New hardware...big problems..

S

shibbyy05

New Member
Alright, whoever can solve my problem, I will forward them 10 dollars via paypal :)

Just recently I decided I wanted to have a little update for my computer so I bought an ASUS P4S800D-X motherboard and a pair of Corsair Dual Channel Gig sticks (400mhz) to accompany the motherboard.

I installed the parts and everything went smooth up until the point of benchmarking my card in 3DMark05. In my previous setup I was getting scores of 5000+ which is normal for a stock x850 with at least a gig of ram. I am now getting scores of low 3000 area and all of my games run at unbearable speeds.

Here are the steps I took so far to solve my problem.

1. Installed the latest Chipset drivers and BIOS for my motherboard.

2. Made sure the memory is set up for Dual Channel.

3. Re-formatted Windows XP Proffessional and installed all the latest updates including SP2

4. Installed the latest Catalyst Drivers (6.4) on several different occasions aswell as installing previous versions of catalyst to ensure that the new version wasn't having compatibilty issues.

5. Made sure my power supply was connected directly to my video card.

6. Made sure DMA is enabled in my HD.

7. Checked my device manager to make sure everything was running properly.

8. Checked all of my settings in CCC to make sure nothing would hold back my card. Everything is on balanced and my SMARTGART AGP speed is set to 8x. (no AA or AF)

9. Ran numerous different options through my bios including just setting everything to default.

10. Checked EVEREST Home Edition to make sure everything was being displayed right and nothing seemed out of place.

11. Defraged my computer.

12. Switched current memory sticks with old ones to see if there was a difference in performance.

13. Inserted a different power cord from my PSU to my video card (which is the reason my score is at 4000 right now, it was 3000 before i did this.)

14. Flashed the BIOS of my card to the original BIOS

15. Disabled sideband addressing

Here is my system specs...

Intel P4 2.66 < -- problem of mine
ASUS P4S800D-X
ATI Radeon x850 PRO OC'd (540/590)
2 gb Dual Channel Corsair
300 WATT PSU <-- Another problem of mine :o

I'm at the end of my rope here. I've been troubleshooting for the past week and can't seem to figure out what my problem is. Do you guys have an suggestions?

Thanks in advance.
 
i would honestly say that you're having some sort of voltage problem with your system because of the lack of power your PSU is providing; however i would also like to add that i would think there would be an inherant instability with the system too.
Try running with one stick of ram and then the other and see if there is a speed difference. its possible that one of the sticks is crappy and that you're getting errors but not enough to crash the system but enough to cause a speed degredation
 
hmm it's interesting that you mention voltages. I tried the one memory stick and it did seem like the performance increased slightly but that could be a placebo effect although it makes sense.

I have a voltages monitor right now but i'm not sure how to read it. Here is what it says...

+12V = none
-12V = none
+5V = +5.08V
-5V = none
Core = +3.09V
Aux = +3.18V
I/O = +3.54
 
shibbyy05 said:
hmm it's interesting that you mention voltages. I tried the one memory stick and it did seem like the performance increased slightly but that could be a placebo effect although it makes sense.

I have a voltages monitor right now but i'm not sure how to read it. Here is what it says...

+12V = none
-12V = none
+5V = +5.08V
-5V = none
Core = +3.09V
Aux = +3.18V
I/O = +3.54
Click to expand...

wherever you're getting those voltages from i would say that they are incorrect simply because of the fact that your CPU would be toast at that voltage.

It might be worth benchmarking your system with each stick of ram individually to see what difference it makes to the performance.
If one of the sticks produces significantly lower values i would run memtest on the ram to see if its at cause
 
lol wow, i'm getting these voltages from Hardware Monitor and they probably are wrong.

Just checked in Everest and this is what it shows


Voltage Values
CPU Core 1.64 V
Aux 3.18 V
+3.3 V 3.54 V
+5 V 5.08 V
+5 V Standby 4.24 V
Debug Info F FF 32 FF
Debug Info T 39 44 14
Debug Info V B9 C5 DD BD FF 90 00 (03)

Alright i'll try those benchmarks right now.
 
Ok, just ran a couple of tests and got some interesting results.

3DMark05

1st gig stick (540/590): 3593
2nd gig stick (540/590): 3658
Both sticks (540/590): 3607
512 stick 266mhz (540/540): 3675

My best test was on a single 512 PC2100 stick. I do realize that since my CPU is only a 533 FSB that I will be getting a bottleneck with these memory sticks but this still doesn't account for the reason i'm getting such low scores period.
 
that really is strange... all of the scores are reasonably close together. i cant figure out why your system is scoring so low on the benchmarks. i cant think of anything else that would help to be honest
 
Wow, this just doesn't seem right. Maybe I'm just being delirious about my old scores, I never did write it down or keep track of it. I know it did perform better before but not THAT much better. It was just recently I found out about my scores being so low with the card that I have and maybe that is why I am trying to figure this out so much.

Do you think that I may have a faulty card? Does anybody have any actually benchmarks of this same card with close specs as me?

I'm totally out of ideas with this
 
i honestly think you should be getting better scores than me even though your processor is slowers... im puzzled by it
 
rofl, well i'm in the middle of talking to ATI support right now, so whoever calls the solution i'll just give them the money. It's just ten bucks :rolleyes:
 
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