CPU Bottleneck with Radeon 9700?

[Hukuis]

About a month ago I bought a built-by-ATI Radeon 9700 on eBay for only
$100. It was a great deal and it improved performance by quite a lot
over my old Radeon 9000. One thing I've noticed though, is that I get
approximately the same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
in Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm using an Athlon XP 1900+; is this chip
slow enough to bottleneck my graphics card? I have 512MB DDR RAM, and
it's all running on an old K7S5A Pro mainboard. I've been looking at
the Athlon XP-M 2500+, which is under $100 and can be overclocked to
some very nice speeds. Would this be enough to remove my CPU
bottleneck, or should I wait until I have enough for a S939 64-bit
system?
Thanks in advance,
-Hukuis

 

[Tod]

About a month ago I bought a built-by-ATI Radeon 9700 on eBay for only
$100. It was a great deal and it improved performance by quite a lot
over my old Radeon 9000. One thing I've noticed though, is that I get
approximately the same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
in Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm using an Athlon XP 1900+; is this chip
slow enough to bottleneck my graphics card? I have 512MB DDR RAM, and
it's all running on an old K7S5A Pro mainboard. I've been looking at
the Athlon XP-M 2500+, which is under $100 and can be overclocked to
some very nice speeds. Would this be enough to remove my CPU
bottleneck, or should I wait until I have enough for a S939 64-bit
system?
Thanks in advance,
-Hukuis

You might try deleting all ATI software, then reloading with
the latest drivers.
Then load the latest motherboard drivers from SIS
This site might also offer some help
http://p199.ezboard.com/bk7s5amotherboardforum

 

[Augustus]

About a month ago I bought a built-by-ATI Radeon 9700 on eBay for only
$100. It was a great deal and it improved performance by quite a lot
over my old Radeon 9000. One thing I've noticed though, is that I get
approximately the same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
in Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm using an Athlon XP 1900+; is this chip
slow enough to bottleneck my graphics card?

It could. First I'd check that vsync isn't enabled. A straight 9700 non-pro
isn't a screamer with 275/275 clockings, but it is a 256bit card with 8
pipelines. But you should see different framerates with different
resolutions. The XP-M 2500+ is very overclockable, but your ECS mainboard
will require a BIOS flash to run at anything other than stock speeds. Is
your RAM PC2100 also? Do yourself a favor and get a better Nforce2 dual
channel board that you can tweak.
http://www.computing.net/cpus/wwwboard/forum/11341.html

 

[Egil Solberg]

About a month ago I bought a built-by-ATI Radeon 9700 on eBay for only
$100. It was a great deal and it improved performance by quite a lot
over my old Radeon 9000. One thing I've noticed though, is that I get
approximately the same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
in Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm using an Athlon XP 1900+; is this chip
slow enough to bottleneck my graphics card? I have 512MB DDR RAM, and
it's all running on an old K7S5A Pro mainboard. I've been looking at
the Athlon XP-M 2500+, which is under $100 and can be overclocked to
some very nice speeds. Would this be enough to remove my CPU
bottleneck, or should I wait until I have enough for a S939 64-bit
system?

UT has always been very much CPU-dependent. If vsync as previously mentioned
isn't the reason for the similar results, this probably is, and you would
get improvement with better CPU.

 

[Hukuis]

VSync is disabled (the framerate was around 47fps). I've already
flashed the CheapoMan BIOS to try and overclock my 1900+, but it can't
pull anything over 1733mHz and remain stable. The RAM is PC3200, so I
won't have a problem overclocking the 2500+.
Thanks for the help,
-Hukuis

 

[Hukuis]

Also, this card may not be a screamer, but it manages very decent
framerates with the Doom 3 demo at 1024x768 on High detail (they're
around 41fps, still playable in my opinion).

 

[Andrew MacPherson]

One thing I've noticed though, is that I get approximately the
same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 in Unreal
Tournament 2004

I saw similar results in several benchmarks when I got mine. The true
strength of this generation (and later) cards is the ability to run modern
games at 1024x768 (and 1280x1024 if you're lucky) with x8aniso and x4fsaa,
which -- IMO -- really improves the visual experience.

A faster CPU would probably give you higher numbers, but a similar spread
of results over the resolutions.

Andrew McP

 

[Sleepy]

About a month ago I bought a built-by-ATI Radeon 9700 on eBay for only
$100. It was a great deal and it improved performance by quite a lot
over my old Radeon 9000. One thing I've noticed though, is that I get
approximately the same framerate for 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
in Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm using an Athlon XP 1900+; is this chip
slow enough to bottleneck my graphics card? I have 512MB DDR RAM, and
it's all running on an old K7S5A Pro mainboard. I've been looking at
the Athlon XP-M 2500+, which is under $100 and can be overclocked to
some very nice speeds. Would this be enough to remove my CPU
bottleneck, or should I wait until I have enough for a S939 64-bit
system?
Thanks in advance,
-Hukuis

The flyby timedemo should show differant results but the botmatch timedemos
are definitely CPU dependent because of the CPU doing all the bot AI.
Are you sure a K7S5A Pro will support a 333fsb chip - thought it only did
266fsb
Athlons ?

 

[Hukuis]

The flyby timedemo should show differant results but the botmatch
timedemos

are definitely CPU dependent because of the CPU doing all the bot AI.
Are you sure a K7S5A Pro will support a 333fsb chip - thought it only did
266fsb
Athlons ?

The Mobile 2500+ is a 266FSB part, although it can be run at higher bus
speeds for overclocking purposes. If I were to buy one, I would run it
with a FSB of 150 mHz and a multiplier of 15 for a 2.25 gHz system.