transition from socket 478 to 775 was very noticable which probably doesn't help you much, but may at least alleviate some of your frustration. Also it has been my expirience that some people exaggerate about their framerates or just try to guess them without actually using a utility or console command to monitor them. Do these peers of yours run the games at the same settings and resolution? They may be running at lower resolutions and settings. This may be a redundant question, but have you checked thouroghly for viruses/spyware? Are all of your drivers up to date and have you installed all the latest patches for the games? These things can factor into performance heavily.

BTW: When you can afford to upgrade, I can recommend a path that will only cost you about $200us and would net you a serious performance boost!

Good luck!!!

 

[Juanra]

If that is the case, use the task manager to fix CPU affinity on the COH process. Installing new drivers is the only thing I can think off.

 

[bushwhacker]

Well, it is AGP... what do you expect?



Plus, the bottleneck happens when your card requires the extra power plugged in.

It happens to my Geforce 6600GT AGP.

 

[Stick'o ram]

Try to see if you have AGP read & write enabled, as well as sideband also enabled, you should be able to look it up in the BIOs or with Nvidia's equivalent of a Control Center...

 

[bushwhacker]

Try to see if you have AGP read & write enabled, as well as sideband also enabled, you should be able to look it up in the BIOs or with Nvidia's equivalent of a Control Center...

It has been a while since i heard about that.

Make sure you look at AGP Aparture size also.

Set it by the amount of your V-Memory.

 

[Stick'o ram]

Yea, tell me about it :haha:

I'm still using a AGP 8x card, Im old school

 

[Vlad788]

Wow thanks for the fast replies everyone. Unfortunately another thing has happened. In effort to clean out my heatsink, one of the legs of the motherboard's heatsink bracket had broken. So in attempt to solve a problem, I created two new problems. So I try to place it back even though the leg is broken, and the computer wouldn't boot at all anymore.

So after a few tests, I figured that since one of the legs is broken in the motherboard bracket, the heatsink is not sitting correctly on the processor and thus in a way is kinda "lifting" the processor out of place. So what I did was I added some pressure to the heatsink to help put it in place and balance everything out. And as a result the computer did boot up! But then the unthinkable happened, for some reason the Power Supply blew. No idea, how that happened. So I'm pretty much stuck without a computer heatsink and processor for some time to come. So what I did though to quickly see if anything else was damaged, was

I had installed my older power supply, and the motherboard and the other components did turn on, the only thing I don't know, is the CPU as it is not sitting correctly in its socket, due to the heatsink in-balance due to the broken bracket leg. Basically the inbalanced heatsink is sorta lifting up the Processor or something along those lines. Anyway I really hope everything works again after I get the new power supply and heatsink. If not, then the Power Supply will basically serve as one of the first stepping stones to ultimately building a new computer.

So two new problems are now created at the price of one, lol.

But thanks anyway guys for all of your help.

-Vlad