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Performance concerns on PIII machine

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Reply 20 of 22, by lost77

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That is indeed an AGP 4X board (it's even in the name). Do you have something similar to "Via CPU to AGP Controller" in device manager?

Weird about the memory, maybe try one stick at a time and other memory slots. PCI speed at 33 is standard so no problems there.

Reply 21 of 22, by Der_Richter

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lost77 wrote:

That is indeed an AGP 4X board (it's even in the name). Do you have something similar to "Via CPU to AGP Controller" in device manager?

Weird about the memory, maybe try one stick at a time and other memory slots. PCI speed at 33 is standard so no problems there.

I do have that, but it’s stuck on the Microsoft driver, and refuses to update. Tried a single stick, didn’t help.

As a sidenote I also tried running SiN on a much more powerful machine... Tried it on a 1.8GHz Pentium4 with a GeForce4 Ti4800 in AGP 8x, also on Win98 (some machine I had around). Even on that much overpower as to what was available at the time of the game release, I still have sub-50s fps at times, and some real nasty framerate jittering all over the place as well as drops. Even on that machine, just looking in certain directions will cut framerate in half, or more. Which is... interesting. I will write that game off as completely useless for testing as that should be proof that either it was made to be run only on machines 10 years after it was released or it’s just broken somehow 😀

Back to the issues at hand then, it sure seems like I need to fix that VIA driver issue. Don’t see why it won’t install... It goes through setup, but still no change and Windows still use the standard driver. Tried lots of versions, including the one on the manufacturers site for the mobo. No change. RAM stick was indeed funky though. Failed a stand alone memtest. Pulling it however yielded no better frame rates in REVolt or other games.

Preserver, refurbisher, collector. In that order.

Reply 22 of 22, by canthearu

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Erk, I gave up on my VIA Intel board, with respect to Coppermine performance. (Acer S61 board) And given that the 3rd PCI slot is not working correctly, I figured I had wasted enough time on this board.

Worked fine if I plonk a Katami or order CPU in it, gave expected performance. Ran a bit slow if I put in a coppermine CPU.

Additionally, stop trying for 4x AGP on this board, you will only ruin stability. The 4x AGP on these boards is only barely functional, and will usually crash if you try to use it. AGP 2x is usually stable and fast enough. 4x AGP was one of the market points at the time, rather than an essential performance feature then.

That said, the performance issue that I was having probably isn't universal to all VIA Intel chipsets of the era or all motherboards that use them.