8800GT very poor performance

T

Tronne

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
65
I just upgraded from a 6800 to my 8800gt and am seeing virtually no improvement. 3DMark06 gives me about 5300. I get about 17 FPS in Shat in WoW.

My rig is:

Pentium 4 530 (Prescott) 3.0 OC'd to 3.6
Asus P5AD2-E Premium motherboard
2 Gig of Geil DDR2 Dual Channel (PC2-4300 DRAM freq 240.1 MHz)
Corsair HX620 power supply
2 SATA drives
etc

The video card is running PCI16.

I used 3 driver cleaner programs with multiple driver installs.

On CPU-Z it shows FSB as 960 and Bus Speed at 240.

Any advice or help is appreciated. I've been seeing a ton of threads about slow 8800GT cards with no real solution. Do you see any bind in the system? Is the Prescott too old to keep up? (I don't see any spiking when viewing CPU activity.

I've also tried OC'd the hell out of the card, UCing etc.. nothing is budging my frame rate.
 
Its that cpu yours thats bottlenecking your 8800gt. Plus 3dmark6 really needs a good cpu to get a decent score. Upgrade your cpu to core duo and you will get better results.
 
What are your individual 3dMark scores. CPU can have a big impact on the final score, but the SM2.0 and SM3.0 scores should be more closely related to the video card. Run GPU-z and make sure the card is running the PCIe at 16x (some people had problems where they would drop down to 1x).
 
I just re-ran 3DMark06 and got the following score: 5735.

Breakdown:
SM2.0 2482
SM3.0 3473
CPU 997

More info: I'm running XP.
I've checked with every tool I can find and verified I'm running at 16x.

Should I just get a new motherboard with PCI-E 2.0, DDR3, etc? If so can someone suggest a good motherboard, processor combo. Due to work I've not been able to follow the trends over the last few years and its been about 2.5 years since I built my last rig.

Thanks again for any help!
 
Faster DDR2 would be a lot more bang for the buck than DDR3, and PCI-E 2.0 offers no real-world advantages yet.

My guess is that your CPU and RAM are the problem. Not only will a better CPU greatly impact that part of the 3DMark score, but it will boost the shader scores as well. I don't know what upgrade options your current mobo offers, but if it supports Core Duo and faster DDR2, you can transform your performance for less than $200.
 
No real upgrade paths on the motherboard. Can you suggest a new motherboard, processor, ram set up? I used to study this stuff daily but after being out of it for a few years a lot of it seems like a new language.

Thanks again for any help!

T
 
Lots of options nowadays, depending on how much you want to spend. A nice motherboard based on the Intel P35 chipset is your best bet - you can find some good ones for around $100. Then pick a processor based on what you will be using the system for - a cheap but still effective option is an E2180, or you can go higher end with an E6750 or something like that, or go quad-core with the Q6600. Any major brand of DDR2-800 will work fine with any of those options, and the prices on 2GB is ridiculously low nowadays (like $25-40). So something like a Gigabyte P35-DS3L with an E2180 and 2GB of DDR2-800 would run you about $225 or so.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top