Replaced my Nvidia 6800GT with a 7950GT

So I replaced my XFX 6800GT with an XFX 7950GT today as games were
struggling somewhat. I priced a new system at around £700 but since
that's a bit beyond my price range I opted for a graphics card update
and I will upgrade the entire pc at a later date.

Unfortunately I didn't run 3dmark06 (free version 1.1.0) with my 6800GT
in so I can't compare to the results I got now (daft of me I know), but
I've just ran 3dmark06 and I got a result of 4239.

I wasn't expecting an amazing amount of increase with the new card but
does this figure seems a little low? Out of the 9 similar systems shown
(such as the free version allows), I'm 8th but a lot of those have
3.4ghz P4s.

I'm running the latest beta drivers, I drivercleaned before installing
the new card.

I know that my ram & CPU are probably letting me down (1.5 gig,
non-matched) but given the price it wouldn't be worth me replacing it, I
would spend a few quid on another 512meg to fill the last slot though.

My processor is a pentium 4 3.2ghz and I'm running windows XP.

Is there anything else I should be looking at or is this the best I'm
going to get? Should I look at clocking the card a bit, if so what is
the best software to do that as I've heard ntune is poo.

Many thanks!!

Moo

--

My blog - http://degeneratemoo.livejournal.com

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:45:27 +0100, Moo
<rodneylowe@roonster.wanadoo.co.uk> wrote:

>So I replaced my XFX 6800GT with an XFX 7950GT today as games were
>struggling somewhat. I priced a new system at around £700 but since
>that's a bit beyond my price range I opted for a graphics card update
>and I will upgrade the entire pc at a later date.
>
>Unfortunately I didn't run 3dmark06 (free version 1.1.0) with my 6800GT
>in so I can't compare to the results I got now (daft of me I know), but
>I've just ran 3dmark06 and I got a result of 4239.
>
>I wasn't expecting an amazing amount of increase with the new card but
>does this figure seems a little low? Out of the 9 similar systems shown
>(such as the free version allows), I'm 8th but a lot of those have
>3.4ghz P4s.
>
>I'm running the latest beta drivers, I drivercleaned before installing
>the new card.
>
>I know that my ram & CPU are probably letting me down (1.5 gig,
>non-matched) but given the price it wouldn't be worth me replacing it, I
>would spend a few quid on another 512meg to fill the last slot though.
>
>My processor is a pentium 4 3.2ghz and I'm running windows XP.
>
>Is there anything else I should be looking at or is this the best I'm
>going to get? Should I look at clocking the card a bit, if so what is
>the best software to do that as I've heard ntune is poo.
>
>Many thanks!!
>
>Moo

IMO, many who submit scores for 3dmark are those who have
exceptionally high scores for their hardware. I wouldn't
put too much concern on that, instead looking at what games
you play and whether you get acceptible framerates, and
whether you find online benchmarks of actual games which are
in the same ballpark as your framerates.

On the other hand, yes your 3Dmark06 score looks about 1000
points lower than typical, but I don't know if the processor
is the bottleneck. Well it certainly is effecting the score
but that much? I don't know. Doesn't 3Dmark give a
separate CPU score? That should be a reasonable indicator
about that (benchmark) at least.

Hopefully it's a PCI Express video card? I write that
because you could update the motherboard and CPU, while DDR2
memory is fairly cheap. However, I don't know if the 6800GT
to 7950GT was really much of an upgrade when the rest of the
system stays the same. Depends on the resolutions and
amount of eyecandy you choose in your games. The
higher/more, the more difference the video card will make.

kony wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:45:27 +0100, Moo
> <rodneylowe@roonster.wanadoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> So I replaced my XFX 6800GT with an XFX 7950GT today as games were
>> struggling somewhat. I priced a new system at around £700 but since
>> that's a bit beyond my price range I opted for a graphics card update
>> and I will upgrade the entire pc at a later date.
>>
>> Unfortunately I didn't run 3dmark06 (free version 1.1.0) with my 6800GT
>> in so I can't compare to the results I got now (daft of me I know), but
>> I've just ran 3dmark06 and I got a result of 4239.
>>
>> I wasn't expecting an amazing amount of increase with the new card but
>> does this figure seems a little low? Out of the 9 similar systems shown
>> (such as the free version allows), I'm 8th but a lot of those have
>> 3.4ghz P4s.
>>
>> I'm running the latest beta drivers, I drivercleaned before installing
>> the new card.
>>
>> I know that my ram & CPU are probably letting me down (1.5 gig,
>> non-matched) but given the price it wouldn't be worth me replacing it, I
>> would spend a few quid on another 512meg to fill the last slot though.
>>
>> My processor is a pentium 4 3.2ghz and I'm running windows XP.
>>
>> Is there anything else I should be looking at or is this the best I'm
>> going to get? Should I look at clocking the card a bit, if so what is
>> the best software to do that as I've heard ntune is poo.
>>
>> Many thanks!!
>>
>> Moo
>
> IMO, many who submit scores for 3dmark are those who have
> exceptionally high scores for their hardware. I wouldn't
> put too much concern on that, instead looking at what games
> you play and whether you get acceptible framerates, and
> whether you find online benchmarks of actual games which are
> in the same ballpark as your framerates.
>
> On the other hand, yes your 3Dmark06 score looks about 1000
> points lower than typical, but I don't know if the processor
> is the bottleneck. Well it certainly is effecting the score
> but that much? I don't know. Doesn't 3Dmark give a
> separate CPU score? That should be a reasonable indicator
> about that (benchmark) at least.
>
> Hopefully it's a PCI Express video card? I write that
> because you could update the motherboard and CPU, while DDR2
> memory is fairly cheap. However, I don't know if the 6800GT
> to 7950GT was really much of an upgrade when the rest of the
> system stays the same. Depends on the resolutions and
> amount of eyecandy you choose in your games. The
> higher/more, the more difference the video card will make.
>
>

Sadly it is AGP, hence the reason for the upgrade, I can't afford a full
new system at the moment so was just looking a stop-gap to keep the
games running until I can afford the upgrade.

My CPU is definitely the bottle-neck (more RAM would help too), the CPU
only test chugged along at an extremely slow pace. I saved the results
(and I've also found a file for results from my 6800GT) but the demo of
3dmark06 doesn't seem to allow the re-opening of saved results.... Is
there any way I can read these without getting the full version of 3dmark??


--

My blog - http://degeneratemoo.livejournal.com