Just upgraded rig

Hey all, I just upgraded my rig this weekend.

P4 3.4 mh cpu socket 775

New Thermaltake CPU fan

Asus P8P500 mobo

1 gig pc 2700 ram

PNY GeForce 6800 GT

The problem is I dont feel the rig is performing as well as it should. Seems similar rigs score in the 5000's on 3D mark05, yet my score only increased to 3840( from 3740 on the P4 2.8 rig). I can only assume that the system needs tweaking, and I would greatly appreciate any links to websites or forums dealing with system optimising, and also I am thinking of getting a liquid cooling system this weekend. I hear they help as well. Anyone have experience and or preferences regaurding cooling systems?

Memory running async (get faster memory). Possibility of memory not running in dual channel mode (put memory in right channels, enable dual channel in bios). I'm running 2.8@3.1, same graphics card, and half the memory, and I'm on 4955, so there's definately something wrong.

I went into the bios and can't seem to find a dual channel setting anywhere. I have two stick of ram, one at pc2700 and one at pc3200, so the system runs at pc2700 by default. They are both plugged into the a1 and a2 sockets on the motherboard. I will probably go get a stick of pc3200 ram this weekend and see if this is the problem.

You have to have the same module for it to work in dual channel mode, and in two slots not next to eachother. I'm not sure what slot A1 means, but it should go like this for Dual Channel:

module

---emtpy---

module

---emtpy---

That's assuming you only have two sticks. If you are buying a second stick of PC3200, you really need to buy the exact same stick as the other one.

I'm in the process of upgrading my PC too, and added an AMD Athlon
64-bit 3000+. I still had the old hard drive and it slowed down to
insane levels for such a fast processor. The only thing I can think of
is a complete HDD format. Worked for me (mostly... it's still using the
same VERY old 5gig hard drive with a tiny cache), so it could help, but
only as a last resort.

As jeff said, you are either running with the front side bus of the cpu
hugely limited by your slow RAM, or you are running asynchronised which
will also have a performance hit. If you feel like tinkering with
overclocking, you could try and pull the FSB of the RAM up a bit and
drop the FSB of the CPU so that you are running with the FSB's
synchronised, and that should enable you to bump up the multiplier on
your CPU to regain the loss in clock speed.

Thats my current situation also - I'm running an Athlon 2800XP (should
run at 333Mhz FSB) with a 512mb stick of PC2100 RAM (should run at 133
FSB). I had some pretty poor performance using stock settings, but once
I dropped the FSB of the CPU to 266 (and therefore the FSB of the
system was synchronised) and upped the multiplier, performance
increased. I then managed to raise the FSB of the system to 147Mhz and
performance increased a little more. I now have 512mb of PC3200 RAM on
its way to me, as I managed to increase the CPU FSB up to 400Mhz while
stable so hopefully at that speed while synchronised I should see a
good increase again.

Obviously keep an eye on temps, be aware of the risks, blah blah blah :smile:

He can't change the multiplier on the CPU unfortunately, it's been disabled on Intel for years.

Giving the memory slacker timings might help get a higher frequency on the memory, but on the other hand it might do nothing, and no matter what the frequencies, I don't think you can run in dual channel mode with two completely different sticks.

In addition to ReNo's warnings, keep an eye on the AGP and PCI frequencies - there should be the option to lock them at 33/66 - running these busses at a higher-than-intended frequency can give loads of very odd effects.

OK I just upgraded the RAM. Bought two sticks of Corsair PC 3200 512mb 400 mh speed. Benchmark score went up only 100 points( 3D Mark05=3890 best so far). I placed them in the dual configuration mentioned earlier in the thread. I am currently attempting to contact the manufacturer for any info they might have with regaurd to performance. I did notice one thing, my plug from the power supply has 4 pins less than the receptacle on the mother board. I have a thermaltake 420 watt and I am wondering if I need the right size plug. Perhaps there is a power issue.????

On a lot of boards, especially if they support many different ram frequencies, need you to specify the speed in BIOS. I know a lot of boards need that to recognize 400mhz ram. So, the ram might be running at like 233mhz or something as such.

Yeah you have to choose it running sync. in the bios. The option isn't always clear though - for me, if you want to run it sync, you select memory frequency 400, regardless of what your FSB actually is. Others give it as a ratio (you want 1:1 of course).

The motherboard manual should have a bit on how to set it up for dual channel. How much of a play have you had with the memory timings and other memory settings?

/me points juim to my christmas thread.

you seem to have an overstock of old parts now :heee:

Juim said:
I would greatly appreciate any links to websites or forums dealing with system optimizing,

this link leads to a doom III link, but that link also leads to many other links for optimizing.. it made my doom III increase 5-10 fps by following them..

most would say 5-10 is nothing, but i noticed it, since my machine could barely run before the tweaks without looking like a doc roc*thwacks ensue* ... well you know :heee:

anyways, the slideshow effect was reduced.