Hi all.

My system:

1.4 Althlon Tbirb. Asus A7A 133 A7A133-c VIA KT133. 256 PC133 ram. Seagate 100/ATA 30 gig 5400 rpm. 3D prophet 3 geforce 3. Generic 300 Watt PSU. Creative Vibra 128 sound card. Logitech Optical mouse. 32X sony CD rom. Veiw Sonic 17" monitor. Win 98 SE DX 8.0a. 21.81 Nvidia drivers. 4.34 VIA 4 in 1 drivers.

3D mark 2001 scores @ defult settings, AA on in video card settings, Vsinc on, 6390, No O/C and no tweaking of card. Not a bad score hey ;)

Now the problem is, my games run poorly. Q3 runs ok but will slow down in a heavy blood scene, UT runs at only 60 FPS, Max Payne runs at 80 FPS but heaps of slowdown to around 30 FPS in gun fights and if there is a lot of smoke and fog on screen, Operation flashpoint runs very nice but I get a hell of a lot of stuttering, Red faction runs smooth but again heaps of stuttering.

So, what is the go? My system is full on, I think so anyway, can you see if there is something not right with it that could cause this slow performance, my PSU ?

Also in my bios I have Pallete snoop dissabled, AGP arp @ 64, Cas# @2, Shadow is dissable and Primary VGA bios is set to AGP, AGP X4 and tried it at 2, anything else I should change?

Thank you for your time.

Re: Beast computer plays games like a Celeron, please advise.

Have you enabled caching for video etc in the bios?

Re: Beast computer plays games like a Celeron, please advise.

Darren

Have looked in the Video card settings in the game to make sure that hardware acceleration is enabled. Or that 4x AA isnt running. I have similar system cant afford a geforce 3, only Asus GF2 MX7100 @ 200/200 Athlon 1.4 / 256mb KingmaxPC133 Asus A7V133-CMaxtor 40gb ATA100 ON a 250watt PS. So I think your prob isnt the PS. Hope this helps.

Regards Mick. PS try AGP in Bios at 128, and Amd large pagefile minimum patch, get it at AMD or VIA.

Re: Beast computer plays games like a Celeron, please advise.

Hi Ya

While not a tech wizard I have never had real problems with my Geforce and Athlon combo. I run mine with default bios settings which gives very good stability and performance.

My power supply is also suspect. I run a geforce 2 200 with an athlon 800 with 384mb of RAM, a C labs 128 and a 7200rpm 20GB Westen Digital and get 4400 on 3DMark 2000 (cant remember score on 2001 maybe 2000?) This is on either 2000pro or XPpro and was only a little less on 98se. I use the latest 'detonator' drivers from nVidia. All the games you said run beautifully on this system.

When there has been problems I have either formatted and started over or deleted anything to do with graphics and loaded the display adaptor as a standard vga, rebooted and then 'made' win98 install the driver (the one that came with vid card) then installed the detonator driver over the top. One thing as well, the logitech optical mouse has caused conflicts on my friends athlon - IRQ settings if I remember correctly-related to the creative vibra....

Other than that I always load the mainboard drivers first then the graphics card and make sure bios is all at default/stable settings.

oh and I played with AGP 4x, breifly but seemed better on 2x.

cheers