VOGONS


First post, by plds1865

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Hi all,
I just wanted to share something really important here that might help others.
I was experiencing very below average performance in my retro gaming pc, which could barely run 3d games in 640x480, despite having a GeForce Mx 440 64Mb, 384mb of ram, ssd, and a Pentium iii 800mhz.
Games were stuttering and lagging heavily, with drops down to 12-15fps even in the lowest settings when there was more action on screen in games like Half Life and Unreal Tournament.
Just to give you an idea, this setup was supposed to give me at least around 5000 points in 3d mark 2000, but I was getting only 2347.
After many tweaks and testing gpu drivers, overclocking, changing bios settings, migrating my system to an ssd and so much more, I couldn’t find a solution, I only managed to increase my performance by around 15%, but still very far from similar systems I saw online.
I was almost giving up…
Then the solution came: I installed the 4in1 chipset drivers for my motherboard.
My performance jumped to 5554 points in 3d mark 2000, and most games up until 2001 run at 1024x768 completely fine (always above 30-40fps or more)
So never forget to install the latest chipset drivers, their absence will completely bottleneck your entire system, making your gaming rig run really slow.
So before thinking of upgrading, check if all drivers are installed and working optimally. Your system might be a lot more powerful than you think.

I hope this helps!

Reply 1 of 1, by PD2JK

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Good for you having a good performing system in the end. 🙂

I tend to run dxdiag or the Nvidia control panel to see if AGP being recognized/working. If it says PCI or some test are disabled, 9 out of 10 it's missing chipset drivers (apart from the graphics driver). Or 'Normal' mode instead of Turbo mode was selected during the 4-in-1 driver installation.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Pluto 700 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856