Video: Gaining Maximum Performance

[Philip Malone]

Well I purchased the Geforce fx 5600 256 mb video card
and had some questions. I did some research/chatting and
learned all sorts of tricks for better video performance,
but i do not know how to apply these settings:

1) IRQ conflicts. How do i make sure my computer isnt
experiencing any of these? How do i make sure that i
have no APIC or ACPI enabled?

2) Bios Settings. My intel bios does not have any of
the settings that people recommended that i change. It
is very limited. It's the most recent version. Is there
some other bios for video cards or something? Is there
some sort of other bios that can work in place of the
intel one? can i change these settings another way using
windows xp?:

enable fast writes
Agp aperature
AGP side Band
Assign IRQ to VGA
Pci Bursting
PCI 2.1 Compliancy
Assign IRQ to USB

3) optimizing memory timing. What is this? how do i do
it using windows xp?

4) TSRs (Terminate & Stay Resident). What are these? how
do i remove them ?

5)Standard PC mode. How do i set windows xp to run my
computer in this mode?

6) ANY AT ALL other recomendations you have for video.
So far i have done the following:

~Maxed my monitors refresh rate
~re-Set my paging file to 1024 mb, rebooted into safe
mode, defragged.
~Turned off AA and AF in my Geforce card settings.

This is ALL i have done, So any other advice you have
would be great. If u could answer any of my six
questions or help me in any other way you will have
helped me more than u can imagine. I am really in a
slump because of my poor video card performance. Thank
you very much for reading this.

Here are my system specs:

~Intel Pentium 4 2.00 GHz
~1024 mb system ram
~3 harddrives (dont know speeds)
~Windows Xp Professional
~Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 256 mb DDR Agp (at 4x with intel
board)
~Intel Mother board D845GBV_ with latest BIOS
~333 watt power supply
~DirectX 9.0b
~Latest Drivers for everything

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

1) IRQ conflicts. How do i make sure my computer isnt
experiencing any of these? How do i make sure that i
have no APIC or ACPI enabled?

If you were getting IRQ conflicts the system would probably hang or crash.
You normally get to see the irq table when the system powers up.
All modern pcs handle irq sharing and xp positively loves it, so why worry
about it ?
Why do you think want to disable ACPI ?

2) Bios Settings. My intel bios does not have any of
the settings that people recommended that i change. It
is very limited. It's the most recent version. Is there
some other bios for video cards or something? Is there
some sort of other bios that can work in place of the
intel one? can i change these settings another way using
windows xp?:

Bios is motherboard specific, its just a fact of life that some
manufacturers let you get at certain settings, others dont. Its the kind of
thing you look for when you're laying out your money. If you wanted a
tuneable board, particularly if you're in to overclocking, I'm afraid this
isn't it. :-(

It has some sort of ami bios, you may be able to find something on the web
to get at settings which aren't avaiable, this will involve patching the
bios with an editor, so you've really got to know what you;re doing or
you;ll end up with a dead board.

It has onboard video to start, thats not good if you intended getting your
own AGP card, so thats more than likely why there are no video tuning
options.

The agp slot is only 1.5V compatible presumably your new video card doesn't
require 3.3V ?.

enable fast writes Not available in bios

Agp aperature Is available Advanced menu/Video Configuration but

with 256MB of onboard memory not really relevant.

AGP side Band Not available in bios

Assign IRQ to VGA Not available in bios, although it probably gets one by

default, does the IRQ table get displayed during boot ?

Pci Bursting Not available in bios but all slots have bus

mastering so should be on.

PCI 2.1 Compliancy Its 2.2 compliant which should be backwards compatible.

Assign IRQ to USB Again not availbale, but normally gets one by default, check irq table at boot.

3) optimizing memory timing. What is this? how do i do
it using windows xp?

Most memory has SPD (signal presence detect), this board only supports spd
memory. You can change memory timings in bios, advanced/chipset
configuration, although, spd works well, so unless you know what you're
doing , DONT

4) TSRs (Terminate & Stay Resident). What are these? how
do i remove them ?

TSR old terminology. Made application routines immediately available by
loading them into memory and then the process which loaded them terminated
itslelf
Don't worry about this under windows xp.

standard mode how do i set windows xp to run my

computer in this mode?

Again, why do you want to do this ? ACPI is the way to go, I can't see how
this is supposed to affect the performance of your video card.

6) ANY AT ALL other recomendations you have for video.
So far i have done the following:

~Maxed my monitors refresh rate

I hope you've checked the maximum your monitor can take, this isn;t
necessarily as high as the maximum the video card can be set to. You may
damage the monitor, how high have you set it ?

~re-Set my paging file to 1024 mb, rebooted into safe
mode, defragged.

Since you have 1024 MB of physical RAM you probably don't need a pagefile
thiis big.
Look in taskmanager/performance at commit peak, versus commit maximum.
The maximum is roughly the sum of the pagefile and physical memory, minus
kerenel and some other overheads.

Defragmenting is good, wont affect video performance but will speed up the
overall running.

~Turned off AA and AF in my Geforce card settings.

Isn't this going to make the outlines rather jagged and less pleasing to the
eye although I guess it will paint faster ?

This is ALL i have done, So any other advice you have
would be great. If u could answer any of my six
questions or help me in any other way you will have
helped me more than u can imagine. I am really in a
slump because of my poor video card performance. Thank
you very much for reading this.

Check all the display stuff in dxdiag is enabled

start/run
dxdiag

Sorry it wan't better news.

Paul

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Philip,

I do have another question, why do you think the video card performance is
bad ?
Have you benchmarded it using a recognised tool to get frames per second or
some other figure , or have you observed some kind of problem ?

Paul