Junkpile PC, looking for any help possible

[Feielle]

I've had, essentially, the exact same system for about 4 years now. I primarily use Macs since I work in graphic design, and my PC is more or less an amalgamation of the discarded parts left over from when other friends update their PCs and don't want the old components.

About a month ago, the motherboard took a dump on me. It was an ASUS P4P800-SE. I had this with an Athalon 2Ghz processor, a Radeon 9600XT Pro video card, and 1.5G of ram. 350W power supply, if that matters. It was a decent machine for 2004-ish. I was able to play in resolution like this easily at 30fps:

http://www.ancientcirclels.com/galle...0001/Wyrm1.jpg

Nothing earth-shattering, but good enough for me.

After that died, I rooted around and found a spare motherboard, an ECS M930L, and a Celeron 2.5Ghz processor to go with it. The board has 2 DDR and 2 SDRAM slots on it, but you can only use one set at a time. I had to cut back from 1.5G to 1G of RAM. I'm still using the 9600XT gfx card.

My system on paper is plenty enough to play FFXI, but the game is damn-near unplayable. I've tried dropping the graphics res to 1280x760 with a 512x512 background resolution (SNES style) and it still runs at 5fps. My logitech controller is slow to respond as well.

I'm familiar with a BIOS to a certain degree, but I'm lost as to why this is running so poorly. I have the latest drivers from ATI as well as all recent Windows XP updates (ah, yes - I'm running XP Professional) 80G HD with, essentially, nothing on it since this is a freshly reformatted machine.

Any help is appreciated. Playing on the 360 is killing me right now...

[Fallso]

If you're comfortable with doing so - crack open your PC and give it a good maintenance overhaul (cleaning dust, checking all components and stuff).

Chances are after 4 years your gfx card is prolly a bit dirty (or perhaps broken, you'll find out). Wouldn't hurt to check the temps on mobo, CPU and GPU too.

[Isiolia]

That, to me sounds, like you're missing chipset drivers for faster AGP modes and such. Did you install them when you formatted? Or just the ATi drivers?

[Jotaru]

That, to me sounds, like you're missing chipset drivers for faster AGP modes and such. Did you install them when you formatted? Or just the ATi drivers?

This happened to me a while back... I upgraded to a card that was (at the time) $300 and over a period of 6 months never noticed ANY improvement in my system... Needless to say I was frustrated beyond belief (spending money and getting no change = yay!)

Turns out the card I was initially using was PCI, and the one I upgraded to was AGP (yea, old school) but the chipset drivers weren't up-to-date (after a reformat I reinstalled everything but was my first reformat on my own so forgot about chipset...) so it was running in an AGP 1x speed mode instead of the 8x speed it was capable of...

Never seen one program installed improve performance so much :D

[levish]

make sure you also use the most recent drivers for the rest of the components, like others have said in particular chipset drivers

might also want to download cpu-z and gpu-z to see what they say about if you are running agp 8x or not and so on

[Feielle]

Thanks I'll try checking the chipset drivers. I do know the BIOS is pretty old on the motherboard, but I didn't think this would affect performance. I got sent away on business after I posted this, so I haven't had a chance to check anything just yet.

As for my vid card being dirty, I cleaned everything before reassembling my machine. That shouldn't be an issue.

I do know my CPU runs a bit hot, but nothing potentially damaging. I'll check when I get home and see what I can find for exact numbers.

My card is an AGP card. Where would I go to get chipset drivers?

Thanks for all the advice.

Edit: I have updated drivers for all other components on the system:
Network card
Audio card
USB/Firewire cards
ATi GFX drivers
Logitech Controller

Is there anything else I may have overlooked driver-wise?

[Isiolia]

From looking around, the motherboard you have is likely a PC Chips M930L, since ECS (same company really) doesn't offer one under that model number. The PC Chips website does have an M930L listed under their socket 478 motherboards, and has an AGP driver available for it here.

Alternatively, you could try to get the driver directly from SiS, as the manual from PC Chip's site indicates that it has the SiS XP4 (645) chipset. SiS's version seems to be slightly newer, but also generic for their entire lineup. Either way it's a 3-4 year old driver.

Sounds like you have drivers in for most everything else.

[Feielle]

Updated the AGP drivers and its still very choppy. running 1280x768 with 512x512 background rez, all maps/textures compressed, no mip/bump mapping and no environmental animation or shadows put me at about 5fps in Whitegate.

I know my specs aren't anything amazing, but it should be capable of much more than that. Even my mule in Windurst lags when running to and from the AH.

Another odd thing about this motherboard is that it can't seem to keep any of my CMOS settings. I have to go into the BIOS if i ever shut it down for more than a day. I've replaced the battery three times - twice from other boards and one brand new battery when I finally gave in and stopped being a cheapass - and it still loses all settings withing a day or so.

Any other ideas?

[Isiolia]

The board itself could be flaky. I've had a computer that was like that as well (well, my brother did) years ago, but this was before 3D accelerators and the like. He just had to set the clock every time he turned the thing completely off.

Have you tried other games or software that would tax the machine to see if it's performing up to par in general?

Tried running something like CPU-Z to verify that everything is clocked right? I know some motherboards will default to "safe" settings that might be far below the actual capability of the processor.


Considered maybe dropping a few hundred on building a machine from new parts? =P
I recently updated my HTPC with a new CPU/mobo/RAM/PSU for about $280. Integrated graphics on it are fine for my purposes, but a more-than-FFXI-needs graphics card on that would keep it in XBox 360 territory for cost.

[Feielle]

Have you tried other games or software that would tax the machine to see if it's performing up to par in general?

Tried running something like CPU-Z to verify that everything is clocked right? I know some motherboards will default to "safe" settings that might be far below the actual capability of the processor.

Considered maybe dropping a few hundred on building a machine from new parts? =P

I don't really use my PC for much gaming - being 2004 spec it really isn't up to par - It pretty much just runs the network in my house and does FFXI. I also use it to store music, but i havent transferred all that back over just yet.

Screencap below of the processor info from CPUz.

Its looking more and more like i may need to actually spend some money, but man I don't like that idea. Also, another friend's computer took a dump on him too so I'm getting another processor and gfx card to play with if i cant get this config to work, though i'd like to find out exactly whats wrong...

Thanks for all the help so far.

[Feielle]

Don't want to be a pest here, but does anyone have any other leads?

For shits, I loaded up EVE Online. with graphics maxed out, it ran choppy but not terrible. 45fps when not fighting and down to about 15 or 20 when in a lot of action. After turning the graphics down to a more reasonable level, it ran quite smoothly.

I know its not as graphics intensive, but all my modelviewers run very quickly and smoothly.

[Fallso]

Your cache looks a bit low, how old is your processor?

[Omniyoji]

Your cache looks a bit low, how old is your processor?

It's a farking Northwood man... OLD technologies.

plus it's a Celeron...

you make kitty cry

[Isiolia]

Cache is normal for that model Celeron. http://processorfinder.intel.com/detail ... Spec=SL72B

That being said, it -is- abnormally low for a modern CPU and could possibly cause issues depending on how FFXI is written. Even most 1 GHz+ Celerons have at least twice that.


Sounds somewhat like it's not in hardware. Did you install antivirus software n' such? Have you tried running the game with those things disabled? I know certain programs have messed with FFXI in particular zones before, but complete slowdown I dunno.

Could try disabling sound in the FFXI Config app, see if that does something. The antivirus issues I've experienced were due to sound files.

Sounds like everything but FFXI runs as expected?

[Fallso]

Your cache looks a bit low, how old is your processor?

It's a farking Northwood man... OLD technologies.

plus it's a Celeron...

you make kitty cry

Still, in my old laptop I've got considerably more cache, and that's a celeron. Having only a few KB of cache could be a problem indeed.

[Feielle]

Sounds somewhat like it's not in hardware. Did you install antivirus software n' such? Have you tried running the game with those things disabled? I know certain programs have messed with FFXI in particular zones before, but complete slowdown I dunno.

Could try disabling sound in the FFXI Config app, see if that does something. The antivirus issues I've experienced were due to sound files.

Sounds like everything but FFXI runs as expected?

AVG Anti-virus & Spybot search+destroy. Neither caused any issues before, but I was working with different hardware. I tried the sound disable trick before, but no dice.

I have... 6 other processors laying around? maybe more... Gotta admit I'm learning as I go here, but I have heard some crummy things about Celerons. I have a LOT of parts to work with here, maybe I should just list out what I've got sitting about and you guys could help me make heads or tails of it all.

Granted, most of it is old as dirt, but I've got easily enough to build 3 working machines. Will update when I get home.

[mootsfox]

You should probably hunt for a better CPU if you can. It's not hard to find a 2.8GHz P4 (I'm guessing S478) for about $10-15 on ebay.

Using a Celery CPU to play any game is just a bad idea.

Since you have a bunch of CPUs around one of those might work. If you can post pictures or sSpec numbers (preferred) we can figure out which to use with your motherboard.

sSpec numbers are a five digit code, your era is going to probably start with SL6 or SL7.

sSpec of this CPU is SL7CH
http://www.lancompnetwork.com/images...8-unit_000.jpg

Your CPU is either SL72B or SL6ZY. (S478 Celery @ 2500MHz)

[Feielle]

The Celeron was a SL6ZY. I also have an AMD Athalon 64 laying around in here, but the board i got it with might be fried it won't fit any of my ancient shit. That one has the following markings on the top:

ADA3200DAA4BW
NBBWE 0609CPMW
Z904527B60849

I might try grabbing a spare power supply and seeing if i can get it to boot with an old gfx card.

For now, i found this laying around (pic below) will boot up FF in a bit and see what its like. Also found a 1gig ram stick to replace one of my 512's, so I'm at 1.5G ram instead of 1.0G

[mootsfox]

The Celeron was a SL6ZY. I also have an AMD Athalon 64 laying around in here, but the board i got it with might be fried it won't fit any of my ancient shit. That one has the following markings on the top:

ADA3200DAA4BW
NBBWE 0609CPMW
Z904527B60849

I might try grabbing a spare power supply and seeing if i can get it to boot with an old gfx card.

For now, i found this laying around (pic below) will boot up FF in a bit and see what its like. Also found a 1gig ram stick to replace one of my 512's, so I'm at 1.5G ram instead of 1.0G

An AMD Athlon 64 3200+ is going to be about 3x as fast as that 2.5GHz Celery.

You'll need a S939 motherboard, which aren't too expensive, but are hard to find. You can use the same DDR RAM though.

You said you had an ECS motherboard, which aren't great for overclocking, but that Northwood runs cool and could probably hit 2.5-2.8GHz without too much struggle. The Northwood at 2.0GHz would be maybe 30-60% faster than the Celery depending on the application.

[Isiolia]

I ran FFXI on a 2Ghz P4 for a few years, should easily be enough power with a decent video card.