Hmm hard to say what the root cause is, but it's a hyprid PCIe / AGP board with a VIA chipset 😜

Some alternatives: AM2 board with Phenom CPU

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=ALiveDual-eSATA2

No, the AGP port isn't crippled... you definitely shouldn't be getting results like that. The board is generally a little slower than Intel-based ones, but it should be more on the order of 5-10%, not 40-50%.

I'd recommend going through the thread about the board over at the Anandtech forums, there's all sorts of obscure and sometimes counterintuitive BIOS settings that can have significant effects. Unfortunately, it's been awhile since I've worked with mine, so I can't remember most of the details.

I had a problem with this board not recognising an agp card when I replaced a pci-e that had died, xp kept reporting no video hardware when trying to install drivers. I think we solved it by re-installing the chipset drivers.

Amigaz wrote:

I'm currently throwing together a fast AGP rig for some experiments, it consists of these components: […]
Show full quote

I'm currently throwing together a fast AGP rig for some experiments, it consists of these components:

Mobo: 4CoreDual-SATA2 http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=4COREDUAL-SATA2
CPU: Core 2 Duo E6600
Ram: 2x1gig 800mhz Corsair Ballistix

Currently using a Geforce 6800GS AGP 512mb in it but so far I get about 40-50% worse FPS in 3dmark06 compared to what I get with this card in an i875 Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme rig

I'm using the latest Via 4in1 drivers and BIOS for the mobo, and latest gfx card drivers

Does anyone here have any experience in this mobo?
I'm starting to think the AGP port is crippled on this mobo 😜

I still have a few good AGP cards that i can test with a nice athlon CPU just for performance comparison, a BFG 7800GS 256MB and a Sapphire 3850 512MB. What's your score in 3DMark06?

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

No, the AGP port isn't crippled... you definitely shouldn't be getting results like that. The board is generally a little slower than Intel-based ones, but it should be more on the order of 5-10%, not 40-50%.

I'd recommend going through the thread about the board over at the Anandtech forums, there's all sorts of obscure and sometimes counterintuitive BIOS settings that can have significant effects. Unfortunately, it's been awhile since I've worked with mine, so I can't remember most of the details.

Can't see anyone having any AGP performance issues on that forum with this board, hope people still have any knowledge about these boards since I'm going to make a post about my problems on that forum

sprcorreia wrote:

Amigaz wrote:

I'm currently throwing together a fast AGP rig for some experiments, it consists of these components: […]
Show full quote

I'm currently throwing together a fast AGP rig for some experiments, it consists of these components:

Mobo: 4CoreDual-SATA2 http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=4COREDUAL-SATA2
CPU: Core 2 Duo E6600
Ram: 2x1gig 800mhz Corsair Ballistix

Currently using a Geforce 6800GS AGP 512mb in it but so far I get about 40-50% worse FPS in 3dmark06 compared to what I get with this card in an i875 Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme rig

I'm using the latest Via 4in1 drivers and BIOS for the mobo, and latest gfx card drivers

Does anyone here have any experience in this mobo?
I'm starting to think the AGP port is crippled on this mobo 😜

I still have a few good AGP cards that i can test with a nice athlon CPU just for performance comparison, a BFG 7800GS 256MB and a Sapphire 3850 512MB. What's your score in 3DMark06?

My 3dmark06 score with the GF6800GS is 2802

Apparently my VIA to AGP bridge driver wasn't updated when I installed the VIA 4in1 package but it didn't increase my AGP performance 😜

Currently using a Geforce 6800GS AGP 512mb in it but so far I get about 40-50% worse FPS in 3dmark06 compared to what I get with this card in an i875 Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme rig

My 3dmark06 score with the GF6800GS is 2802

^^ This is really good result for this card! Average results oscillate around 2600 points. If you encountered problem during using another application I recommend to use older drivers. The latest drivers are not the best for "antique" hardware. (; In this table you have mentioned which drivers are recommended for each graphics card:

http://www.3dnews.ru/download/drivers/video/nvidia_video

EDIT:
Are you sure you tested your graphics card using 3DM06 in the past? Maybe you tested it in 3DM05. They look very similar...

udam_u wrote:

^^ This is really good result for this card! Average results oscillate around 2600 points. If you encountered problem during usi […]
Show full quote

Currently using a Geforce 6800GS AGP 512mb in it but so far I get about 40-50% worse FPS in 3dmark06 compared to what I get with this card in an i875 Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme rig

My 3dmark06 score with the GF6800GS is 2802

^^ This is really good result for this card! Average results oscillate around 2600 points. If you encountered problem during using another application I recommend to use older drivers. The latest drivers are not the best for "antique" hardware. (; In this table you have mentioned which drivers are recommended for each graphics card:

http://www.3dnews.ru/download/drivers/video/nvidia_video

EDIT:
Are you sure you tested your graphics card using 3DM06 in the past? Maybe you tested it in 3DM05. They look very similar...

Your absolutely right, I had been running 3dm05 on my P4 extreme rig.

Here's some results:

C2D E6600, Asrock 4core dualsata2 Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample 256mb:

C2D E6600, Asrock 4core dualsata2 Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample 256mb flashed with Ultra BIOS:

Pentium 4 Extreme 3.4ghz, Abit IC7-G Gainward 6800GS 512mb:

Pentium 4 Extreme 3.4ghz, Abit IC7-G Radeon HD3850 512mb:

As expected the 3850 owns!! going to test it on the C2D E6600 rig to see if the Abit S478 rig is a bottleneck 😀

That 3850 will deflate the excitement of a 6800 GS for sure 🤣

swaaye wrote:

That 3850 will deflate the excitement of a 6800 GS for sure 🤣

hehe....yeah 😀

The Radeon 3850 AGP is a powerhouse, Crysis runs at circa 30fps on my P4 Extreme rig at 1680x1050 with everything set to high...pretty impressive for a system based around stuff from 2004-2005 except for the gfx card..

This is how you flex with the 3850. The P4 is certainly a bottleneck.

@prophase_j

And they say AGP is dead? bahh

Guess I'll squeeze out some more points with my E6600 or the E7300 😉

My Asrock mobo is currently packed away since there's another "patient" on the surgery table

I haven't seem too much about that hybrid AGP/PCI-E board, it is kinda interesting. I'm also using an AsRock, mine is a 775i65g rev 2.0 with an E5800 overclocked to 3.5ghz. This uses the 865 chipset from Intel that was somehow made to take the new Core2 processors. This motherboard's overclocking ability and some choice memory allow me to run a sick FSB setting of 250mhz with the memory locked 1:1.

Another interesting result:

Same i875 canterwood chipset and RAM but different mobo, DFI Lanparty 875P-T and a P4 3.6ghz Prescott CPU with less cache than the P4 EE in my Abit rig 😜

Didn't know a lousy 200mhz raw speed helped this much 😕

Nice! I have been looking for one of those DFI boards, but it's like they don't exist anymore. At any rate, your result isn't one I would expect either. I figure with the P4 EE perhaps you had hyper threading disabled. The alternative to that, is the benchmark is better with prescott. I would have figured the northwood and its shorter pipeline to be faster or same even with it being 200mhz slower.

prophase_j wrote:

Nice! I have been looking for one of those DFI boards, but it's like they don't exist anymore. At any rate, your result isn't one I would expect either. I figure with the P4 EE perhaps you had hyper threading disabled. The alternative to that, is the benchmark is better with prescott. I would have figured the northwood and its shorter pipeline to be faster or same even with it being 200mhz slower.

It's a VERY nice mobo imho...looks nice and performs well, but it didn't come cheap when I bought it a year ago.

I have HT enabled on the Abit IC7 rig, maybe it's the long cache scheme on the P4 EE that system perform slower?

I know that another cache level will usually increase latency,but P4 in general will always improve with memory bandwidth. The 3rd level cache will improve that. The other idea was that there are certain optimizations with the newer microarchitecture, however I always though it benefited encoding and compression type things more.

I have a new idea Amigaz; is it possible that you have different drivers on each computer, or more importantly so, if you had different settings in Catalyst, for things like AA AF and Catalyst A.I.?

prophase_j wrote:

I know that another cache level will usually increase latency,but P4 in general will always improve with memory bandwidth. The 3rd level cache will improve that. The other idea was that there are certain optimizations with the newer microarchitecture, however I always though it benefited encoding and compression type things more.

I have a new idea Amigaz; is it possible that you have different drivers on each computer, or more importantly so, if you had different settings in Catalyst, for things like AA AF and Catalyst A.I.?

Same ATI Catalyst driver on both machines, same Intel chipset drivers

Maybe it's down to the timings stuff in the BIOS?