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Old January 19th 04, 08:39 AM
Darthy
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On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 19:58:25 GMT, "Paul Quin" wrote:

I've just installed my big Christmas present, a "PowerColor" 9600 Pro card.
So far I'm very impressed by it. My old card was a 32Mb GForce 2 MX...


A decent upgrade of a video card... GF2mx is a few years old...

The rest of my system consists of the following: ECS P4VXASD2+ Mobo (Via
Apollo P4X266 chipset) Intel Celeron 2.2 Ghz, 512 Mb SDRam, 30 Gb 7200RPS
HD.

My benchmarks are around 5000 for 3DMark2001SE and 2700 for 3DMark2003.


You are a victim of having an LOW-END Intel Celeron system... Someone
sold you MHZ, not performance. In the real world, your system is
pretty much nothing more than a P3-1000Mhz.

With a decent CPU (Like a $80 AMD 2500+) you're 3DMark2001 would be
around 10,000~11,000... with the same video card. He

GAME AMD 2600 Celeron 2.4 / 2.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
UT2003 61.84 36.07 / 32.12
Wolfenstein 67.9 34.2 / 31.4
Quake3 269.2 159.0 /151.5
WarCraft 3 36.43 19.74 / 13.12
SimCity 4 65.58 34.39 / 32.82
GunMetal2 Bench 32.96 27.84 / 24.84 (Is this it?)
H A L O 51.46 33.65 / 31.38
Aquamark3 bench 37.43 28.64 / 26.09
3D Studio Max 4min 7.7mins / 8.9mins (render)

* 3D Benchmarks are designed more for VIDEO CARD torture, rather than
CPU. In most cases, Game play on the Celeron is unacceptable!

As proven by people posting here (and Nvidia group) and this
preformance article below, which was done with a $400 ATI 9800Pro -
when most people who buy such machines tend to buy $100 fx5200, maybe
a 9600/5600 card. Which means you can cut these scores by half
(5600/9600) or almost 1/4 for the $100 cards.

So those playable 36fps you see on UT2003 for the Celeron2.6 drops to
around 15fps.. or worse.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=1

Because youre Mobo is SD-RAM, even if you put a REAL P4 on the system,
it would still be hampered by the memory. Unless your RAM is 512mb
SD-RAM DDR, which I think it is... up to you to confirm. If so, then
you can buy a P4 2.2Ghz CPU for about $150.

I have a question regarding 3DMark2001SE. The 2nd test (first game in
highres) seems to bring my system to it's knees. The framerates drop to
below 10 fps at times. What is it about this test that my system struggles
with? I imagine that it is either the Celeron or the slow SDRam that is
causing a bottleneck. All the other tests run with good to great
framerates, so I'm wondering what is different about this test. My MoBo
will accept DDR ram. Should that be my next upgrade?


1 - BOTH your CPU and RAM is the problem

2 - Mixed memory system boards are never the best. But DDR would
help.

3 - Replace both with an AMD setup... get more for your money. Even
today, an AMD64-3000 (64bit) costs about $225+$150 for the mobo and
it'll run circles around the $400+ P4 3.2Ghz. No matter what, you
need to AT least replace the CPU and RAM at the same time, as just
one of those items isn't enough to get any real performance out of the
system.


--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!