Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Shouldn't this run faster?

by Fokker Dec 31, 2004 7:46AM PST

I upgraded my Dell d4600 a tad over christmas. Now I have a AIW ATi Radeon 9800 pro 128mb and 1gb DDR PC2700 ram, a significant improvment from the old Geforce FX5200 and 512 ram. Anyhow I now run my games at 1024x726 32 bit colour. The problem is I get framerates in the low 20-high 40s running on medium, high, even low running games like UT2k4, BF Vietnam. Now I may have made a mistake with the power supply, I have the card sharing power with the hard drive, but the manual said to do so. Another thing that may be causing the slow down is this 'AGP acceleration' and it's current setting of 'off'. I tried setting it to 4x (2x cannot be selected, board dosen't seem to support it) but some sort of self test wouldn't allow it to be set at 4x so I'm stuck with it set to 'off'. And my final theory is that my processor (P4 2.8ghz, 533 FSB) is bottlenecking the card. Anyhow, any suggestions as to improving performance?

Discussion is locked

6 Posts
- Collapse + Expand Details
- Collapse -
Power Check
by UnWritten7 Dec 31, 2004 11:25AM PST

How many watts is your power supply? I found that with all I had in my system that my graphics card was running a lil slow and had some lag. When I upgraded my power supply from 300w to 550w (a bit much and you could use less) the lag seemed to be gone and the system seemed to run a lil faster.

- Collapse -
Alright....but....
by Fokker Dec 31, 2004 11:52AM PST

This is such a n00bish question but...


How do you check your power supply?

- Collapse -
(NT) (NT) open case read whats posted on power supply
by Mark5019 Dec 31, 2004 7:40PM PST
- Collapse -
Ok, what about the AGP acceleration?
by Fokker Jan 1, 2005 2:38AM PST

I can't set it to 2x, only 4x and 8x, so I attempt to set it to 4x. The computer will then do a self test to see if it can run these settings following a restart. When I check after the restart the AGP acceleration is set to 'off'. So it would seem that my computer can't run this 'AGP acceleration'. Yes, I am a newbie with the hardware configeration.

- Collapse -
What's a SM Bus Controller?
by Fokker Jan 1, 2005 3:18AM PST

That device is not working as it has no drivers. What does is this device do? And how am I to determine what kind of driver I need?

Oh and about the AGP thing, apparently I should find some sort of AGP Controller under the device manager, but I cannot find this device on the list. So the Radeon 9800 manual says to get a "GART driver". Would this allow me to enable AGP acceleration?

- Collapse -
It's a sign the motherboard drivers were not installed.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jan 1, 2005 3:32AM PST
Back to PC Hardware forum

CNET Forums

Operating Systems
Software
Electronics & Gadgets
Hardware
Tablets & Mobile Devices
General Help
Brand Forums
Roadshow Autos
Off Topic

Other Forums

Forum Info