First post, by Gahhhrrrlic
What began as a suspicion that my graphics card sucked has slowly morphed into a suspicion that my machine is generally running slower than it should. Here's a brief summary:
Shuttle HOT-557 board with 256kb integrated cache (just got a COAST module but it didn't work for some reason)
Pentium 120 (Overclocked to 133 via FSB from 60 to 66, 2x mult)
64MB SD-RAM PC66 CL2
ATI 3D Rage II 2MB EDO
SB16 ISA
NIC PCI
Modem ISA
IN-2000 SCSI Card ISA
- ALL games that support DX5 that I have tried are horrendously slow, no matter what their min specs are or how old or primitive they are
-Tomb Raider 2, F-22 Raptor, Mech Warrior 2, Wipeout, Descent Freespace Great War (all lowest settings)
-In all cases, performance seems unusually INSENSITIVE to resolution (ie. twice the resolution is only maybe 30% slower)
- Youtube confirms games like wipeout and Mech2 should be playable at low settings on a Rage 1 let alone a Rage 2
- I installed every version of DX in order from 5 through 8 and tested the same game each time - Very marginal bumps in speed of maybe 1%
- I tried multiple ATI drivers and got largely the same performance from all of them except the really early ones that had glitches.
- Sysinfo and Freespace launcher report the memory transfer of the graphics card to be 30 MB/sec
- Sysinfo shows the DRAM at 130 MB/sec
- Sysinfo shows the CPU operating at 63, which is short of what the reference tick for a P133 shows (100?)
I don't really understand what's going on but while I initially thought the graphics card sucked or was broken, I now think the entire system is running slow for some reason. The DRAM timings are maxed out and stable. There are no issues with the clock misreporting the speed - it is indeed 133. Cache is working. I am at a loss guys. I don't get why the computer is acting like a 486.