Draconis

Allright, you guys are either gonna love this, or hate this. Regardless, I'm a newb here. ~Shrugs~ However, Maybe alot of you have an idea as to what is going on here.


I recently Purchased a Thermaltake Giant Extreme III Sandwhich Style VGA Cooler. Stock cooling on the card, I usually got around 63-65 Degree's Celcius. With the Card now installed, and using Artic Silver 5 throughout the entire assembly process for the massive sandwhich heatsink and it's dual copper pipes, my Video card now stays around 56 Degree's Period.

NOT BAD. Seeing a 5-7 Degree drop in Temepature is huge to me. Gives me some serious OC'ing potential. Which I have not yet as of done. I need to get ATI Tool running for at least 6-12 hours on each max core and memory setting before I am comfortable with an OC position.


However, something puzzled me. After I got the card Reinstalled, and put in the New Catalyst 4.8 Drivers I ran 3DMark03 on my system, and got a Really nice score that I can remember.

Then I tried to play Doom 3. Once again, Doom 3 gave me the dreaded NO CD error, which means somewhere along the lines, my system reset itself to a restore point with Previous NFORCE drivers for the Motherboard. To explain what is going on here, Doom 3 will NOT, I repeat WILL NOT run on my system unless I have THESE specific Nvidia NFORCE drivers installed from their Website. The Nforce Drivers from Gigabyte's Website does NOT work. I've tried repeatedly. I have to use Nvidia's Drivers on their site. I don't Frigging know why, but it just WILL NOT run without those specific drivers. For some infernal reason, the system thinks that no matter what I do, the Cd is not in the drive without them.

Okay, so I install the drivers. No biggie. Run through Doom 3 on the Hell level. (( one of the most graphically intensive levels I use for benching FPS ))

Game runs fine. Exit Doom 3.

Run 3DMark03 once again. Walk away from system. Come back and witness some of the scene's dragging slower then what I remember from Previous benching. Scratching my head, I let it finish to get a score of 1977.

I know that Bench is wrong, I know it absolutley Has GOT to be wrong.

Spend the night sleeping on it, figure out the most recent change I made was those motherboard drivers. Okay, no problem. I'll reinstall my Manufacturer's Drivers from my Disc.

Wake up this morning and do so. Had to reinstall the ATI 4.8 Cat's after I Installed Manufacturer Nforce drivers from disc, because 3DMark03 wasn't recognizing my card for some strange reason.

So, get the system rebooted, run through 3DMark03 after all that insanity. As usual and as is to be expected with my system, the third sound card test gives me an error and kills everything. (( I need to replace it. It's overdue for it. ))

Check the 3DMark's Score. 5159 3D Marks..............


Okay....now....I want to know....WTF is going on here?!?!?!

My system is as follows:

AMD Athlon 3200+ Barton Core Processor
Gigabyte 7N400 Pro 2 Motherboard with Nforce chipset
1 Gigabyte of PC 3200 Ram, Running Dual Channeled at 400 Mhz ( With Copper Heatspreaders! [img]images/smilies/big%20grin.gif[/img] )
Sound Blaster Live Value Card ( Yes, I know, I should be smitten down )
1 Western Digital 40 Gig Hard drive, 7200 RPM's ( OS Drive )
2 Maxtor 200 Gigabyte Hard Drives with 8MB buffer Cache, 7200 RPM's ( Data Storage and Video Game HDD )
US Robotics 56K Controller Based modem ( 100 Dollar modem. Designed for Internet gaming over 56k Connections. I moved from High speed Dial up to an area in the boonies where they have no High Speed. /cry )
1 LG 52X CD Rom Drive
1 Philips CDRW 2400 Series CD Burner Drive
ATI Radeon 9800 XT Video Card ( With New Insanely Large Cooler on it! [img]images/smilies/big%20grin.gif[/img])

Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 1 ( not touching SP2. I hear it breaks too many games, and I have 90+ PC CDROM games on my System. )
Direct X 9.0c



I am sorry, but I do NOT consider my system Weak at all. The CPU Temp never and I mean NEVER goes over 54 Degree's Celc and The Case Temp stays at 39 Degree's Celc. WTF is going on here? I should NOT, I repeat, NOT be noticing such a HUGE difference in 3DMark03 with only a matter of the Motherboard Drivers. Either Nvidia's Nforce drivers have a huge bug in them, or they have some code in there that is choking my system or my 3d rendering for the card during these tests.

So I would like people's opinions. How the hell Do I correct this problem, get good Bench's on 3DMark03 and run my system the way IT SHOULD be run, and yet STILL play Doom 3 with the Cat 4.8's?


All help is appreciated.


Oh, btw, the new Cats Rock. Definite increase on my other systems that I have seen. I just dread putting the 3.11's on my Linux box. I wish their Linux Drivers were as good as their Windows ones.


Draconis

dsdsdk

5200 is still low score for that rig...
trying uninstalling ati driver and nforce driver. after that, use Drivercleaner from mainpage.
first install nforce driver, then ati driver.
check bios if agp is set to 8x and fastwrite is disabled.
agp aperture size to 256mb...

Draconis

Well, AGP is set to 8X speeds and the video card does have Fast Write enabled. I am downloading the Driver cleaner now and will run that according to the readme file.


As for the CMOS settings, Or Bios, whichever you wish to call it, I can't set the AGP Apeture size in it at all. It doesn't have a setting for it period. It has a setting where I can tweak the MHZ of the AGP slot I believe, up to 166 or something. I have to look at it. Can't cut down on my DL in the middle of typing this to check. I'll get back to you on that. But otherwise everything is ok.

I'll get the drivers cleaned and reinstalled and see what comes of it.


Draconis

HawK

jup it is low, here is my score, nothing OC'd:

HawK

You can on the first page do ctrl+f1, then more setting will be available

Draconis

I wanted to thank everyone for their help with this ordeal. All of the suggestions worked beautifully and got everything done as I needed. I saw a major improvement in the Benchmark Scores Shortly thereafter.

After which, I decided to Reinstall XP Pro. It's been in dire need of a Format/Reinstall For almost a year now. Mainly due to one annoying quirky bug I could'nt fix until now.

PC Mark now has my Machine close to about 4000 PC Marks.

3DMark03 now has me clocking in my Scores on that Bench around 6,478 Total 3DMarks. Not bad overall.

I saw about a 10 point score boost overall when I set my AGP Apeture to 512 instead of 256. Games seem to run slightly faster as well. Doom 3 has some SLIGHTLY improved performance. I really wish that damn game would run better. But I don't expect it to until I see 512 Meg graphics cards out, which I think are due to hit in October for ATI Cards?

Still, I guess I can't complain about getting a Solid 30-33 FPS in the Hell level with 1024x768 with all the eye candy turned on and 4X AA up and running. Not too bad I guess. The other levels run at a solid 60 FPS now. Much better improvement then what I remember it running at a while back.

One thing however, as small and inane as it may seem, I am EXTREMLEY happy about.

I finally fricking KILLED the Dissapearing Internet Connection Status Icon Bug that I had.

Ran a driver by driver install. From the ground up. Direct X 9 First, Nforce Drivers, Sound, Modem, Graphics.

Then installed the one suspect program. FFXI Online. More specifically the Program that is Playonline. What I found out was interesting. Originally I had installed it to my C:\ drive. Well, I went back and uninstalled it because I wanted everything on my D:\ drive for Gaming. Come to find out, after I installed it on the D drive, suddenly when I try and connect to the internet via Dial up connection, I do connect, but the same damn bug of my Modem status icon Vanishing popped up again.

To Explain this bug, what happens is you can create a dial up connection in network connections. Problem is, as soon as you dial it up and connect, Windows Swallows it whole. The darn thing ceases to Exist. Oh it'll dial up regularly all right if you have a shortcut on your desktop or know other means of acessing it like Internet options. But once you click that Initial connection, Network connections swallows that existing connection like a black hole. All available options of telling your OS to show the Modem connection status Icon Fail. It absolutley WILL NOT show it. Period. The only way to truly tell if you are connected and your speed, well, the one I know, is to hit Ctrl Alt Del and check Network connections. Pretty messed up if you ask me.

Sooo...Go to a system Restore point. Reverse it back after I uinstalled Playonline. Sure enough, reboot the system, check it out. Modem status Icon comes back.

Okay....so I go back, Reformat/Reinstall all over again because I want to make 100% sure I have a clean foundation to work from.

( I don't like System Restore Points. They don't wipe out 100% of everything that was there that caused the problem. )

Reinstall Playonline on C:\

Test Modem. No problems. Reinstall FFXI on C:\ Test Modem, No problems. So far the Internet connection status Icon is staying put. Which to me, after about 6 months of not seeing my connection status, NOR being able to disconnect the darn thing by the push of a button, is a small but beautiful godsend to me right now.

Go Figure. All that mess about Benchmarks, and the one thing I go nuts about working is a small status Icon. Sheesh.


Thank you all for your help. It is greatley appreciated.

And Hawk, Btw, I never saw the Ctrl F1 option in my motherboard documentation at all. O.o

Know anything else about my Motherboard that I don't? Heh.

Still, I'd sure as heck like to know why such a small difference on the drive I install a program on makes such a huge difference with that damn Bug.

Thanks All,

Draconis

HawK

Yeah, I didn't know it either until someone (think it was Cartman.. erm Asmoday informed me about it)
...pushiment for not reading the manual
Bios flashing: do not use the the windows internetflasher, use a floppy,
costed me a new Mobo, oh but I see you have the dual bios mobo right?, much safer then.. good luck

MindlessOath

did u update the bios? i have a 7nnxp which is simular to your mobo, but not the same. i had to do a bios update to 19 to get it to work better with some things. they fixed a lot.

20 is out it adds support for semperon and some kind of usb camera 2.0 fix. but be warry of updating bios, it could break the whole computer.

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