First post, by botond87
Hi Everyone!
I've learned a lot from this forum, reading through guides and forum posts helped me a lot in assembling and getting my Win98 gaming rig up and running - but now I have a problem I cannot solve on my own, hopefully you guys can help me out 😀
So, I have the aforementioned Win98 gaming rig with a Voodoo2 SLI setup, until now I used a TNT2 in the AGP slot. I figured I'll take the rig a step further, and add a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 into the mix. Once the card arrived, I stipped it of its massive heatsinks, cleaned it, and added fresh Arctic MX-2 to the graphics chip and RAM modules. The card is a Leadtek AE250LE with 64MB of RAM, and for a Geforce 4 Ti, it runs painfully slow, comparing benchmarks on the web, mostly on a Geforce 2 level.
I've tried so far with UT2003 and NFS: Underground 1, and when there is a lot of crap happening on-screen, the performance takes a massive hit, going as low as 5-10 FPS. When there is not much happening, it can go up to 40-60 FPS. As a concrete example, the built-in UT2003 benchmark maxed out at 1024x768 has a flyby score of 89 FPS, and a botmach score of 29 FPS. When looking up GF4 card benchmarks on the web, the performance should be double. The other interesting thing is, that this seems to be pretty much resolution independent. The dips happen even at 640x480, hell, there is not a lot of difference in NFS: U between 640x480 and 1280x1024.
The only way the performance is better, if I turn all of the settings to the lowest possible, but then both games look like crap. I've tried lowering step by step a couple of settings, but that didn't make any difference.
To me, it seems like some sort of bottleneck, best guess would be CPU, but that's a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4, so theoretically that shouldn't be much of a problem.
Here's what I've tried until now, that made absolutely no difference:
- Different driver versions from 30.82, all the way up to 61.76 (including 56.64 and 44.03)
- Checked the clock speeds with Coolbits enabled, they are on stock at 250 / 513 MHz
- Tried overclocking to 290 / 525 (made nothing faster)
- Removed the Voodoo2 cards to only have the Geforce 4
- Tested different AGP aperture sizes from 16 MB to 256 MB
- Changed AGP modes down from 4x to 2x, then back
- Toggled AGP Fast write, AGP master 1 WS write & read back and forth
- Tried to set the AGP Driving Value to manual, and upped from DA to EA, EF, even FF
And at this point I'm out of ideas. This are my specs:
- SL-85DRV (VIA P4X266 PR22-S) motherboard
- Pentium 4 1.7 GHz CPU
- 512 MB of DDR400 RAM
- 32 GB "hard disk" SD card with IDE adapter
- Leadtek AE250LE Fegorce 4 TI 4200 64MB
- Corsair VS350 PSU
My last guess is that maybe the no-name VIA motherboard has some funky AGP solution that cannot handle the Geforce 4, or that the card itself is somehow bricked, but I don't really know how if it actually works.
Is there something I'm missing here?
Thank you in advance 😀
