Geforce fx5600 is it this bad

[ptitterington]

I thought I would upgrade my daughters graphic card as we are unable to get the sims to work on her pc and this is a last resort.
I did not want to break the bank and on the face of it the GFfx5600 256mbddrAgp by inno3D seembed good enough.

Even with latest drivers It could not even run 3dmark that came with the card and games even on lower video settings have loads of pixels missing and crawl along.
I have also tried in my machine with same result.

spec. Abit KD7E latest bios 512ddram 40gig 7200maxtor Basic soundblaster, win xphome new clean install xp2200+ chip new gold 400w psu.
any advise
In the meantime have put back in GeForce 2MX card

 

[Steg]

if u are having those kind of problems in two different machines then the card has probebly got some kind of major fault and therefore it might be an idea to claim on the warrenty


Steg

 

[ptitterington]

Hey folks I see a lot have looked but not much help (Steg not included)
I have read some fairly good reports even the pre-launch hype reported by Techspot was wuite good.

I am put back my GeForce 4 ti 4200 which at the moment appears far superior to the FX 5600 I am just concerned that If I RMA I am still spending £17.50 in postage (as I am in the Channel Islands) and if the replacement is as poor I would have been better investing more £ in a better card.
Thanks

 

[Rick]

Here are two key things to try:

1.) Install the latest version of Direct X
2.) Install the latest version of the detonator drivers from www.nvidia.com. DO NOT USE THE DRIVERS THAT COME ON THE CD. They never seem to work as well...

 

[ptitterington]

Thanks Rick,
Those were the first things that I did.
If the card is faulty would it just not work.
It would appear fine if I was to just use the PC as a wordprocessor but as soon as any graphics get run there are missing pixels all over everything, dropping the settings just does not help either.

I have tried dropping the AGP from 8x to 4x with same result.

It just feels like the card is very poor. Yet some of the writeups are quite good.

 

[Rick]

Yes, the card itself COULD be faulty. I've seen a few video cards with simliar problems, including an ATI Radeon that had no 3D acceleration in ANY system we put it in at work. I tried it on Windows XP, Windows Me and 98 with different drivers and on 4 different systems. It simply did not have 3D acceleration.

So we took it back and got a replacement.. Works fine now!

 

[ptitterington]

If the card is replaced under warranty, would a fully working replacement perform as well as my Geforce 4 Ti4200 which has half the memory?

 

[Rick]

To be honest, the 4200 is faster than the 5600 in many games that I have seen benchmarks for.

But, there's a huge difference between the 4200 and 5600 at high resolution gaming. It seems the extra bandwidth and and extra memory of the 5600 really cleans up after the 4200.

I personally do not believe there is enough of a performance difference to justify replacing your 4200 with a 5600.

 

[ptitterington]

It was not for me, it was for my daughter to stop her playing on my pc.
I have requested a RMA from dabs and Ill somehow try to unlist it from Ebay, its already reached more than I paid for it with 2 days to go. Dont really want any neg feedback.

 

[SHOGUN]

re: GeForce FX5600

Hi,

I take everything back....my FX5600 has really started playing up, it's got 256mb on board, my system has 1gig DDR RAM and I am completely bamboozled as to why CoD and Halo should be running so bad. They are both really jerky even on the lowest settings....and yet worked fine for the first couple of times playing them????



Can anyone offer any advise? I have the 53.04 drivers for win98SE (which is what I am running)

.........A very angry online gamer.....

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

A very angry online gamer - does this mean your games are jerky only when you're playing online, not in single-player modes? If so, it's most likely your network connection, not the graphics card.

 

[Greeno]

check your FPS (Frames per second) if they're stable at a certain number, albeit low... check to see whether you have vsync enabled.. you maybe gaming at a high resolution, but your monitor may not be much cop

 

[SubKamran]

My advice, if you buy Nvidia, 5900+ is the way to go.

As for Shogun, if it's only online it's your network connection.

 

[SHOGUN]

Hi

Thanks, but don't really want to have to go and buy another card..this one was a gift you see....

Have problems both on and offline, or in any graphically intensive situation, the display performance continually gets worse until the monitor shuts down into standby mode.

Thought it was power supply, so changed my 300W to a 550W...no joy.

At mo. have got an Athlon XP2000+ with SIS745 chipset which only has FSB133 and AGP4X...FX5600 card supports AGP8X.

So tomorrow I take delivery of a GA-7NNXP nForce2 Ultra400 chipset MB with a AMD 2800 CPU which has FSB400 and supports AGP8x (am hoping that it needs the exra AGP buswidth when detail is high and that this is the problem.....

Does anyone think that this could be it??? any advise appreciated..

Cheers for replying guys.

 

[SHOGUN]

Haha,

Just noticed on first page of Inno3D manual that came with the card:

Apparently in the "things to do first" section, it says it needs a BIOS driver update on the host PC, if it is not to be installed in an intel based system....what a joke.

What do you guys make of this? Is there any such BIOS upodate that suddenly makes your PC recognise NVidia cards?

I've never heard of this before, and yet there it is in black and white.....and yet my old GeForce 4 MX440 worked fine (also an NVidia card )

aaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhh!

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Well, I've heard of similar problems with ATi, but that was due to motherboard manufacturers not following the AGP spec, and thus you needed to patch the mobo for the ATI card to work...

It could be some of the same here, since you're currently using an old mobo... But if/when you install the new one, there shouldn't be a need to flash the BIOS, as it should be new enough, and stick to the specs...

Or did you mean that it says to flash the BIOS of the videocard?

 

[SHOGUN]

Hi,

Thanks for replying.
Yeah, I think that it must have ben some kind of Graphics card/motherboard conflict.

I have just installed a GA-7NNXP nForce2 Ultra400 chipset motherboard with an Athlon 2800+ CPU and the problems have dissapeared.

Could it have been a problem with the AGP? the old MB only supported 4x whereas the new one supports 8x (same as the graphics card)?

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Not very likely as AGP 8x is backward compatible with 4x...

Most likely the motherboard wasn't built to spec (as was a big problem with the Radeon 95/97), in a way that the graphics card, which was in perfect condition, wouldn't work properly...

This could be rectified by either getting a new card from ATI which was more lenient towards the spec, or updating the BIOS so the motherboard did follow the spec...

 

[SHOGUN]

Is it easy to change BIOS drivers? and more importantly, is it safe ?

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Changing the BIOS (on the motherboard) can be quite easy, or somewhat advanced, but is allways dangerous...

Or, if you have a double BIOS (which is becoming more and more of a standard), it's no longer dangerous...

In most cases you download an executable from the motherboard manufacturer, copy it to a bootdisk, boot with the disk, and run the program...

Asus has a utility which allows you to flash your BIOS whilst in windows...

The danger is if you reboot the computer whilst flashing the BIOS (or there's a powerfailure)... Then the motherboard can become totally useless...
It doesn't happen often, but when it does, there is no warranty or anything to cover you.

Hope this gives you some of the answers you were looking for...

If you want to flash the BIOS on either of your motherboards, create a new thread in "cpu, chipsets and mobos" and we'll give you the help needed...