Problems with new rig, please help

[tottyspotter]

Hey guys, been a while since I last posted, I guess mainly because I was getting along great with my rig and hadn't change anything, until the weekend just gone.....

You can see my old system in my sig, I replaced the motherboard with a Gigabyte GA-K8NSU-939 so that I could put an Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego in there but keep the existing AGP graphics card. Simple enough you might think. However, my 3dmark05 scores are now lower (4125) than with the old CPU (5574). Oddly though, the new CPU is scoring higher than the old one in the CPU tests, so no problems there.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve this? I'd really appreciate your help, as at the moment I'm bitterly disappointed to have spent money on this upgrade only to get worse results

Many thanks in advance.

EDIT: Here's the compare URL in case there's anything in there you think would be useful: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1990308

[MONKEYMAN]

do you have all your chipset drivers installed and was it a complete fresh install of windows?

[tottyspotter]

Completely fresh install from an XP disc with SP2 slipstreamed onto it, put wireless drivers on to get on the net, proceeded to update everything else from the windows update site, then put chipset and graphics drivers on, overclocked the graphics card to it's usual setting, then benchmarked, then cried lol.

[chrisbard]

It is not the CPU that does that!!! The difference is just too big. Something went wroong with the drivers or with whatever you did with your vcard setup. Make sure you have all option for vcard enabled in bios ! Get back then and tell us what happened. BTW install the latest XG drivers they are awesome !

[tottyspotter]

I was pretty tired when I did the install, maybe I did something wrong or missed something really obvious. I'll start again from scratch this evening and let you know how I get on, I'll also double check the bios settings.

Like I say, I know it's not the CPU as that is actually scoring higher in the CPU benchmark part of the test, but I did just noticed on the compare URL above that 3dmark is not recognizing the AGP rate and it's reading the GPU clock incorrectly too, maybe that signals what kind of problem it could be?

[MONKEYMAN]

1. Uninstall your graphics driver, remove any left-overs in safe mode with drivercleaner pro, then reinstall the driver for your card again.
2. Make sure your AGP aperture is set to 256mb in your bios and that the AGP transfer rate is correct(8x).
3. Make sure you are not forcing AA or AF through the nvidia settings

[tottyspotter]

Thanks for the tips, I'll let you know how I get on this evening.

[tottyspotter]

No joy :-( Starting a reinstall now. Can't actually find the AGP aperture size anywhere in the BIOS which is a little odd. Any advice on that part?

[tottyspotter]

Just did a complete reinstall with no joy.

Just to explain exactly what I did step by step:

I installed the xp disc that has SP2 slipstreamed.
Installed linksys wireless driver.
Connected to windows update site to get all windows updates.
Installed Nforce driver from nvidia website ( nForce_5.11_win2kxp_international_whql )
Updated drivers for any hardware still showing as unknown in device manager (apart from VGA)
Installed latest XG drivers
Overclocked graphics card
Ran 3dmark05 and still had crap results :'-(

Any other advice?

[tottyspotter]

Sorry for the multiple posts, just reinstalled again using the drivers from the motherboard CD rather than the forceware drivers from the nvidia site, then I forgot to overclock the video card and after running the benchmark got about 5k on 3dmark05. Now, feeling reasonably happy with that, I overclocked the card and scored the same as before - 4100ish. I'm now confused... :-/

[tottyspotter]

Well, fiddled around some more last night and upped the AGP voltage by 0.2v and managed to get a stable overclock of 370Mhz with the memory at 1.5ghz, far below what I'd got out of it before on my DFI board. Got 5100 3dmarks. I'm sure there's something wrong here as I've done orb comparisons with equivalent rigs and even at stock graphics speed I should be getting something like 5600 3dmarks.

[tottyspotter]

Would there be a better part of the forum to post this in so that I might get a few more responses?

[chrisbard]

Random Nonsense does it 4 me ! Anyway if you OC your vcard make sure you do that in 10 Mhz steps and run 3dmark each time until you start getting negative results thus finding out what your card really likes !

[Favu]

I'm not really sure if there is anything I would say to try that you haven't yet

One thing I noticed though - did you install any windows updates before you installed your drivers? I don't know why but that could give some funky results. And are you running the latest BIOS version?

Also - you could try running the benchmarks on just the bare Windows install (with drivers, of course), without any of MS' updates.

Hope you get this sorted!

EDIT : Are you sure that nothing is overheating / clogged with dust / whatever ?

[tottyspotter]

Okay, well, couple of issues now just to clarify:

1) After a complete reinstall it's scoring 5000 now in 3dmark05 with the graphics card at stock speed.

2) Even though the card has previously been successfully clocked at 400mhz gpu and 1.1ghz mem it now doesn't get much above 360mhz / 1.04 ghz mem before the 3dmark05 score starts to go downhill.

A few observations / bits of info to sum up:

The CPU performs significantly better in the CPU part of the test than my old one did, so I believe the CPU is working correctly.

Perhaps the Gigabyte board can't supply as reliable power hence the limited overclocking of the graphics card.

Despite the lack of GPU overclocking it appears the system should be performing significantly better with 3dmark05 than it is (according to orb comparisons).

Running latest BIOS version.

AGP aperture set to 256MB and AGP 8x enabled, no problems there.

Haven't tried installing drivers first before patches, does anyone have a recommended install order for optimum performance?

System is clean and dust free.

So far installed 3 or 4 times, tried Gigabyte's driver CD on one install (which includes chipset driver), the latest nvidia nforce driver on another install, always using the latest XG drivers for the graphics card. Always the same result (though the very first time I must have missed out someting critical to only get 4100 3dmarks, not sure about that one but it's not happened since).

Really hoping to get this sorted as at the moment I feel like I've wasted money :-(

Hope you guys can help

[Favu]

Looks like you've tried almost everything :/

I would suggest making one more new install, with the drivers from the CD before any MS updates, and from your original XP disk (are you using a SP2 slipstreamed one you made yourself or an official one?) and using nVidia's drivers for your GFX.

That way you know everything should work, and there should be no conflicts. I hope.

[tottyspotter]

I'm using a disk that I've slipstreamed myself, that's one thing I'd not even considered to be honest! I'll try what you suggest; original XP CD install, Gigabyte supplied CD, official nvidia graphics driver, then see what happens! *prays to the PC gods*

Probably not going to get a chance to do this until tomorrow evening now unfortunately, really appreciating the input here though guys, many thanks.

[Favu]

No worries!

Let us know how it goes

[Staz]

Make sure "Fast Writes" are enabled.