Some kind of bottleneck

[nix0r21212]

I recently got a GeForce 6800 GT from a co-worker, and i watched the card work very smoothly on his computer, so I'm confident the issue is not with the card. The weird thing is that most games for me will lag up no matter if im on the highest resolution or the lowest. A good example of this would be doom 3, where I get about 55 frames per sec avg whether im running at 640x480 or 1280x1024, low or high detail. This also happened with Sims 2, which has system requirements much lower than my specs. Here's what I'm running:

512 MB of DDR400 corsair memory x2
Asus P4P800 Deluxe mobo (800 MHz FSB)
SATA HDD 80 GB
P4 2.8 GHz....god whats the name, not Prescott, but the other one....christ, I can't remember.

If the problem seems to be independent of the card does that probably mean its a processor issue? Does anyone think that me reseating the processor might help?

Can someone point me in the direction of a good system diag tool, or specifically a motherboard or processor diag tool?


If you've read all the way to here, thanks a lot.

 

[Appledrop]

2.8c, or northwood. *edit* i am not sayin this is the weakest link (although it may well be), just answering your first (maybe rhetorical!) question....zzzz ill su now

 

[sbuckler]

I have a p4p800 deluxe, 3.2 p4c, 2 * 512 crucial DDR400, 6800 GT.
Whole system should work fine.
Reseating the processor will not help, if that was loose it would just crash. The processor will either work, or crash, it won't ever misteriously slow down causing lag.

Could be a problem with windows and other programmes running on your system - what other stuff is running in the background? Shut down all uncessary stuff. Run up msconfig and try closing down anything that looks dodgy. Check you don't have a virus.

Also *smaller* chance it could be a problem with the motherboard. Have you upgraded the motherboard bios to the latest version?
Have you checked motherboard settings - i.e. you are using agp * 8, 256mb graphics. Turn off fancy turbo memory options.

 

[George Powell]

Looks to me like you answered your own question - CPU bottleneck.

It just hasn't been able to give the graphics card the data it wants.

The 6800GT is a very fast card, but only as quick as the speed at which it recieves data.

Personally I wouldn't worry too much about those figures.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

may have virus' / adware/ spyware eating up cpu cycles

an u only do 55fps in doom3 at any res coz u are CPU limited and not grpahics limited ..... that is the general problem

but give your system a virus scan and get spy bot search n destroy or something

see whats running in task manager, but i would of thought u have no problem with any games weith that rig

 

[nix0r21212]

yeah it's a 2.8 C. Another interesting thing is that last night I OCed the processor to 3 ghz and the card to 400/1100 (up from 370/1100 stock) and then benchmarked it again with 3dmark2001 and actually got LESS 3d marks than before. Also, there's really nothing running in the background, and I don't have any viruses. I work as a service tech down at the Best Buy so im much more familiar with spyware and how to remove it than I'd like to be. Another thing I think might be an issue (but I don't know how this affects system performance) is that I only have a 300W power supply (the minimum required by the GeForce) and it seems logical that if something wasn't getting enough power it would hinder it. Any more thoughts based on this?

 

[nix0r21212]

oh oh one more thing. I noticed that whenever I'm scrolling down a website, something in the computer, either the GPU or the CPU makes a little ticking noise everytime I scroll down one line, one tick for every scroll. also I can hear this noise only it's interval is much shorter, each time I'm playing a game. It's almost as if there is one tick-noise for each frame that the card renders, but the sound kind of sounds like it's coming from the processor, although the two are so close its hard to tell for sure. has anyone else heard this kind of thing with the GeForce 6800 GT?

 

[nix0r21212]

Also *smaller* chance it could be a problem with the motherboard. Have you upgraded the motherboard bios to the latest version?
Have you checked motherboard settings - i.e. you are using agp * 8, 256mb graphics. Turn off fancy turbo memory options.

Interestingly enough I tried recently to flash my BIOS using a bootable CDROM that I made with Nero and had some problems. Are you running the newest version? Does it say they were created on 6-23-2004 for you? Cuz I'm pretty sure they were actually created on like 8-7-04, or so Asus wesbite says. The trouble I've had with the BIOS does make me suspect that there could be something wrong with the board.

 

[stevty2889]

Try setting your AGP aperature lower to 64mb or 128mb if you haven't already. Also try turning off AGP fast writes. Unless your PSU is a name brand, it might be a bit weak for what your running.

 

[billyjak]

I would use drive cleaner and delete all traces of your drivers and reinstall them.
I had to do it on my system becauses traces of the old drivers were lingering around.

 

[LanFear]

I have a 6800 GT also, eVGA. Had the same thing happen except i was running aquamark 3D. Once i enabled coolbits and oc'ed it, my aquamark score went down. It is widely known on the net and gaming sites that Doom 3 does not like overclocked cards, so i'd leave it stock. By the way, 55fps on high detail is fine, try 1600x1200 on high quality and see what you get. Run timedemo1 a second time so it's cached. Doom 3 is locked at 60fps anyway, so 55fps is just fine

 

[lost0822]

my old rig was a 2.8 Northwood and i have a 6800GT, mine never did that.....i had a gig of ram in that one though, maybe that's what it is. I had awesome frame rates with the 2.8C and the GT.

 

[LanFear]

It's not my rig, a relatively new box, A64 3200+ 2.2ghz 6800GT 1gig Crucial Ballistix @ 2-2-2-5 160gig SATA raid, etc. etc. It's oc'ing the card that is causing some wierd 3d benching results, check google, many people have noticed it.

 

[nix0r21212]

Originally posted by: lost0822
.....i had a gig of ram in that one though, maybe that's what it is. .

[/i]


Yeah, I have a gig too. the more I talk to people the more im convinced its either a software issue or the motherboard. I'm going to try formatting my drive to see if that fixes it, if not, ill try to get ASUS to cough up a new board, im well within their warranty.

 

[yelo333]

Originally posted by: nix0r21212
oh oh one more thing. I noticed that whenever I'm scrolling down a website, something in the computer, either the GPU or the CPU makes a little ticking noise everytime I scroll down one line, one tick for every scroll. also I can hear this noise only it's interval is much shorter, each time I'm playing a game. It's almost as if there is one tick-noise for each frame that the card renders, but the sound kind of sounds like it's coming from the processor, although the two are so close its hard to tell for sure. has anyone else heard this kind of thing with the GeForce 6800 GT?

I'm also not saying this is the problem, but I've heard of low-quality power-supplies giving this noise when they are maxed out, or ran out of specifications. what brand PS is it?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Heres what you need to do.

#1 Format and Reinstall Windows

#2 Install all drivers... latest

#3 Run memtest

If none works post back and well try some other stuff.

-Kevin

 

[Vee]

Yeah, I have a gig too. the more I talk to people the more im convinced its either a software issue or the motherboard. I'm going to try formatting my drive to see if that fixes it, if not, ill try to get ASUS to cough up a new board, im well within their warranty.

Don't flail mindlessly around. Be methodical about it.
It's unlikely to be a MB hardware issue. But your PSU looks scaringly marginal, and you could have screwed the driver someway, I suppose.
But before you start to reinstall your entire OS...
First of all stop OC to get a grip of basics. (OC doesn't seem to be healthy for 6800GT, BTW).
Then get prime95. Turn off your PC to let it cool down. Run the benchmarks and compare to those posted at the Prime95 website for your cpu.
This way you will get a good idea if there's something seriously wrong with the way your cpu works.

Then run prime95 for 40 min. Then Immediately benchmark again, to see if heating up affects your performance. (If it does, get a better heatsink.)

(Also, since someone else brought up the subject of AGP aperture: IMO, you should not run an AGP aperture larger than 128Mb, in fact I'm going to suggest you also try 64MB, since you have only 512MB. I believe 64MB is still optimum, even if I can see that some future day will demand more.

The size of the AGP aperture will affect your performance this way:
If it's too large, performance will drop. If it's too small, performance will drop. Between those settings, there will be no, or minimal variations in performance. What is "too large" or "too small" will change with every application, and every graphics card. It's absolutely no use whatsoever, to run 3DMark (or something) to "find" the "optimum" aperture. Some thorough testing a couple of years ago, showed that values between 32MB and 64MB were least likely to ever be too small or too large. Since software demands increase, this lead to the 'rule of thumb' value of 64MB. Since MB bios nowadays mostly defaults to 128MB, it may be that 'rule of thumb' has been upped to 128MB. I'm not sure.)