How do you make sure AGP is 8x?

[GMaxx]

I've got a winnie 3200 at 2.5 with 1 gb pc3500 (2.5-3-3-7), Antec 480 psu and bfg6800gt.

The problem is that my benchmark scores are terrible. I'm only getting like 53k in AM3. I should be in the mid 60k at least with this setup.
For ex., my gfx in AM3 is only like 7350. What's up with that?

I've reinstalled the chipset drivers, vid card drivers (71.21), reformatted and did all of this again too.

I even borrowed my friend's identical working card card to see if it was the video card problem, but the his card gives the same lousy scores on my computer but not his.

The only thing left I could think of was a bad agp slot on the mobo or bad mobo.

However, before tearing the mobo out I wanted to know if there was anyway to make sure your AGP was at 8x and that AGP was fullly enabled.

I'm using the nivida gart driver. My graphics card display shows AGP of 8x, but it just isn't performing like it's at 8x.

As a side note, I noticed my 12v rail was at 11.3
Not sure if maybe that is causing problems for my video card.
Could it be a bad psu. My Antec Neopower is suppose to be more than enough for this setup.

Any comments would be appreciated. I'm going crazy trying to figure out a reason for these terrible scores.

THANKS!

 

[Kruzin]

I wouldn't worry about the voltage.
Acceptable variance is 10%, which on the 12volt rail is 1.2v, or a minimum of 10.8v.

And don't worry about being in 8x mode. 4x mode will give almost identical results, and even 2x, depending on the amount of RAM on the card. 2x/4x/8x is all marketing hype, and does not translate to bencharks well.

I would be looking more into FSB speeds, making sure they match CPU->RAM->Bus. If you crank the Bus speeds on one end, and not the other(s), it often won't help performance, and may even be detrimental.

 

[Major_A]

Get Everest Home Edition and click on the Motherboarb tab > Chipset. It should tell you what you want to know. Another way you could do it install Coolbits and look in the Advanced Features section of your driver contol center.

 

[GMaxx]

Get Everest Home Edition and click on the Motherboarb tab > Chipset. It should tell you what you want to know. Another way you could do it install Coolbits and look in the Advanced Features section of your driver contol center.

Thanks guys! I'm running Everest HE right now. I looked there and it is showing an agp of 8x.

 

[Scali]

And don't worry about being in 8x mode. 4x mode will give almost identical results, and even 2x, depending on the amount of RAM on the card. 2x/4x/8x is all marketing hype, and does not translate to bencharks well.

The amount of RAM doesn't have all that much to do with AGP bus speed. Sure, it affects AGP texturing speed, but AGP texturing is rarely used, especially on videocards like this, that have 128 or 256 mb onboard.
The more important factor for performance is how quickly you can access the videomemory, for sending new geometry, textures, or commands.
Also, it's not so much marketing hype (you really do get 8x AGP bus speed with AGP8x), as it is that in most situations the AGP bus speed will not have a great effect on performance.
Ideally games will upload new textures or geometry as little as possible, which means the AGP bus is hardly used. That's the advantage of hardware T&L, it pretty much took the pressure off the AGP bus.
There are exceptions... like Doom3 for example, it still updates a lot of geometry constantly... That may be a game where AGP bus speed may affect performance considerably.

 

[arentol]

If the GART says it's 8x then it's 8x. Besides 4x is only like 1% slower these days (I have even seen it test as being faster in some tests). Like Scali said, the AGP bus just isn't used that heavily anyway.

Check your AGP aperature settings (in your bios). If your at 256mb try 128mb and then 64mb. Some people get 10% or more boosts from dropping down to 128mb..

Also (really outside chance on this one) make sure you try testing without any overclocks. The overclock may actually be causing a problem that's not really visible except as lowered gaming performance (perhaps because the GPU isn't getting the power it should be).

 

[GMaxx]

If the GART says it's 8x then it's 8x. Besides 4x is only like 1% slower these days (I have even seen it test as being faster in some tests). Like Scali said, the AGP bus just isn't used that heavily anyway.

Check your AGP aperature settings (in your bios). If your at 256mb try 128mb and then 64mb. Some people get 10% or more boosts from dropping down to 128mb..

Also (really outside chance on this one) make sure you try testing without any overclocks. The overclock may actually be causing a problem that's not really visible except as lowered gaming performance (perhaps because the GPU isn't getting the power it should be).

OK, I haven't experimented with the agp aperture much. I just dropped it down to 128mb once and really no diff., but I'm going to try 64mb now.

Yeah, I tried without any ocing on my card and the scores were even worse.

I'm thinking it might be a bad agp slot on the mobo. I just got my new Epox mobo last week and have been trying to sort this problem out during that time.

THANKS!