I will update the new scores when I get home from work.

60.8 fps on a socket 939 Athlon 64 3200+ overclocked to 2,3 ghz,2g ram,7600gs 512mb ram,windows xp sp3.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

My AGP 939 system: […]
Show full quote

My AGP 939 system:

Athlon 64 3700 (2.2GHz), EVGA 6800GT AGP (307.83), 2GB DDR400, Gigabyte K8NSC-939 (NF3 250gb), Onboard audio, XP Pro SP3:

640x480 Medium: 115.0 fps
1024x768 Ultra: 98.5 fps
1280x1024 Ultra: 79.1 fps

Rant, now irrelevant.
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Its one of these newer 0.09 micron A64 I guess 😀
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00CFBOX%29.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00BNBOX%29.html

The older Athlon 64 3700+ s939 0.13 micron from jun 2004 is a 2400 MHz CPU?
I am not 100% sure but I think the s939 0.13um 3700+ is identical with the s939 0.13um 3800+ (2400-512kb) except it officially only supports 800MHz HyperTransport and not 1000MHz.
Usually the CPUs that wasnt strong in the HT department went to the s754 platform but no rule without exceptions.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00AWBOX%29.html

Run CPU-Z, it will know for sure 😀
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Some input needed.

After reading up some more I just realized that AMD did actually get the 0.09 micron CPUs to the market in October 2004, they used the 0.09 process for the lower speed grades for some reason. Oktober 2004 is damn near the Doom3 release, perhaps its better to call all single core s754 and s939 CPUs period correct. It is not like with the Prescott 1M vs Prescott 2M where they doubled the cache, the A64 could always be found with 512KB or a full MB of cache. The main differenence is, only SSE2 support in 0.13um CPUs while the 0.09 micron CPUs also support SSE3.
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You were not fast enough.

I changed the period correct cut off to 31 dec , it solved the Nforce4 and ATI X850 issue and it also makes ALL single core s754 and s939 CPUs period correct with one exception, the FX57.
On the Intel side the only relevant things released Aug 3 --> Dec 31 are the P4 570/571, the P4EE 3.46 and the Intel i925XE chipset which is just a rebrand of i925X with official P4EE 3.46 support.

Okay, finally got the timedemo results for the FX5500 sorted out. What a finicky card this is to get it to work right in Windows 98SE 😖

Pentium 4 2.4GHz Northwood, Soyo P4I-845PE (Socket 478), 512mb DDR-333, NVIDIA GeForce FX5500 256mb AGP (82.63 Win9x beta drivers), Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, DirectX 8.1b, Windows 98SE.

Medium Quality:
640x480=26.3
1024x768=12.2

High Quality:
640x480=23.5
1024x768=11.3

Ultra Quality:
640x480=21.7
1024x768=10.9

Not only did I have to use the last Win9x drivers Nvidia ever made in order to get the best framerate possible, I also had to reduce AGP aperture size in the BIOS to 64mb to avoid texture corruption and severe overall performance degradation (I was getting very low fps numbers, even lower than GF3 😵 ). And after several tries, this is the best results I could get. Texture quality is also much improved when compared with GF4 and GF3. Still, I wouldn't want to play Doom 3 with this card; I much rather have an FX5700 or better to get playable average framerates.

Now to give the GF6600 a shot. Hopefully the results will be much better (cross my fingers 😊 ).

Oh you are using Windows 98 SE. I would recommend going with XP for Doom 3 and later games (Splinter Cell included).

Skyscraper wrote:

Its one of these newer 0.09 micron A64 I guess :) http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00CFBOX%29.html http://www.cpu […]
Show full quote

Standard Def Steve wrote:

My AGP 939 system: […]
Show full quote

My AGP 939 system:

Athlon 64 3700 (2.2GHz), EVGA 6800GT AGP (307.83), 2GB DDR400, Gigabyte K8NSC-939 (NF3 250gb), Onboard audio, XP Pro SP3:

640x480 Medium: 115.0 fps
1024x768 Ultra: 98.5 fps
1280x1024 Ultra: 79.1 fps

Its one of these newer 0.09 micron A64 I guess 😀
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00CFBOX%29.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00BNBOX%29.html

The older Athlon 64 3700+ s939 0.13 micron from jun 2004 is a 2400 MHz CPU?
I am not 100% sure but I think the s939 0.13um 3700+ is identical with the s939 0.13um 3800+ (2400-512kb) except it officially only supports 800MHz HyperTransport and not 1000MHz.
Usually the CPUs that wasnt strong in the HT department went to the s754 platform but no rule without exceptions.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%2 … 00AWBOX%29.html

Yep, it's a 2.2GHz San Diego. It runs nice and cool, has a full meg of cache, and overclocks to hell and back. Plus, it was much cheaper than the 4000+ which ran only 200MHz faster. The San Diego 3700+ was the CPU to put in a killer gaming rig back in the day. 😀

When overclocked to 2.8GHz, it outperforms the Pentium M Dothan @ 2.66GHz (especially in 640x480 Medium). Overall, the two overclocked processors perform similarly. 3DMark01 prefers the overclocked Pentium M, while Doom 3 runs better on the overclocked Athlon64.

Athlon 64 3700 2.2@2.8, EVGA 6800GT AGP (307.83), 2GB DDR400, Gigabyte K8NSC-939 (NF3 250gb), Onboard audio, XP Pro SP3:

640x480 Medium: 152.3 fps
1024x768 Ultra: 108.7 fps
1280x1024 Ultra: 80.8 fps

I do not know if you remember but last year I tried to buy a socket 754 DFI Lanparty board. I bought 3 before giving up because they were all broken in one way or another. I recently found a cheap DFI Lanparty board in "good working condition" on the Swedish version of Ebay from a seller with only good reviews so I thought, hey lets give this another shot. Well... the lessen is to not buy things without seeing high res pictures that isnt out of focus. I took a better picture and even in low resulotion its not hard to find the Gremlins.

I have yet another DFI s754 board waiting at the post office but that one was sold as broken / for spare parts. I guess that board will be working perfectly.

With luck I will have an Athlon 64 system running before the weekend. If I do not find working parts for a DFI s754 system I will build some other K8 system, I just need to find the time.
The Intel system is nice but stands no chance against Steves s939 system 🤣 . I will keep it more or less intact though as I am using it to play both Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights.

There is a real lack of AMD 64 boards. I guess even back in the day the bulk of people bought a Pentium 4 with mostly gamers going for AMD 64 boards. Personally I just stick with Intel. I know that Athlon 64 is faster but I can just go with a Core 2 Duo platform if I need performance. The Pentium 4 boards I worked with have all been terrific.

I don't get why the scores are so uniform on my 939 system, and less then the 6800 at 640x480. On a similar 939.
The system is overclocked, it must not like the newer gpu, probably optimized for the older gpu's, but the DC 939's only have 512kb per core of L2 cache, that might influence it. The single core 939's all have 1mb.
I guess the game is cache limited too?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Oh you are using Windows 98 SE. I would recommend going with XP for Doom 3 and later games (Splinter Cell included).

I know that Phil, in fact I have a spare 40gb WD hard drive, 2gb of DDR-333 ram and my copy of WinXP SP3 set aside to try out later; for now, I'll just finish the Doom 3 timedemos in Windows 98SE 😀

AlphaWing wrote:

I don't get why the scores are so uniform on my 939 system, and less then the 6800 at 640x480. On a similar 939.
The system is overclocked, it must not like the newer gpu, probably optimized for the older gpu's, but the DC 939's only have 512kb per core of L2 cache, that might influence it. The single core 939's all have 1mb.
I guess the game is cache limited too?

The single core Athlon 64 s939 CPUs can be found with both 512KB and 1MB of cache. The dual cores can be found with 1MB or 2MB.
There is even Single Core A64 with only 128KB and 256KB cache but those were sold under the Sempron brand.

Cache is supposed to play a minor part when it comes a Athlon 64 performance.
The built in memory controller with improved memory latency is the main reason for this I guess.

Yes but the ones benched above are all 1mb.
Trying to figure out the odd FPS.
A wall of 103-105fps from 640x480 to 1600x1200 is odd would you not think?
The 1mb ones are all getting higher fps at 640x480.

AlphaWing wrote:

Yes but the ones benched above are all 1mb.
Trying to figure out the odd FPS.
A wall of 103-105fps from 640x480 to 1600x1200 is odd would you not think?

The thing that stops the performance dead at a bit over 100 FPS is the CPU.
It bottlenecks the video card so much that all resolutions give the same FPS.

Steves 108 FPS is at 2.8 GHz but that is bottlenecked a bit* by the video card (6800GT) so in his case its the other way around compared to your system.
*not that much difference between CPU at stock speed and overclocked

For you on the other hand every extra MHz you can push your X2 3800+ will increase the FPS.

If we take a look at the Intel systems there is a much wider spread for simular hardware. I do not think the CPU is the main bottleneck here I think its the memory latency and throughput.
It would be easy to determine with my P4 670 by comparing scores between 14*322 and 19*227, The CPU can handle both settings (4.5 GHz) and my bet is that the setting with higher FSB and therefore greater memory speed (running 1:1) would yield much higher FPS in Doom 3. Perhaps I should find my i975X board and give it a try.

Here are the results for the GF6600.

Pentium 4 2.4GHz Northwood, Soyo P4I-845PE (Socket 478), 512mb DDR-333, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256mb AGP (82.63 Win9x beta drivers), Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, DirectX 8.1b, Windows 98SE.

Medium Quality:
640x480=42.7
1024x768=41.8

High Quality:
640x480=42.4
1024x768=41.2

Ultra Quality:
640x480=37.5
1024x768=35.9

Now this is more like it 😀 . The 6600 is much better than my older GeForce cards; still, I wouldn't mind a bit more oomph. Maybe a 6800 Ultra will do 🤣 . Installing and setting up the 6600 was also a breeze, I was done before I even noticed (I even returned the AGP aperture size back to 128mb without any problems). Texture quality was just as good as the FX5500.

Now to grab my spare 40gb hard drive and two 1gb DDR-333 ram sticks, install Windows XP SP3 and see how Doom 3 behaves in its native environment.

Yea the 6600GT AGP is one of my favourite cards to pair up with a Socket 478 Pentium 4. However I find the failure rate quite high. I have 4 cards and only 1 works 😢

The 6800GT will be held back by the P4. While the Athlon 64 is certainly faster the Core 2 Duo showed just how much these processor were holding back graphics cards.

So going with something like a Core 2 Duo and a 7600GT you should see much higher performance. The 7600GT beats 6800GT SLI. Back in those days a new card meant it faster than twice the previous card 😀

I figured as much, seeing the fps results tells me I'm pretty close hitting the P4 Northwood ceiling. I just want to somehow push it close to the 60 fps range in High Quality (maybe an FX5950 will get me there 😅 ).

I'm surprised you have 3 dead GF6600 cards Phil. Mine's a little over 2 years old since I bought it at eBay and had been in storage for about 7 months, yet still works fine. Go figure.

Well I got 52.7 fps @ 1024 x 768 Ultra with a 3.2 GHz Northwood. There is a 3.4 GHz model, but I wasn't able to source one and that's as good as it gets. Should still provide a decent gaming experience. I'm sure there is a setting that is hardly noticeable but makes the game run a lot faster. There is always one like the soft shadows in FEAR 😀

Coppermine is significantly slower than Tualatin in Doom 3 for some reason.

PIII-850, 100MHz FSB, i440BX, 768MB SDRAM 3-3-3, Radeon 9800Pro (cat 7.3), SBLive, XP Pro SP3

640x480 Medium: 15.4 fps
1024x768 Ultra: 14.1 fps

PIII-S at 1585MHz hits its brick wall at 42.6fps (at 640x480 with a 6800GT running 81.98). Granted, the Tualatin is on a different motherboard, clocked nearly twice as high, and is equipped with more memory (1.5GB), but 15.4fps is almost three times slower.

Pentium III-S is a beast and the massive amount of cache plus high FSB / memory throughout helps a lot. Do run the memory at CL 2 though. Pretty much all PC133 modules have SPD setting of CL2 at 100 MHz.

It wasnt the other DFI Lanparty Nforce3 socket 754 board that was waiting at the post office. It was yet another DFI K8 motherboard I bought, I had almost forgotten about this one.

I really really hope this board works, I have looked over it and visually I cant find any faults.
DFI RDX200 socket 939 with ATI Radeon Xpress 200. The chipset was released November 8, 2004.

I also found this little fellow in a drawer, say hello to Mr Claw Hammer! 😀

I do have newer 0.09 micron Athlon 64 CPUs but I thought that I would at least start my K8 benching with the original 0.13 micron K8.