Try using older driver for the 9600 and that 1600+ might be a bit of bottleneck for that card. I remember one time I had a GTX 550 Ti paired with my 3.8GHz pentium HT and I got very bad scores, it was worst then the hd 2400 I originally had in it. Some times to high of a card or to modern drivers can really make an impact.

what games?

9600XT with XP 1600+ is I suppose a little unbalanced

Also check your card with GPU-Z - what is GPU/MEM speed and bus width (64/128 bit). I see many variations of 9600 chipset and some may be "slow" by default (64-bit bus width for example).

i had the MSI 9600XT 128MB RX9600XT-TD128 in 2005 (still have it) and at that time i got almost 11000 in 3Dmark 2001SE with a XP 3000+ Barton + KT880

kixs wrote:

Also check your card with GPU-Z - what is GPU/MEM speed and bus width (64/128 bit). I see many variations of 9600 chipset and some may be "slow" by default (64-bit bus width for example).

I have 128-bit.

Should i use GeForce 4 MX-440 for MS-DOS and older Windows games?

2001 is mostly a CPU benchmark, don't use it to compare GPUs in different systems. 03 would be more reliable.

And yes, memory interface is often the issue. There are so many gimped cards out there, versions that aren't on any wikis, it's quite amazing really.

The athlon 1600+ is probably holding back the 9600XT

On my rig - i get 11150 3dMarks running:

AMD Athlon XP 1600+ Clocked at 1604Mhz (153Mhz FSB x 10.5)
768mb PC2700 Kingston DDR, running 2-2-5-2 timings, 4way bank interleave,
8QW
MSI KT3 Ultra (non-ARU)
40gb Maxtor D740X 7200rpm
Radeon 9500 non-pro softmodded w/8-pipes, clocked to 325/615

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/134429-33-asus-9600...

Something is wrong with my GPU. I have lag (FPS drop) in all older games. GeForce 4 MX-440 works better in games on the same computer.

I should get the better result i have on the 1280x1024 not on 1024x768. I have only 9500 on 1024x768, with latest driver for Radeon 9600 i have only around 8500-9000 on 1024x768.

3dmark01 results look fine to me. If you get frame drops you most likely have a chipset driver or DX issue. What version of catalyst are you using? Try completly removing ALL ATi drivers, reinstall your chipset driver - use an older version of via 4 in 1 - or experiment with different versions. Also keep in mind that on XP (at least on SP3) the chipset driver will not install correctly. You might have to go into device manager and manually install the VIA AGP to CPU bridge driver.