I built a brand new PC around christmas 2005, and Ive been extremely disappointed by its performance on the latest games. The components installed are as follows. AMD Athlon 4000+ 64-bit processor with HT 200GB SATA hard drive 1GB Corsair RAM XFX NVIDIA 7800GT graphics card (overclocked as standard) 2MB broadband Windows XP 32-bit SP2 Tagan 480W PSU Mobo: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe S939 NF4 SLI ATX It cost me quite a lot of money for this system as you can expect, but I have not seen the gains in performance over my older X800pro, Intel P4 3GHz System. Ive read all these publications and reviews showing how well the 7800GT performs, but Ive yet to see it. The main problem is that no matter what game it plays, even older games, or less demanding ones, it looks, and plays like crap. I used to play WOW a lot, and often found myself going back to my old PC with inferior components, but somehow looks and plays a million times better. The new PC could barely manage 20FPS on low settings with WOW, when really it should have been able to run on the absolute maximum at 60FPS or more...unless I am mistaken (thats what that ATI system was getting anyway). Then I come to other games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Counter Strike Source and Farcry. All of them run like crap. They did not get low FPS, but for some reason, the lines were always jaggy, and there was noticeable juttering of the graphics. Both of these things really really annoy me, I cant stand playing a game with rough edges. I've tried tweaking around with the Nvidia Forceware controls, but no matter what I do, the rough edges remain, and the games just dont feel right, they feel slowed almost laggy, even when offline. I have all the latest drivers etc., they have helped the problem slightly, but they are not making the system perform to the level I would expect it to. I recently purchased ES4: Oblivion and Black and White 2 to see how they ran. Oblivion looks great, but runs so slowly its unplayable, and i just cant stand running things on terrible graphics settings. Black and White 2 again looks good, but even on low settings and 1280 x 1024 resolution, it still runs sluggish at around 20FPS. I've posted this message here because I think the problem is caused by the graphics card (before you ask all the power connectors are in to the card). I'm aware that it could be to do with the RAM, so i'm going to try adding more RAM, and putting my ATI card in the machine to see how it goes. In the mean time though, does anyone else with this card or a similar NVIDIA card have any advice on how they get there graphics to look good, or their settings in the forceware control panel. I've looked up tweakguides, but that really hasnt helped me much at all. Thanks for any help.
I've got the same cpu, an agp 6800gt graphics card from xfx and also play most games at 1280 x 1024. I make sure that in my Nvidia control panel "Performance and Quality settings" the slider is set to high speed instead of high quality, to the left that is. I've used the auto overclock feature sported by my asus a8v deluxe mobo to overclock my 4000+ with 10% (2,7 GHz) Your mobo is the sli version of mine, maybe you could try that? It should be one of the features of that mobo. I played most of the games you are talking about and get more than 60+ fps on most games, oblivion runs like dung though. What bios are you running on that mainboard? I've had to update mine once because only after a certain version my cpu gained support. I did notice performance increase when done. 1GB of RAM should be enough for most games, but I indeed have 2GB installed and don't want to go back to less. Corsair is an A class brand so I don't think your RAM is of bad quality, no need to run to the store directly to buy more RAM. I hope this helps you out a little, let me know if anything was useful or not... Greetings
Ok thanks, I'll try the updating bios thing, dont really know which one I'm running at the moment. As for the overclocking, I'll check that out but i'm not really sure how to do it, and by how much.
ASUS states there are 3 types of AMD 4000+ chips, 1 of them is supported by all bios versions, another one attains support from bios version 1007 and up, and the 3rd type gains support from bios version 1015.005 and higher. I used the AI oc utility built into my board's bios, I've looked up your mobo's specs and it says the A8N-SLi Deluxe also has that feature. So if you do want to overclock your CPU, you have to check your BIOS for those features. There should be an option to set your CPU AI overclocking to "auto" and when you set that you also get to choose what % you want to overclock it. Depending on CPU type and RAM installed it can go up to 30% but my 4000+ can only be set to 10% at the moment. When you decide to overclock it in any way, make sure you have adequate cooling in your case, my case has 2 case fans (1 x 80mm and 1 x 120mm)and I use a aftermarket fan from Zalman for my CPU and another aftermarket Zalman fan for my graphics card. You can easily check what temperature your cpu is running in your BIOS too, and when booting you can see what version you currently have installed too. Check the ASUS support site for the latest drivers for your mainboard. I saw the latest drivers are 1016, but there's some important guidelines in red that you need to pay close attention to, so be careful.... If you're not sure about what you have to do, seek help from somebody who knows. Good luck
