Low Performing 7600GT

[hyperen]

Hi, today I upgraded my AGP 9800 Pro to a PCI Express 7600GT overclocked edition and there seems to be little improvement in fps in games that I have tried (HL2 Lost Coast and Just Cause).

I ran a test on pcpitstop.com and it said my card was performing at 47% as well as other people's 7600GTs.

Core 2 Duo E6300
Asrock 775 Dual VSTA
1GB DDR400
XFX 7600GT XT

I uninstalled my ATI drivers and used Driver Cleaner before trying both the newest Nvidia drivers as well as the ones that came on the disk.

Are there any other tools I can use to see if my card is underperforming compared to what it should and if it is underperforming what might be some reasons?

 

[CKXP]

LOL...pcpitstop.com, what kind of test did you run? do you have 3Dmark05? if so run that, if not download it. HL2 LC has a in-game stress test, try that...from there post your results.

 

[hyperen]

I did a full test of the system on pcpitstop and I have 3Dmark06 and on 1280x1024, no AA, I got 1020 for SM2, 1037 for SM3, 1591 for CPU and 2716 3D Marks. I will try the Lost Coast VST now.

 

[videopho]

Originally posted by: hyperen
I did a full test of the system on pcpitstop and I have 3Dmark06 and on 1280x1024, no AA, I got 1020 for SM2, 1037 for SM3, 1591 for CPU and 2716 3D Marks. I will try the Lost Coast VST now.

It looks a little low for the 3dmark06, or a tad too low for both sm2 & sm3 scores I should say since you have the c2d E6300.
My low-end system Dell dimension 4700 that has P4 3.0g scores about 2957 in 3dmark06 with the eVGA-7600GT.

Download coolbits and monitor the temps. Make sure the card is not running way too warm.
What driver are you using?

 

[hyperen]

I'm using the ones on the CD now, it says 91.31

I got 68 FPS in the Lost Coast VST with these settings.

Here

The Nvidia settings tool says I'm getting 46 degrees C idle and it goes up to 56 under load.

What concerns me is I'm getting 30 FPS on Just Cause which is just 10ish more than with my 9800Pro.

 

[videopho]

Go to nvidia and download the latest 91.47 driver from it then try to run 3dmark06 again.
The driver I'm using is from Tweaksrus or 91.92 I believe.

 

[CKXP]

i just noticed your motherboard is a Asrock 775 Dual VSTA, IIRC that board uses a PICe 4x instead of 16x, not sure if or how much a perfomance loss that could cause. maybe someone else could have more info on that.

 

[hyperen]

"Our results confirm that there is not a throughput performance penalty for using AGP over PCI Express on the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. In fact, just the opposite is true in this case as our AGP graphics cards consistently scored better than their PCI-E counterparts. This is attributable to the PCI Express Graphics slot being limited to X4 operation at the upper resolutions and the slight overhead penalty incurred due to the VIA chipset design. However, the performance of the PCI Express slot is not that bad with the worst penalty being around 5% with our video cards. (Pairing the motherboard with a top end GPU results in performance that can be up to 10% slower in certain applications than competing motherboards.) If you have either an AGP or midrange PCI Express card then this board will handle both in a more than acceptable manner with today's applications."

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2814&p=4

 

[cmrmrc]

are you sure you dont have AA or AF or something else turned on while youre gaming/benching?

 

[LLoose]

Its because you are running 4x.

 

[hyperen]

I also have noticed something else now.

I can't select 1280x1024 in some games like Battlefield 2 and Fear Extraction Point Demo anymore. The highest they will let me go is 1152x864.

 

[TAL0N]

I'm considering building a similar system, so I hope you can resove this issue.

This review @ hardwarezone noted a tendancy for the board to sometimes boot at PCIe 1x speed.

During our tests, we've also noticed that the board sometimes has a tendency to switch the graphics interface down to PCIe x1 intermittently at boot up. This results in a noticeable performance drop in graphics, but is easily remedied by re-booting your PC again. Most graphics card drivers have link width information for checking or you can always use a simple tool like CPU-Z to double check.

This overclock workbench review claims the speed difference between PCIe x4 and x16 is only 2% to 6%.

Do you have the latest Via Hyperion drivers, 4.10a I think? Also which Asrock BIOS are you running?

 

[schneiderguy]

Originally posted by: hyperen
I also have noticed something else now.

I can't select 1280x1024 in some games like Battlefield 2 and Fear Extraction Point Demo anymore. The highest they will let me go is 1152x864.

BF2 and FEAR dont natively support 1280*1024. you'll need to add "+szx 1280 + szy 1024" to your target line in your BF2 icon to get it to run at that resolution... im not sure what you have to do with FEAR.

 

[videopho]

Originally posted by: schneiderguy

Originally posted by: hyperen
I also have noticed something else now.

... im not sure what you have to do with FEAR.

This w/s tweak for FEAR worked great for me. Here is HOW

 

[akshayt]

I would expect a score or atleast 3500 or so with your system. Besides, are you having any problems with your games?

That mobo has a max of 4x PCI E as far as I know, but that shouldn't make a 53% performance hit.

 

[hyperen]

I have tried it on a clean windows installation on a spare hard disk as well as disabling the AGP driver through device manager. I have also set PCI Express as the default graphics solution in BIOS.

I have been playing Half Life 2: Episode 1 with high settings and get around 50 FPS.