need info on settings for 9700

[franklinz]

Its the noob again, I thank you guys alot for helping me out with my last delima. But i bumped into yet another problem (sorta)
My setup is a p4 2.4 ghz, 512 pc2100, rad. 9700, soyo px4 mobo.
My games run like butter compared to my 3 year old dell with a 32mb tnt card. But while i worked at Best Buy i "acidentally" played medal of honor on one of the new alien wares we had (2.8, 512 rdram, rad 9700) Looks identical to my setup, but recently when playing unreal tournament 2003 (holy cow!!) it seems like theres some frame rate issues that occur, nothing bad but i can tell it gets into the 40-25 fps, (a rough estimate) nothing unbearable. But i thought with the 9700 it would run perfectly, until the more intensive unreal 2 comes out.

Is this just over expectations or is this how its gonna be, but alittle worste when unreal 2 and doom 3 comes out??
Ive turned down the effects on the card to performance only, nothing changed, turned it all the way up and was expecting it to run slow but it still managed to put out the same frames. Same thing with the ingame features, little improvement.
Should i have invested on an rdram mobo, or just get a gig of 3200??
I downloaded the sandra benchmark and it says for tips to turn down the colors to 16bit, and to see if theres an update for my bios, and as a noob to computers i think im going to wait until something major happens to update that forsaken thing.
thank you in advance,
franklinz
btw could it be my windows 98??
i probably look like a fool to you guys!:grinthumb

 

[Rick]

Latest drivers, latest Direct X etc... High recommended.

I don't have any hard evidence that Windows 98 performs worse than Windows XP for gaming, but you can bet that development for drivers and games favor XP right now since 98 is "old news". This could make all the difference.

RDRAM would offer little improvement (if any) over your current system. You may want to look at your motherboard and compare it to Alienware's though... This could make much difference.

Unreal Tournament 2003 is a VERY demanding game. I have to leave everything on "normal".. I can't really do high detail with decent FPS. I have an Athlon XP 1600+ / 512MB 2100DDR / ATI Radeon 7200 64mb... It might be old news compared to your system, but it still runs many games very well except for Unreal Tournament 2003.

If you want it to run nice, you might want to consider whether your CPU or your video card is the limiting factor (CPU possibly). Try turning off the more advanced features of UT2003.. Like shadowing and FSAA if it is enabled. This can amount to huge FPS boosts.

There are many things that may be affecting performance, which could all add up to a noticeable amount. You may want to change some BIOS performance settings, try replacing ACPI with APM in device manager (more info on this forum) and follow several tweak guides (many of which should be useful on techspot).

I'm sure you could achieve better performance by tweaking settings in your graphics card using a program called Radeonator. You may be able to overclock it a decent amount as well.

Also, it could be an issue with the game and your system itself. Perhaps a when I new update patch for UT2003, it will fix the performance problems you are experiencing.

 

[franklinz]

Rick you are fast! Thanks man i love this place. I think in a few years ill be giving someone else advice, soon as i get my 240z back on the road. Yeah the bios can use some work, i just set the basics down. What should i do a search on the forum under??
Bios tweaking??
thanks,
franklin

 

[Rick]

ACPI vs APM
https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2868&highlight=ACPI

Changing ACPI to APM
https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2797&highlight=ACPI

Anything else you need
https://www.techspot.com/guides.shtml

 

[Rick]

It just hit me you are using Windows 98 and not XP.. Ha! ACPI may not be much of an issue then. I think Windows 98 partiially supported ACPI.. I'm not really sure about the details though. So don't worry about the ACPI thing.

 

[franklinz]

doing some tweaking with some help from http://kpush.tripod.com/tweaking/id3.html
Im into the Registry editor, and upon opening up my HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\system\currentcontrolset\control\sessionmanager
I see that there are two session managers, one with just power under it, and the other has about 5 or 6 options, one of which HackInFiles??? Is this bad??? And are the rest of the tweaks on this site recommended??
thanks,
franklinz

 

[Rick]

I would recommend most of these tweaks, some are left a bit open to interpretation though.

224mb OR 384mb for comps with 32mb RAM
192mb OR 224mb for comps with 64mb RAM
128mb OR 160mb for comps with 128mb RAM
96mb OR 128mb for comps with 192mb RAM
96mb OR lower for comps with 256mb RAM

I feel these values are not generous enough. It would be very easy for a power user to run out of memory with such little swapfiles.

-then on the right side of ur screen, right click on the blank space and create a new "DWORD" value and give it a name of "CPUPriority" (w/o the quotation marks). Then double click on it and give it a value of 1. <this will significantly improve loading times of ur programs> Not recommended for folks using an AMD processor. You guys are free to apply this tweak with your AMD system ... the risk is yours to take!

May have unexpected results with ANY system, it is worth trying though... It won't crash your computer or anythig but might make it run funny depending on what you are using it for.

-then on the right side of ur screen, right click on the blank space and create a new "key" and give it a name of "MemoryManagement" (w/o the quotation marks). Then open ur newly created key/folder and right click again on the blank space on the right side and create a new "DWORD" and give it a name of "SecondLevelDataCache" (w/o the quotation marks). Double-click on it and give it a 'hex' value of 200 for PII and PIII comps, or 80 for CeleronA comps. <this will let ur system use all ur available cache for faster system performance>

You'll probably want to set yours to 100, since The P4 has 256kb of cache, as opposed to 512 (6th generation CPUs) or 128 (celeron). If your P4 has more L2 cache, like 512, then put this value at what is recommended for P-IIs.




Also, I highly recommend Xteq X-setup.. www.xteq.com
It's THE best Windows tweaker, which almost all and more of these tweaks built into a snazzy interface. It's fairly easy to use, explains what each options does, and does it for you at the click of a few buttons.

 

[Th3M1ghtyD8]

-then on the right side of ur screen, right click on the blank space and create a new "key" and give it a name of "MemoryManagement" (w/o the quotation marks). Then open ur newly created key/folder and right click again on the blank space on the right side and create a new "DWORD" and give it a name of "SecondLevelDataCache" (w/o the quotation marks). Double-click on it and give it a 'hex' value of 200 for PII and PIII comps, or 80 for CeleronA comps. <this will let ur system use all ur available cache for faster system performance>

Surely thats for WinXP, and it makes no difference anyway as WinXP is quite capable of detecting the cache size. I know, I looked into this for my tweaking program.

franklinz what 3dmark do you get? my 9700Pro + 2400 Athlons give my around 16500.

 

[franklinz]

tried that x-teq walk through, nada. 3/4 of the stuff i cant even change in there.
If someon has a soyo syp4x400 mobo could you please tell me where to put my settings at??
thanks,
franklin

 

[franklinz]

i just used the PC mark 2002. Is the score the total amount of points for the hdd, memory, and cpu?? In that case i got a wimpy 12297.... uggg.
And it says that my agp is 1x currently and available are 4x and 8x how do i set these??
thanks,
franklinz

 

[franklinz]

in the bios under agp & p2p bridge control
agp aperature 64m
agp driving control auto
agp fast write disabled
agp master 1ws write disabled
agp master 1ws read disabled
dbi output for agp trans disabled
what should these be set to??
thanks,
franklin

 

[Rick]

For a decent gaming benchmark, I would try Madonion's 3DMark.. It will be more useful than PC Mark 2002 in improving game speed.

AGP aperture is usually fairly irrelavant. I recommend setting this at 128 since this seems to cure odd behavior with some video cards.

AGP driving control auto affects the speed of the AGP bus. By increasing this, you also overclock your card in a way. If you set this to manual, you can play with the values. I think the default is usually something like 220 usually (This is all I have seen anyhow). You might want to try boosting it to 240 or so for a slight performance gain. If you are overclocking your system elsewhere, I would do this step last to make sure you don't have any stability problems.

agp fast write disabled should be enabled, under your discretion of course. I'd try it disabled first, then try it enabled and compare results. Theoretically, it is faster and usually is.

agp master 1ws write disabled and agp master 1ws read disabled usually improve speed. Sometimes motherboards have a wait state of 0 for the AGP bus, so this isn't always faster. But in many cases, this setting lowers latency. I recommend benchmarking this feature enabled and disabled so you can compare.

dbi output for agp trans disabled?... Not familiar with this one.

You may also want to make sure "System BIOS cacheable" is enabled under Windows 98 and disabled for Windows XP/2000. Also, enabling "Video BIOS cachable" may increase performance or lower performance depending on your current setup, so try toggling this off and on and benchmarking it in each state.

The key here is to change one option in the BIOS and run some quick benchmarks to see what works better.

When you are benchmarking, you should also make sure all other programs are CLOSED. CTRL+ALT+DEL to make sure nothing but systray and explorer and maybe Run32dll are running. End task anything else you see because it is not needed by the system in Windows 98.

 

[Rick]

Oh, and the biggest performance gains you can see will be had by overclocking your system. You can find plenty of information on doing this if you do not already know how. Just search for something like "overclocking CPU BIOS" and you should get some matches.

 

[franklinz]

tried the 3dmark (kickass benchmark!) got 13239 though.... which seems sorta low compared to the rest of yall.
Fill Rate single texturing 1504.1
Fill Rate multi texturing 2534.2
havent overclocked it yet but i just printed some papers from this site and hopefully thatll help me some.
uggg, putting the computer together was easy now on to the hard part!
thanks,
franklinz

 

[franklinz]

one other thing i opened up my case and my 9700 seems to be running warm/hot, as in cant touch the heatsink to long. is this normal???
thanks,
franklinz