Good Hardware = Bad Performance?

Q

Quicksilver

Newcomer
I recently purchased a Sapphire Radeon 9600XT to go with my system:

-Dual Intel PIII Coppermine 800Mhz @ 900Mhz (multiplier 6x, FSP 150Mhz).
-Abit VP6 (4x AGP)
-640MB Kingston PC133 SDRAM
-Gigabit Eathernet
-SB Audigy 2
-Four 120 Maxtor Drives, each pair is running a RAID 0.
-The new Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 128MB (Omega Drivers)
-Windows Server 2003 Standard (all unecessary services dissabled, nothing is eating resources)

I was reading alot of reviews for this card, and every 3dmark2001 score was beyond 12000. I benched my system as soon as I got the card, and got a score of just over 6000. It seems to me that despite the fact that the test systems used in the reviews have higher FSB speeds, and faster memory, it would not give me a performance hit of over half the card's usual perfomance.

Is there something I am missing?
 
3DM01 is basically an FSB test, so yes, it most definitely would have that effect.
 
Quicksilver said:
Am I going to see a dramatic hit in games?
Click to expand...
you'll almost certainly be CPU limited in most titles because they don't have SMP support for one and they are often memory bandwidth junkies, so it's definitely possible.
 
Well, um.....your cpus are very slow, I don't think 3dmark01 takes advantage of dual cores(they'd still be slow even if you got the full advantage of both) your ram is really slow, but fine for your processors...and really you'd probably get better or equal performance on your pc with a geforce2/3. Video cards != game cards just yet. If you had a 3 ghz p4 or a 3000+ athlon you'd be seeing beyond 12000, but you're very cpu and memory limited right now.
 
Hey just play quake 3 all the time. Its the only game i know that uses 2 cpus if avalible
 
Your slow CPUs are holding the cards performance back.
 
Hey, I'd just like to point out that if you do upgrade your cpus and memory, stay away from all celerons, pentium 4's less than 2 ghz(and stay away from willamette!), durons(unless you get the 1.8, which is close to a 2 ghz p4), athlons that aren't xp or mobile xp or athlon 64(multiprocessor is fine, but it's useless in 99% of all games), sdram, rdram, and make sure your memory matches or exceeds your processor. That's pc2100 for 266 FSB athlons(tbreds and palonimos, they go up to 2600+, well the tbreds do, oh and so do the mobile bartons) or for 533 FSB p4s(stay away from 400 FSB, make sure you get a motherboard with dual channel ddr and two matched sticks of ddr, though performance might be better with pc2700).

Pc2700 for overclocked athlons or the desktop bartons(333mhz, start at 2500+) and maybe for 533 FSB p4s(northwood), as long as you go dual channel.

PC3200 once again for overclocked processors, but also for the final desktop barton(3200+, it's a bad buy but has a 400 FSB), 800 FSB pentium 4's(northwood and prescott) in dual channel, and for all athlon 64s. You'll need higher speed memory to overclock any of these processors, and I'm not sure what kind of memory the server processors, Xeons and Opterons take.
 
Sorry to say but that setup just doesn't make any sense.
Your CPU is way too old to get playable framerates in actual games.
The grafics card is good but can't use it's potential combined with that CPU.
 
Your video card is making trips to the convenience store while it waits for the rest of your system to give it data to process.
 
Any chance you could run aquamark3 and report results here please?

AM3 should support multiprocessing and I'm pretty curious in learning how your computer would compare there :D

Case you didn't know, aquamark3 can be downloaded from http://www.aquamark3.com/
 
Quicksilver, well, you got your answers already (when gaming, you essentially have an outdated 1-way system, so yes your 9600XT is somewhat overkill for it). However, look on the bright side: because in most games your framerate will be CPU/system limited, you can pretty freely crank up AF and AA and burn your surplus fillrate on them. Don't stare at the non-AF/AA 3DMark results too hard :)

Should you want to upgrade the system, you'd obviously have to get a new mobo for new CPUs and DDR memory (as your P3s already are close to the best for the platform). If this rig is otherwise fine for your (server) purposes, it makes you think twice about the justification for the expense, doesn't it? Do check out how's the experience with real games first -- it might be "passable" or "okay", after all. If not, Fox5 gave good advice on upgrading; I would add that if you need to go duallie and price matters over 64-bit futurism, consider a pair of Athlon XPs on an Athlon MP mobo. (You probably already know www.2cpu.com for more info.)
 
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