Need to replace under achieving card

[GnomeWizardd]

I got a 9700 pro that REALLY underperforms. I mean 3dmark I am lucky to break 13k with a 3000+ oced to 2300 1 gig of ram and a 9700pro. Aquamark I get 21000 when people get in the 40000. I am thinking of a ti4800 8x to replace it with because my budget wont allow for a 9800pro or even a 9700pro. Igot the 9700pro for free so i am not complaining but i still need to upgrade.

[Enverex]

I think there is something wrong with your system rather than just having an underperforming system...

Formatted Recently?

NS

[keto]

Ya, your card isn't even running at default speeds, unless you have all the sliders in the control panel cranked all the way to the right "max detail/beauty" settings.

Download Rage3DTweak, open up the overclocker and tell us what it's got for "Default" clock speeds.

[GnomeWizardd]

ok just checked my rage 3d core is 325 mem is 311 I have been fighting with this card for along time and I am about to give up! IVe had it oced to 345/325 and i dropped in performance but 2k pts in 3dmark and 4 k in aquamark. System specs

Ran win2k fresh install and winxp fresh install within the last 4 days and still had low scores.

Abit NF7-S v2.0
AMD Xp 3000+ @ 2300 slk 900 w/ 53cfm Mechatronics fan
1gig Kingston HyperX ram pc3500
Saphire 9700pro ( POS! )
WD 80gig SE 8mb Cache HD
Maxtor 60gig 7200
Pioneer 4x dvd-r
Lite on 52 cdr/cdrw
430 Thermaltake Purepower PS
Chieftech case
zoom modem ( yea yea yea )
LOTS of mechatronics 53cfm fans

[GnomeWizardd]

BTW i am on AOL and Yahoo today under Gnomewizardd If you want to talk that way

[keto]

I only use ICQ atm. That is very wierd. When I had my 9700Pro on my AMD @ roughly 11X200, I was scoring in the ~16k range - overclocked card I admit, but this Gigabyte card is a crap overclocker. Ur definitely right, something very wrong there (but you knew that). Rage3D is reading correct stock clocks. Any chance it can be RMA'd? I saw you got it free but not the source, is it returnable?

[GnomeWizardd]

No i cant i got it from a friend for free. I am looking for a good card under 200 bucks I am looking at the ti4800 by gainward. what do you guys think I should get?

[keto]

9600XT (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactory&catalog=48&manufactory=1126&DEPA=1&sortby=14&order=1)

[GnomeWizardd]

what bout any nvidia cards?? the 5700 or the ti4800 or anything come close? I havent been keeping up with them at all

[keto]

The XT will eat the 5700 and spit out the tough transistors all day long. The 4800 may actually be faster in some games/benchmarks until you turn on AA/AF - plus the XT has DX9 extensions whereas the 4800 does not (the 5700 does). You can game on the 9600XT with the beauty setting CRANKED at very good framerates in most cases.

See all the review links under the item description on the NewEgg page? Go read 3 or 4 of em if you have the time.

[GnomeWizardd]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactory&catalog=48&manufactory=1312&Type=Refurbish&sortby=14&order=1


what you think of that for the price???

[GnomeWizardd]

and between the saphire or the ati card which would you get??


http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?catalog=48&DEPA=0&submit=property&mfrcode=0&propertycode=&propertycodevalue=5026,3668

[keto]

Ya, saw that one. Price is very reasonable but my main concern would be the experiences of a few members here who have recently bought refurbs (Equito and I can't remember who else) - the cards have been crap, obvious mods, smeared w AS, etc. If you REALLY want to keep in a budget, ti-4200's can be had around or just under $100, tho I don't have a link handy. The XT is still THE buy in the <$200 category.

[GnomeWizardd]

yea i think i will get teh xt but now i gotta decide is it wrth the xtra cash or should i get the saphire?

[keto]

Sapphire will be fine, if it's cheaper do it.

[GnomeWizardd]

not to mention i have a zalman heatpipe to rip off my 9700 pro and put on it! well thats if i wanna oc it


BTW i will be selling the 9700 pro for cheap when i get my new card

[SimGuy]

GnomeWizardd had this to say
not to mention i have a zalman heatpipe to rip off my 9700 pro and put on it! well thats if i wanna oc it


BTW i will be selling the 9700 pro for cheap when i get my new card

Remind me NOT to buy that 9700 Pro :D ;) ;)

Before you go to the drastic measure of replacing the card, have you formatted, done a clean Windows install and tried benching at stock clocks on the video card?

You could have farked video drivers, corrupted DirectX, or hell, even your AA & AF levels cranked too high during benchmarking.

You've checked all these?

BTW, 9600XT > 5700 Ultra > Ti4200/Ti4600 & AGP8x GF4 Ti cards :D

[GnomeWizardd]

GnomeWizardd had this to say


Ran win2k fresh install and winxp fresh install within the last 4 days and still had low scores.

Abit NF7-S v2.0
AMD Xp 3000+ @ 2300 slk 900 w/ 53cfm Mechatronics fan
1gig Kingston HyperX ram pc3500
Saphire 9700pro ( POS! )
WD 80gig SE 8mb Cache HD
Maxtor 60gig 7200
Pioneer 4x dvd-r
Lite on 52 cdr/cdrw
430 Thermaltake Purepower PS
Chieftech case
zoom modem ( yea yea yea )
LOTS of mechatronics 53cfm fans



Does that answer your question simguy??


That 9700pro i might sell for 100 bucks with the zalman heatpipe which is 50 bucks

[SimGuy]

When you benchmark, do you have your Direct3D settings set to the following selections?

//Edit: As well, do you have a MadOnion ORB compare reference link I can use to take a look at your latest 3DMark2001 SE benchmark score?

[GnomeWizardd]

its set like that but my last score was 13045

[SimGuy]

Let me try running a bench with a Ti4400 on my Barton 2500 @ 3200 (200x11) and see what turns up.

I can't understand why your system would be benching like this...

Humm.....

[SimGuy]

Okay... either there's something we can't identify that's causing this problem, or the card may be fubar'd.

I just ran a benchmark with a Ti4400 on an AXP 2500 @ 3200.
The Ti4400 @ default clocks reads 12,063. An IDENTICAL system with the R9700Pro runs 17,452.

HOWEVER, at stock R9700 Pro speeds, my P4 2.26 @ 2.55 with WinXP & DX9 scores 13,729 3DMarks, which doesn't sound very far off the mark with yours. However, with that 2300 AMD MHz, you should be smoking this system.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=7061531

Seeing that the 3200 is at a speed slower than your 2300, there is something really strange going on.

Are you using Omega drivers or vanilla Catalysts? What is your CPU Multi & FSB set to? DDR timings? Dual-Channel? 1:1?

[Thrax]

Just remember than a 9600 XT is slower than a real 9700 Pro.

[GnomeWizardd]

i know it is! but the problem is this real 9700 pro has never run like a real 9700 pro!

amd xp 3000+ @ 2310 221 x 10.5 my ddr is at dual channel

[TheLostSwede]

Gnome,

There is something else that is wrong.

Can you run a Sandra memory bandwidth benchmark?

I´m on IM if you need any help.

[GnomeWizardd]

aight I will do that when I am done packing my stomache with turkey! I gotta go they are wondering where i went!

[GnomeWizardd]

3646 on the RAm Int buffered
2924 on the RAM Float buffered


this is an old version of sisoft but it works! I am gonna go start to dl the new one

[TheLostSwede]

That's pretty good i must say. Well above average.

I think we need to do a reinstall of the os and all the other tools but they need to be installed in the right order. I'm not saying you have done it wrong or so, but we need to start somewhere.

If it is the card that is wrong, i suspect that 4 of the pipelines are disabled somehow. Have you flashed the videocards bios?

[GnomeWizardd]

yes i did a flash of the video bios and it didnt help.. The Winxp os was just reinstalled yesterday to try and solve this problem. I did a win2k install 4 days ago to see what i could turn up with a diff OS. alas same results

[GnomeWizardd]

BTW i am on aol or yahoo now if you see this send me a PM i wanan try and figure this out !

[Preacher]

So if the choice was between a 9600XT or a Sapphire 9800 Pro...wouldn't the Pro win out on performance? Just thinking of upgrading options prior to HL2..

[TheLostSwede]

I wonder if it's a 9500 you have with only 4 pipelines enabled.

Any way to check to make really sure? Simguy?

[GnomeWizardd]

I took the 9500 from my fathers pc and his scored higher than mine!

[keto]

Preacher, you'd take the 9800Pro all day every day.

G - I was going to suggest earlier but now that Mack brings it up, I'd be VERY curious to see front & back photos of your vc

[GnomeWizardd]

I have pics of it when i was installing my zalman heatpipe I dunno if you can tell anything tho http://www.tehgnome.com/Card/

[TheLostSwede]

http://www.tehgnome.com/Card/Card%20016.jpg

On that link, you can see the partnumber. Cause of the blur, i cant see it good enough. What number is it? Ati should have a searchfunction for it.

[GnomeWizardd]

pn 109 94200 11

[keto]

According to ATI, all their part #'s start with 102 and there is a search engine for searching PN's http://apps.ati.com/102lookup/

[SimGuy]

Mackanz had this to say
I wonder if it's a 9500 you have with only 4 pipelines enabled.

Any way to check to make really sure? Simguy?

God damn that would be damned irregular I think. ATI Quality Control would have really gone down the crapper to let an oldstyle R300-PCB based 9500 Pro be packaged as a 9700 Pro.

Possible? Yes. Likely? Almost not... but mistakes do happen.

Gnome: You'll find the Part Number (that 102 number) on the back of the card on the white barcode label. It will be the lower set of values. :)

As well, I need you to run a DEFAULT 3DMark2001 SE benchmark and submit it to the Online Result Browser. Than I can take a look at your fill rates and such information and make a comparison. :)

Thanks :)

[SimGuy]

Preacher had this to say
So if the choice was between a 9600XT or a Sapphire 9800 Pro...wouldn't the Pro win out on performance? Just thinking of upgrading options prior to HL2..

The 9800 Pro would definately win out on both performance and AA/AF abilities.

AA & AF are memory-bandwidth limited. The 9600XT only has a 128-bit memory interface, running at 600 MHz, giving it 9.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. As well, it only has 4 pixel pipelines and half the pixel/vertex shader 1.4/2.0 units as the 9700/9800 series cards has.

In contrast, the 9800 Pro has a 256-bit memory interface running at 680 MHz, giving it a whopping 21.76 GB/sec memory bandwidth.

Essentially, when you've got AA & AF information competing for memory bandwidth that's traditionally used by the GPU to perform rendering calculations and store frequently used data, the amount of bandwidth really comes into play. There needs to be all that extra memory bandwidth availability to allow the card to transfer the AA & AF information (essentially re-rendered pixel selections from the original screen) to the memory and back before it's rendered. Only 9.6 GB/sec of this bandwidth isn't enough, and the standard video information that's used in just rendering the raw scene must compete for ample memory bandwidth that's being used by AA & AF features. Hence why on older cards and today's low end cards with little memory bandwidth, AA & AF really impact performance.

On today's 256-bit parts, the cards are no longer memory-bandwidth limited, they are fillrate limited (speed of GPU/VPU). Hence, AA & AF on these cards don't impact performance nearly as bad as it would on the low-end cards. :)

[SimGuy]

Gnome: I've got another little task for ya.

Could you please download this file:

http://www.short-media.com/img/9800flash/FlashROM.zip

and unzip its' contents to a disk. You'll also need a Windows Boot Disk (98, 95, Me, etc... someway to get to a real DOS prompt).

Once there, remove the boot disk and insert the disk with the FlashROM.zip files on it.

I'd like you to make a BIOS dump of your video card using the FlashROM program and upload it to SM so I can take a look at it to make sure that the BIOS isn't doing anything wonky to your card.

Once you have inserted the FlashROM disk, change to your A: and type the following command:

flashrom -s 0 gnome9700.bin (the "0" is the number ZERO, not the letter "O").

Then, restart back to Windows, put that .bin file in a ZIP file and upload it to this thread. :)

We'll get to the bottom of this eventually. :)

[GnomeWizardd]

DAMN!!!!!!!!!!! Talk bout making my fraziled brain work at 10:30 at night! Ill have that done bye11:15 hopefully it doesnt crap out on me! My pc just restarted soon as a set it up to 1200x1024 ran for an hour then boom reboot!

[NoFuture]

did you try it in another computer just for fun. I recall having a lot of problems with 9700pros and NF2 chipsets at my shop.

[GnomeWizardd]

yes sir still same problems

[GnomeWizardd]

Done and here is your zip file!

[SimGuy]

Well... Anyone seen Reelbigfish in a while? Seems like I was sold a R9700 Non-Pro for R9700 Pro prices?

I just went to compare my 9700 Pro BIOS to the Gnome's and it turns out my card is actually clocked at the 9700 NP speeds, yet windows finds it as a 9700 Pro? WTF?

That's besides the point. I'll deal with it myself.

Gnome, if you have 3DMark03 installed (any version), could you fire it up and post your "Display Device" details underneath the "System Details" information page? I think I've found a way to determine how many pipelines are enabled on your card by checking this information dossier. :)

IE, my 9700 Pro (well, other than those NON-PRO clock speeds...) ??

Notice the "Textures In Single Pass" = 8. Radeon 9700/9800's are 8x1 texturing unit devices... so this will tell you how many pipelines are active (theoretically). Can someone with a NON-softmodded 9500 or 9600 do the same thing and post their info to make sure this actually works. I don't have a 9500 or 9600 to corroborate information with :(

[TheLostSwede]

Great work there guys. Hopefully this will come to an end.

[GnomeWizardd]

How bout pcmark04?? lol

[GnomeWizardd]

Total agp mem = 0 ???? WTF???

[Enverex]

Go to the run prompt and type dxdiag
Then go to the display tab and make sure "AGP Texture Acceleration" is turned on.

NS

[GnomeWizardd]

says not available

[Al_Capown]

No i cant i got it from a friend for free. I am looking for a good card under 200 bucks I am looking at the ti4800 by gainward. what do you guys think I should get?

Why did he give it to you for free?

There is still probably a possibility of sending it back to ATi. Just takes work.

[GnomeWizardd]

why cause at the time he thought it was dead I put a new heatsink and fan on it and it was good to go!

[Al_Capown]

Where did he buy it from? Does he still have the receipt? Why didn't he just rma it if it was broken?

[GnomeWizardd]

cause he was gay! and i think he got it from newegg

[Al_Capown]

Al_Capown had this to say
Does he still have the receipt?
See if you can call newegg and rma it. But I'm sure if that's the case and he finds out that you can rma it he will probably want it back. So, try to unlock those other 4 pipelines.

[SimGuy]

Gnome, all 8 pipelines are unlocked and running at full potential.

Seems like you have a problem with AGP Texture Acceleration. By chance, do you have a "SMARTGART" tab in the ATI Control Panel?

Without AGP Texture Acceleration enabled, you WILL notice a 10-25% performance drop, which seems to be in line with what you are experiencing.

In order to get AGP Texturing Acceleration enabled once again, you'll have to:

-> Uninstall ALL Catalyst drivers & Control Panel. DO NOT REBOOT.
-> Then, utilize a driver cleaner software and completely remove every trace of the Catalyst drivers found.
-> Delete the C:\ATI folder found on your hard disk.
-> Download the Catalyst driver suite you wish to use (recommend Catalyst 3.7).
-> Download the DirectX 9.0B redistributable here (http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/9/c/c9c8a1d4-7690-4c98-baf3-0c67e7f3751f/dx90update_redist.exe)
-> Disable your internet connection
-> Restart the system and logon.
-> Cancel any prompts you get regarding installing drivers for your video card.
-> Reinstall DirectX 9.0B & restart.
-> Upon restart, install the Catalyst 3.7 series, then the Control Panel. ONLY REBOOT once both have been installed.
-> Upon next startup, fire up dxdiag and check the Display tab for AGP Texturing Acceleration. It should now be available and enabled.

As well, I'd double check your AGP Aperture Size in the BIOS once again and set it to either 128 MB or 256 MB.

A user over at AMDMB Forums reported the same R9700 Pro AGP Texturing Acceleration problems as you with an NForce2 motherboard and this is how he fixed it :)

[Gobbles]

here may be other numbers that are silk screened right on the board. Certain numbers may indicate the graphics chip family for the board. Graphics boards BUILT BY ATI will include a "109 Number". Although this "109" number does not give specific information on a particular graphics board product, it may lead you towards the correct display drivers. Similar numbers may be listed for a POWERED BY ATI product.

http://www.ati.com/support/identify/cardver.html


dont know if anyone posted that yet.. more of a FYI kinda thing..

Gobbles

[GnomeWizardd]

YEa i will do that tonight when i get sometime right now i have NO time!

[MachineGunKelly]

My 9500 soft-modded to 9700 scores 12228 w/2100 XP stock, 512mb of 2100, w/AGP textures enabled at the settings simguy specified.
Would love to hear how this turns out. Hope it's the AGP textures. Good luck!

[GnomeWizardd]

we shall see! i do have the 9600 Xt on the way tho so if i do fix it ill probally still sell it cause i need the cash

[SimGuy]

9700 Pro > 9600XT by a long shot. :)

[GnomeWizardd]

not this 9700!

[GnomeWizardd]

16333 3dmarks!!! wahoo!!! I still might sell it tho I am gonan see if i can get 17k since it is at defaults right now!

[SimGuy]

Glad to know everything's back to normal :D

[GnomeWizardd]

just checked my pops 9500 pro on the nf7-s same problem. gonna redo it! wahoo!

[SimGuy]

Wierd... I think it may have had something to do with what order you install the driver software for ATI's cards. They can be very sensitive to what order things are installed in.

Usually, it's best to install DX9, restart, install display driver & control panel, restart and check AGP Aperture. Then, start up and you're good to go :)

[GHoosdum]

w00t! Big props to SimGuy for helping out the Gnome! Good luck with your issue there SimGuy.

[TheLostSwede]

Remember, chipset drivers can be a pain in the ass as well if you install them wrong. I wouldn't advice on installing DX before the chipset drivers UNLESS the Windows own drivers are good. I'm talking the AGP drivers here but it was/is mainly a Via problem though.

Glad you fixed it Gnome.

[SimGuy]

Chipset - NIC - DX - Video - Sound - Whatever Else.

That's the order I usually end up installing everything in :)

[keto]

:thumbup :thumbup :thumbup :thumbup :thumbup go G go

[GnomeWizardd]

lol its gonna be sweet when i get my christmas present ( 9800XT from what pops said! )

[Straight_Man]

For gaming and bench competitions, NOT the gainward ti4800, not even the SE. You do not want to know my AquaMark3D score, but I refuse to run nothing else while benching so it was definitely under 20K. I like BENCH-UNDER-LOAD....

But,the Feb 2004 issue of CPU (Computer Power User) has a bereakdown of cards in your price range that you might want to look at before you buy.... If the CPU Mag site will let you get there, try http://www.cpumag.com/cpufeb04/vidcards/ for the online version of the reviews. The FX 5700 and FX 5900 (interestingly, look at the eVGA.com FX 5900 SE, which is at street of $199.00 right now) can be had for about 200.00 street, and you might look at an ASUS Radeon 9600 XT also.

No i cant i got it from a friend for free. I am looking for a good card under 200 bucks I am looking at the ti4800 by gainward. what do you guys think I should get?

[csimon]

No i cant i got it from a friend for free. I am looking for a good card under 200 bucks I am looking at the ti4800 by gainward. what do you guys think I should get?
Keep combing the refurb section I saw an ATi brand 9800pro128 for $218 but are out of stock ATM.