Graphics X800 AGP Speed issue, help appreciated!

Ok, just had my spanking new X800 Pro delivered Uninstalled all drivers, removed my old 9800 Pro, put the X800 in, installed Cat 4.5s etc etc, usual graphics card installation and all went fine. The card appears to be working fine however performance is not what it should be, whilst better than my 9800 Pro it's not up to that of other X800 Pros.

It appears the reason for this is my AGP settings. My mobo is a gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra which only goes up to 4x AGP, although 4x would be fine. At present the AGP is set to OFF and when I try and boost it up to 4x it says smartgart needs to reboot to ensure this is stable, which is fine, but when it reboots its back to OFF.

I didn't have this problem with my 9800 Pro so I don't think the mobo is faulty. I've checked in the bios settings and the only AGP related setting I can find is whether the defaults graphics is PCI or AGP, and naturally that is set to AGP. Anyone got any ideas what might be causing this, and how I can get it sorted out? Any help would be well appreciated

Cheers.

 

Try going back to an older version of the Cats, i had similar problems with my 9700, when installing this 8x card it would register as off, eventually after searching older drivers, i found version with smartgart would allow the card to run at 8x Anyway, hope it helps,

If you need older version i can send you a couple over messenger.

Proph.

 

Cheers for the advice mate, will give that a go. Got many an old version kicking around so no need for the msn, but cheers anyway!

What version did you have to go back to out of interest?

 

Incidently, I'm not sure how badly this is affecting my performance anyway - I've got it up to 540/520 already, playing Halo and Far Cry at 1280*1024 with everything on full and not a glitch in site

 

Sounds pretty good anyway, what kinda 3dm scores were u returning and whats teh rest of your setup?

Anyway, as for version i tried a few, i belive 4.1 and 3.9 worked correctly. Anything after that has smartgart built in and was forcing agp off mode

Proph.

 

I wouldnt have thought the X800pro was noticably faster than the 9800pro tbh

Try setting the AGP in your bios not windows.

 

kweh? not noticably faster? it pwns the 9800xt in benchmarks most of the time, which in turn pwns the 9800pro...

Proph.

 

you've made no mention of the rest of your system... these cards are bottle necked even with a Socket 939 FX-53.

 

Yeah sorry should of detailed rest of my system, it's in my sig now. I don't think there's any issues there

Anyway to update: I've got AGP working by updatng the chipset drivers, however now when I turn AGP on the system crashes as soon as it goes into 3D mode... Still works fine if I turn AGP off...

As far as benchmarks go, with everything clocked to the max I get 9200 in 3DMark03, which whislt not being bad is less than I was epecting, was really looking to break the 10k mark at least...

And the X800 Pro not noticably faster than a 9800 Pro? Me thinks someone needs to do some research... My max 3Dmark03 with the 9800 Pro was 6700 and that was with everything working properly, now I get 9200 with the X800, with AGP turned off. I can run games like Far Cry with everything on high settings at 1280*1024 and still get better frame rates than I did with the 9800 Pro set on 1024*768 with medium settings!

 

Hmm, it seems your right. Im supprised, but it depends what reviews you read and games you play i spose.

BigZ if its processor limited or whatever, then maybe its AGP4x not helping? Its probably not the lack of memory bandwidth cause its an E7205, dual channel board (Titan 667?)

Go into the bios and set agp there, gigabyte usually have comprehensive bios'

 

With scores like i wouldant be to dissapointed. And looking at scores, the people getting the 11 - 13k with pros are running ubah clocked athlon fx-51s or a64s with water/prommie cooling systems.

And also DDR33 ram, can see some bottlenekcs coming in there.

Proph

 

The board is dual DDR 266 though, so 333 is an overclock (as is the 3.06-3.45ghz)

Dual 333 is still more than single 400.

 

You've got a big bottle neck in that system... sheer lack of memory bandwidth.

You're running 150MHz fsb dual channel, which is going to give you a theoretical maximum memory bandwidth of around 4800MBPS, but realistically, you've got a maximum of 4560MBPS (95% efficiency). The FX-53 has around 6000MBPS of real unbuffered memory bandwidth (~95% efficiency) @ DDR400/200MHz fsb. Hence why I said that your system more than likely has a huge bottle neck somewhere in relation to the CPU.

The FX-53 at 2400MHz would outperform your P4, and as I've said, a stock FX-53 is still a bottle neck with an X800

edit: AGP 4x will make a bit of difference, but not a huge huge difference.

 

whats the perpose of a card with 16 pixle pipelines, if mobos only do 8x and 16x will be obsolite with the coming of pci express in the near futuer.please correct me if im mistaken

 

Will have to work on my mnem bandwidth for my x800 system then, lol.

Proph.

 

Becase the actual bus to the card isn't too important, and AGP 8x is almost overkill anyway. Also, there will be no AGP 16x because PCI-e is practically here anyway. 16x PCI-e is the new interface for video cards

 

so i cant see any reason to buy a x800 unless u have a spare 500 bucks or so burring a hole in your pocket, im happy wit my 9800pro

 

Well, still got the problem… Updating chipset drivers has allowed me to enable AGP (which is strange as I'm sure they were up to date anyway) however with it turned on the system now crashes out in 3DMode

At a bit of a loss with this one, any more ideas?

 

Well managed to bump the score up to 9744 with AGP working but at much lower clock speeds than when I achieved 9200 without AGP yesterday, which is a bit weird. If I can hit 10k I'll be happy things are performing as they should, then just to make sure everything is stable.

I think part of the cause is a that there seems to be a lot of compatibility problems with gigabyte boards and the X800s, have seen this documented in quite a few places in my research...

 

You're confusing pixel pipes with AGP speed, they arent related.

Pixel pipes is simultainious pixel processing, AGP speed is raw and processed video data transmission