FFXIhealer wrote:

Well....thank the Lord I'm not trying to run Crysis. 🤣

1) You want to buy ATI GPU, but Athlon XP may be a lil' bit slow for Crysis...
2) Running on lower resolution than Full HD (or 1280:1024), will help as well 😁
+ Crysis "Harbor" map, uses mostly SM2.0 shaders.
Source : LINK

No, seriously, I'm NOT trying to run Crysis. Doom 3 is probably the most demanding game I might try....that or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the expansions. I wouldn't have even considered Oblivion unless this 3000+ Athlon XP works properly AND I get the video card upgrade.

I've got my eye on a possible good card. It's an ATI Radeon X700 Pro with 256MB of GDDR3 on an AGP slot (probably has an AGP -> PCI-E converter or something. Requires a 4-pin floppy power connecter, but that's fine. I got that. Performance is just a tad ABOVE the 9800xt I had been wanting to get and the price is only $19 + $7 shipping. Good deal? Don't know yet if it works as the details were minimal, but the card looks like it's in good condition from the pictures. Even comes with the original user's manual for it and I can download Catalyst 10.2 off of AMD's website (already checked). Opinions on the price? Good?

Well, I did it. I pulled the trigger. I got an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ "Barton" coming and now an ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB AGP card coming in. Here's crossing my fingers - hoping they both work.

that should make a very speedy socket A PC, the X700PRO, I'm not convinced it will be above the 9800xt, but in any case it should be close enough; still the positive thing is that performance is around there but it will be using less power, the GPU is natively PCIE,

now Oblivion, that's a game from 2006, a real challenge, I'm sure it's playable (I remember people with mods playing with Geforce 3!), but perhaps not ideal
x1K series and geforce 7 were the main thing during the Oblivion release.

I was looking at the X700 Pro PRECISELY for the reasons you listed - lower power requirement, less heat generation, same performance. Benchmarks in games show slightly higher framerates than the 9800xt, but not too much. Keep in mind, I still have my Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop with the 7800GTX in it. Oblivion ran pretty well on that one. I recall a stutter or two, but not many. The display on that laptop IS 1920 x 1200, after all. Tried it once on my GTX 480 system and it flew (obviously). But this isn't about flying or 175+ FPS - it's about what I can get away with at 1366 x 768 (16:9) on this system. It's about pushing the boundaries. Hell, I don't even know yet if I will be able to get the Barton core to work on this MB.

FFXIhealer wrote:

I was looking at the X700 Pro PRECISELY for the reasons you listed - lower power requirement, less heat generation, same performance. Benchmarks in games show slightly higher framerates than the 9800xt, but not too much. Keep in mind, I still have my Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop with the 7800GTX in it. Oblivion ran pretty well on that one. I recall a stutter or two, but not many. The display on that laptop IS 1920 x 1200, after all. Tried it once on my GTX 480 system and it flew (obviously). But this isn't about flying or 175+ FPS - it's about what I can get away with at 1366 x 768 (16:9) on this system. It's about pushing the boundaries. Hell, I don't even know yet if I will be able to get the Barton core to work on this MB.

I understand, I recently played a lot of Far Cry on the 9500PRO, which is probably not ideal, but it's was fun experimenting with it (and in a way going back to, since when the game was launched I was running a 9500!), and it was pretty OK overall, I even thought about trying Oblivion in it, might give it a go once I get more ram for my P4 (only running with 768MB right now), I know it's not going to run well, but...

now 1920x1200 is going to make it challenging even for the 7800

Yeah, pushing 1920 x 1200 was pretty hard for a number of games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It played very well around the 720p resolution, though. I remember sitting in my barracks room in Hawaii and installing that on my laptop. I had been playing it on my PS3...but the first time I dropped into a multiplayer map on my PC, I got 12-0 (kills-death) before I got killed and a good number of headshots. After that, I never played a FPS on console again.

3DMark 03 Version 340
3DMark 05
AquaMark 3

Far Cry V 1.2
Unreal Tournament 2004
RtCW - Enemy Territory
Tomb Raider - Angel of Darkness
Half-Life 2 (Counter-Strike: Source, Build 2124)
Doom 3

Well this is interesting.

In attempting some cable management on this system, I moved the ZIP 250 drive from the Master position on the Primary IDE port (jumpered as slave) to the slave position of the Secondary IDE port. I moved the Primary IDE port position to the 80GB WD hard drive, which had been occupying the Slave position on the Primary IDE port. It used to look like this:

Primary IDE Master: WD800JB-00FMA0 (On Gray Slave slot on cable)
Primary IDE Slave: IOMEGA ZIP 250MB (On Black Master slot on cable)
Secondary IDE Master: Sony DVD-RW DRU-10A (On Black Master slot on cable)
Secondary IDE Slave: None (empty Gray Slave slot)

Moved everything to this:

Primary IDE Master: WD800JB-00FMA0 (On BLACK MASTER slot on cable)
Primary IDE Slave: None (empty Gray Slave slot)
Secondary IDE Master: Sony DVD-RW DRU-10A (On Black Master slot on cable)
Secondary IDE Slave: IOMEGA ZIP 250MB (On Gray Slave slot on cable)

The system takes over 10x as long to POST and won't boot. Went into BIOS and did an Auto-detect on the Primary IDE Master and got a bunch of zeros.

Moved the drives back to their original configuration and BOOM, I get into Windows XP no problem.

What the hell is going on here? Is the HDD so old and used that it no longer can run control of an IDE cable as the Master unless it's handed off from the "slave" of another drive? I'm about to attempt a CMOS reset with the 2nd drive configuration to see.

Why would I want to change it? Well, the system has a spot for a 2nd hard drive next to the first and I had thought about putting in a larger 120GB hard drive at some point, or even moving the OS over to that one with migration software. I don't know yet. But I was going to have the slave spot on that IDE ribbon available right there while I was doing cable management and cleaning up all the dangling wires/cables.

UPDATE: Sorry, my bad. I got it working the 2nd way by re-jumpering the HDD to Cable Select. Works fine.

Wow... looking at the top picture, that's actually a very good high-resolution image of my motherboard. You can almost pick out details of each individual capacitor. And man, are those caps tall on this board.

Ok, as was pointed out to me on Facebook, it might be a concern that this Abit motherboard needs expert eyes-on. So I'm adding the photos here on this thread for you guys. Examine the condition of the MB capacitors and tell me what you think. If I need to do a re-cap, please be helpful and add manufacturer brand-names and sites to order from (keep in mind I live in the U.S.A.)

There are several swollen and at least one leaking/venting cap. My advice is to have the entire board recapped if you want to use it for a good long time. I'm sorry that I can't offer more help; I'm just not that skilled with soldering or identifying which caps to replace with what. The folks over at BadCaps.net are the experts. You should post these photos over there and ask for advice. The owner of BadCaps.net also offers a re-capping service. It's not cheap, but he does very good work and it is worth the price. He's done several of my boards and they've all come back in perfect working order.

Yeah, I took another shot and then edited it twice. Total Capacitor List:

2x Nichicon 4700 HD 6.3v H0147 BROWN
5x Nichicon 3300uF 6.3v (Tall Black near CPU)
2x Teapo 2200uF 6.3v GRAY
2 x Teapo 1000uF 16v YELLOW
14 x Teapo 1000uF 10v RED
8 x Teapo 1500uF 6.3v BLUE
8 x Teapo 1000uF 6.3v GREEN
2 x Teapo 470uF 6.3v PURPLE
5 x Teapo 100uF 16v CYAN

🤣 you posted exactly what I was going to suggest doing as I finished up writing it 😀

FFXIhealer wrote:

Yeah, I took another shot and then edited it twice. Total Capacitor List:

I think you've forgot to mark the middle capacitor direct left to the CPU.

Anyway, it's a nice board which should be worth to spend time and/or money for it (re-capping).

I've already started to solder out the bad cap's from several boards i have.

Status is now:
>20 capacitors are desoldered from 3 boards (one Abit, one MSI and this Epox one).

Worst problems:
3 times, the pin's were not able to solder of the boards and part of the pin's just break from the cylindrical capacitor.
Then i had to drill out these damned fixed holes with the thinnest drill tool i have.

I hope, after i'll get the new capacitors, the "solder-in" work is not that "pain in the ass" like the 3 times i've mentioned before...

I did not forget to mark anything. If you check the caption on that photo, you'll see that I only marked caps that had any kind of detectable leakage or actual bulging on the top. That one is completely clean and completely flat on top.

Then again, if I re-cap, I'll replace ALL of the capacitors - not just the obviously damaged ones.

Well the Barton CPU came in. I had to straighten almost two entire rows of pins before it would grudgingly slide into the "Zero-Insertion Force" slot (apparently, the previous owner didn't know how to pull the CPU out of its socket properly). After that, applied new thermal paste on the CPU die, installed the reinstalled the heatsink, hooked everything back up, cleared the CMOS, and it booted up in system defaults. I put it in User Mode, stuck it at 166MHz FSB with a x12.5/x13 multiplier, made sure the memory timings and settings were at SPD, then rebooted and it came up as an AMD Athlon XP 2.15GHz. Windows XP immediately recognized the new processor as an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, all 2 GB of RAM were still recognized, and CPU-z agreed with everything. The entire FSB is now running at a full 166MHz, so the RAM isn't having to do a +33MHz stepping. I don't like when the RAM and the FSB are out of sync that way on these older systems.

I did not benchmark it at all, as certain parts of the system were resting on a non-conductive towel outside of the case and what-not. I HAVE been contemplating changing out all the capacitors, mind you. I should get the Radeon x700 Pro later this week and I hope that one works too. I'm talking to the guy who works at BadCaps.net to get the replacements. I haven't decided whether to ship the board to him and have him do it or to attempt the repair myself and just buy the caps directly as one giant set. The caps would be over $40, the job is $125 + shipping out to him with a burn-in and a 2-year warranty on the caps.

Well shit.

Got the X700 Pro AGP card today, so I took it out, removed the heatsink and fan, disassembled the whole thing, cleaned out all of the caked-on dust that was everywhere, put it back together, then put it in my system. When I turned it on, the system refused to POST. All of the fans are spinning and the HDD spins up and the DVD drive clicks its own POST, but no beep codes, nothing put out to the display, nothing.

Removed the card and reinstalled the 9550 and got an immediate POST and boot into Windows XP. Removed and tried the X700 Pro again - no POST.

What

the

fudge

FFXIhealer wrote:

Well shit. […]
Show full quote

Well shit.

Got the X700 Pro AGP card today, so I took it out, removed the heatsink and fan, disassembled the whole thing, cleaned out all of the caked-on dust that was everywhere, put it back together, then put it in my system. When I turned it on, the system refused to POST. All of the fans are spinning and the HDD spins up and the DVD drive clicks its own POST, but no beep codes, nothing put out to the display, nothing.

Removed the card and reinstalled the 9550 and got an immediate POST and boot into Windows XP. Removed and tried the X700 Pro again - no POST.

What

the

fudge

I always try to clean stuff before using it, but I won't completely disassemble graphics cards as I prefer to test them first to see if they work.

You could try it on a workbench using a different motherboard perhaps, do some basic troubleshooting first.

Btw, maybe it wont work in AGP 4x slots? (just a guess)

But it's "funny" that it won't even POST with the card, so maybe it is the AGP 4x slot?

That's what I'm thinking. The last time this happened, it was a USB 2.0 PCI card that made my ASUS P2B refuse to POST in the exact same way, but that PCI card works perfect fine in THIS Abit KX7-333 motherboard. I think maybe the card was made for an 8x only AGP slot, even though it has the AGP 4x 1.5v notch in the card. And I don't actually have any other MB that has an AGP slot to test the card in other than an AGP 2x slot on the ASUS P2B...so I have no way to test the card myself. The fan on it spins. I know that much.

Perhaps it's because the GPU chip is designed for the PCI-Express bus (It even says PCI-Express on the chip itself when I cleaned off the thermal paste during the breakdown and clean). It probably has a PCI-E to AGP converter chip somewhere on the board to allow it to use the AGP bus...but wouldn't that also limit it to AGP 8x operations?

It may be that I'll need to flip the card on E-bay, reclaim most of my money, and try an ACTUAL AGP 8x/4x native card, such as the original 9800xt I originally wanted (but people price-gouge on). Hell, in THEORY, maybe I could make a slight profit off if THIS card in order to ease the purchase of the other one?