Hmm what to tweak, what to tweak?

F

FishyWishy

Geek Trainee
OK I just got myself a new computer (refer to Signature) I assembled it myself with minor problems. I’m not really all that knowledgeable with tweaking and whatnot and I have just left everything as it is. I’ve noticed that, although it may be running a lot faster than my previous computer I’m not altogether sure its running at it's fullest potential, in fact I’m sure its not. I understand that I’m not going to get the best graphical and gaming results because my video card is old and crap but I think that windows could be running a lot better than it is. I shall soon be upgrading the video card to a HiS Excalibur Radeon 9600XT Turbo. But for the time being I want the best out of my CPU and MOBO that I can possibly get, I would very much appreciate any help that you incredible smarties would be able to offer.

Thankyou :D
 
Aside from overclocking, you can lower your CAS timings from 2.5 to 2. Most decent RAM will run this at stock speeds. If you're looking to overclock, look into some PC4000 as your memory is running at 400MHz (or should be). If you've only got one stick of RAM, you're capping the available bandwith of your system. If you have two sticks, make sure you've got one of each installed in each channel (refer to your motherboard manual).
Asus also has a PAT-like setting in BIOS, but I forget the name. Enable that and you'll gain extra performance.
 
Ok how do i lower the CAS timings? is that in bios? my memory is PC3200 and i only have one stick, should i look into buying another one? I just ran PCMARK 2002 and got the following scores

CPU Score 7383
Memory Score 6730
HDD Score 694

im not sure what relevance this holds but yeah thats the only benchmarking proggy i could find, and for some reason it thinks my cpu is running at 200MHz FSB .. is that a glitch in the prog or would it really be @ 200FSB if so how do i fix that to 800?

thankyou for your help :)
 
Yes, you do lower the CAS timing in the BIOS. As far as additional performance, you could squeeze a little more out of that Radeon 7200 VE. If you haven't already, you can add a good fan to your VE's porcupine (heatsync) and afterwards overclock your GPU ~40-80MHz. Your RAM should overclock just as much without any 'syncs, assuming your chassis runs fairly cool. For motherboard performance questions, look to Big B for the answers. He's the resident motherboard expert, especially for Intel-based systems.

Keep 'yer head up, Aussie. :)
-AT
 
CAS timings are in BIOS, as are most of the tweaks. I'm not sure how tight of timings your RAM can run, but you're welcome to try it out.

The program is correct. The P4 uses a quad-pumped front side bus (FSB), so it's 4x200MHz=800MHz.

Free software info and/or benchmark proggies:
Clibench
SiSoft Sandra
Aida
3Dmark 2001 (2003 is not a reliable benchmark due to certain companies cheating).
 
:( overclock :( .. hoooow? :'( *wishes he knew how to overclock* i have a lil old 486 fan on the VE, it should cool that beast right down :D but as far as overclocking goes is there a good tutorial site u can direct me to or can u tell me what to do, i was always scared of overclocking .. but if its stable then i'll go with it
 
FishyWishy said:
:( overclock :( .. hoooow? :'( *wishes he knew how to overclock* i have a lil old 486 fan on the VE, it should cool that beast right down :D but as far as overclocking goes is there a good tutorial site u can direct me to or can u tell me what to do, i was always scared of overclocking .. but if its stable then i'll go with it
Click to expand...
Easy amigo. To overclock your video what I'd do is grab some Omegadrive Radeon drivers, and use the "Radlinker" radeon tweaker included. Warning though, Omega drivers are optimized for gaming, not synthetic benchmarks. That being said, they're all I use on my Win32 boxes (real ATI drivers on my Linux machines). If you want benchmark scores, get the latest Catalyst drivers and download radlinker seperately. However, with a 7200 VE, you won't get any teary-eyed 3DMark scores anyway. IMHO you may as well go for the gaming performance.

EDIT: make sure you overclock slowly, a little bit at a time (5-10MHz). Check for artifacts as you go, and adjust as necessary. Omega drivers are great for this because they include artifact testing tools! Go slow and careful, use your head, and you'll have almost zero risk of damage or other problems.
 
Overclock is fairly safe as long as you're not pumping excessive voltage into your CPU. For the P4's, don't go any higher than 1.7V. 2nd, you'll be overclocking via the FSB, so since you'll want to buy a 2nd stick of RAM anyway, if you're thinking of doing overclocking, buy something faster. Kingston Hyper-X and Corsair XMS DDR are the top stuff here, but Kingmax has a decent name behind them as well. You can play with it some before getting a 2nd stick.
If/when you do overclocking, look for Memtest 86 and Prime 95. Memtest is a little program you put on a floppy (you can also download an .iso and burn it to a bootable CD) and just boot off of it to check your memory for errors. Prime 95 runs a series of calculations until it has an error or you stop it. Your overclock is generally considered stable if you run it for at least 24 hours with no errors. It runs in the background, so you can still use your system at the same time.
 
thanx to both of yas :) you've been a great help, i'll be sure to come and whine to you when my computer is smoldering :D i'll post if i have any troubles thanks a bunch :)
 
ok i have made the following adjustments. i did a 5% CPU overclock and i overclocked the video card by a bit too i also set bios to "optimise memory", or something like that, and with my specs i get 2214 on 3DMark 2001 SE, im not exactly sure what i should be getting or wether my computer is still not at its fullest potential, ive also been told that i shouldnt have overclocked my CPU any feedback would be appreciated, i tried setting my CAS latency to 2.0 but something screwed up, i'll try again later. Is my score adequate and should i reset the clock speed on my CPU?
 
Your video card is the bottleneck in 3Dmark, so you're highly unlikely to notice any change.
 
after latest chipset and latest bios drivers installed

PCmark 2002 scores:
CPU Score 7659
Memory Score 7104
HDD Score 817

3D Mark score:
2221

so yeah thats a positive. if there is any other tweaks i could run to make things faster please let me know, windows tweaks etc. also if there are any problems such as i should have a higher score etc. thanks muchly :)
 
well you can tweak some Win. XP thingys to make your startups faster....control panel then administrative tools then Services...
you can disable windows messenger if you dont use it, just go to its properties then select "disabled" (only if you dont use it) and apply. you can disable more of them but know which ones yoru disableing and what they do. This wont increase speed very much, maybe not at all i dunno. but it does cut down of some processes you may not even worry about with a p4 with HT. and for some more xp tweaks, try www.tweakxp.com
 
FishyWishy said:
...so yeah thats a positive. if there is any other tweaks i could run to make things faster please let me know, windows tweaks etc.
Click to expand...
I'm sure this isn't what you want to hear, but the best thing to do to get more performance outta Windows XP is to remove it and install Windows 2000 Pro instead. All the features of XP that differ from W2K are superficial, and only hog resources and cause instability.

That being said, if you still wish to run XP turn off the system restore feature, it only slows things down and wastes resources. As a matter of fact, it has ironically often crashed XP boxes I've used in the past by rolling back drivers and software without permission, and as a result hosing Windows. Nothing beats real backups! Also, disable the last access time feature of your NTFS file system. It's another misuse of resources that has no real useful purpose.

All the best,
-AT
 
ive been told that windows 2000 isnt as good for gaming .. which is really what this computer will hopefully be oneday used for, is there any difference between Windows 2000 and XP for gaming, they look pretty much the same, my dad bought an OEM version of 2000 then XP came out so he isnt using it, should i change to 2000? make the effort to remove my millions of files, games and crap from this HDD? Completely restart and waste 99999cds backing everything up? ... please say no :D .. ive turned off Sys Restore and how do i go about disabling the Last access time feature? also can anyone tell me how to turn off, Acoustic Managment on the Seagate Barracudda V HDD's? ive been told i can get a bit more performance with it off, sacrificing silence of course.
 
That's nonsense. XP=Win2k Home. XP basically has a prettier GUI and more "user-friendly" stuff added on, but for all points and purposes, it's just a little newer version of Win2k.

Seagate has some utility you can download, but I think you need to put it on a floppy and boot off of it and run the utility.
 
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