VERy low gf4 performance

[IVIojo]

hey ladz,
having read an earlier post about someone complaining about their geforce 4 ti 4600, cant find help anywhere but u guyz seem 2 know wot u r on about,
i have got a geforce 4 ti 4600 128mb and on my HL mods (mainly CS) my fps is unplayable, i am gettin from as low as 10 up to about 30-40 maybe 50 if i look at a wall. My comp is out of date (p4 1.3) but should still be running more than this wit that gfx card surely?!? my setup seems fine, vsync is off, have experimented wit my rates to get a good setup for my rubbish connection (64k) without it turning my fps down, i used to have a TNT2 and since i got this new gf4 i have seen not much imporvement. Any ideas? i dont know how to tweak or overclock but if u have any good links i would be more than thankful.
plz help as it rlly does suck paying £250 for a gfx card that cant even run HL very well ^^

 

[alcratin_42]

Some thoughts from a hardware perspective.

Take a look at your motherboard manual. There is typically in ASUS manuals a page that discusses which slot shares with other slots or embedded devices. This will help determine where bandwidth may be going.

PCI slots are all bound to each other at the hardware level. So the computer will use ACPI to allocate and assign IRQ's accordingly, but if you have hardware that is highbandwidth or high voltage use on the PCI bus, this could inhibit your performance.

If your computer has 5 PCI slots, counting from the far edge of the board. The slot closest to the AGP is PCI 1 and the furthest is PCI 5. If your comptuer has 3 PCI slots, all slots are bound to embedded devices, running high speed AGP card and having any card plugged into on of the 3 PCI slots will not help. Upgrading the board and the processor would be recommended for power gaming.

Typically Slots 1 and 5 are bound to the AGP slot. Sometimes Slot 1/2 and 5 or 1 and 4/5 are bound to the AGP.

If you have other cards in those slots you may want to move them or pull them and see if your FPS increases.

Be careful though, if you are running Windows XP, pulling the NIC card will result in you having to re-authorize the OS when you reinsert the card into a different slot.

The only other way to guarantee better performance is to re-install the OS in Standard PC HAL (Hit F5 at time of first boot from CD-ROM) and then assign your IRQ's in the BIOS of the MOBO so that no devices share with each other and each have their own IRQ and disable all the ports and embedded devices you don't use. Since ACPI mode in Win XP ignores BIOS IRQ assignments.

Good luck.

Q42