E6600 with onboard graphics - memory VERY SLOW - will new gfx card fix it?

[asdfqwertyuiop]

I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 with a RAID1 2* Western Digital 400GB raid-edition SATA drives.

It's running on an AsRock 775Twins-HDTV motherboard, which I picked to allow me to reuse my 2 * 1GB A.DATA PC3200 DDR1 CL3.0 memory (there's little performance difference between DDR and DDR2, so I saw no reason to upgrade).

My graphics is the onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset.

Under Windows XP performance wasn't really satisfactory, but I wasn't sure why.

I've just upgraded to Vista, and my performance index is:

CPU 5.3
Disk 5.4
Memory 2.3
Aero graphics 2.0
Gaming graphics 2.8

The graphics scores are about what I expected, but the memory is appalling. I tested under SiSoft Sandra, and it confirmed that my memory throughput is about half what it should be.

It suggests that using a dedicated graphics card would improve things. Does anyone think this will fix the problem? Could the 128MB of RAM shared for use by the integrated GPU really be doing that much damage?

Or is it a motherboard issue?

Generally DDR400 should be fairly competitive with a DDR2 solution, from benchmarks I've seen, so the fact I'm using DDR rather than DDR2 shouldn't make a difference. (See here http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2810&p=7)

Any suggestions on a Vista graphics card?

I just need DirectX 9 and DVI, no more, I won't be running any games at all, so no $200 graphics cards please.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Yes definitely would help. I don't care who makes the onboard video - granted some is better than others - but in general it all SUCKS. Get an external card. For what you are doing a X1300 series card would work well.

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: asdfqwertyuiop
E6600 with onboard graphics - memory VERY SLOW - will new gfx card fix it?

Yes. That's all you needed to ask . Get any graphics card at all, a GeForce 6600 or Radeon X1300 would do easily well enough for all your 2D needs.

 

[MotF Bane]

Yeah, definitely get a new card. Integrated video hurts overall system performance, and it's disgusting in games.

 

[perdomot]

Don't get anything less than a X1650PRO card. They are $83 right now at newegg and will give you plenty of performance at a great price.

 

[Madwand1]

Yes, there's a memory problem -- an Athlon XP with single-channel PC2700 here does better. But is this a problem due to on-board video? I'm not sure about that. I have a system with on-board video and PC3200 that well-exceeds that. You might want to go dumpster-diving and get a temporary old PCI video card that nobody wants to check out that hypothesis. (Computer stores that do upgrades probably throw these out regularly.)

Look at your memory configuration further. Maybe CPU-Z can tell you something.

 

[asdfqwertyuiop]

Well I got the X1650 Pro, nice card with two dvi ports, and the DVI port is definitely a lot better than the VGA port was for clarity.

But it hasn't done much for my memory performance (possibly because Asrock doesn't actually let you disable the onboard graphics) - up slightly, to 2.5, but this still seems pretty bad. I'm guessing it's an issue with using DDR RAM.

Any ideas how to tell how much this is hurting my performance?

I might throw the Asrock mboard away and get a better quality one and overclock - the Asrock overclocks very poorly - my E6600 would go to about 2.7GHz max. And for some reason the DVI port doesn't work till Windows is loaded, possibly because Asrock doesn't let you disable the onboard graphics adapter.

Any recommendations for new motherboard + RAM?

I'm looking for:

motherboard, no real features needed - just basic audio, support for RAID1 (I have 2 * 400GB SATA drives in RAID1 atm), should be stable, and decent overclocking performance: I'm not into d*ck measuring contests about squeezing out an extra 100MHz, but I want to get a good speed out of it. I would also like the option to go to quad core in the future on the same board. And no Taiwanese chipsets on board - no Via/SiS/uli crap please.
4GB DDR2 RAM - needs to obviously be overclockable, but again I don't want to pay ridiculously over the odds for it
heatsink and fan - if I'll need one other than stock?

Suggestions for good mid-range mboard and RAM?

 

[asdfqwertyuiop]

on the mboard, probably best to avoid Nvidia chipsets as well.....

 

[Roguestar]

Are you sure there's no option to change graphics adapter in the BIOS?

 

[Dutchmaster420]

i have a 7300gt pci 16x and my graphics score is only a 3.0...I mean its by no means a good card but does what i need...looking to upgrade though

and that went up .02 when i hooked up my lcd with a dvi wire