Help with underperforming PC
 

My friend purchased all the parts for a new computer and asked me for help putting it together. I agreed to help but I told him of my limited knowledge. Anyways everything is put together and appears to be working well. Then I ran 3dMark 2001 to see how fast his computer is and I find that it gets about 4000 which is a terrible score. So now I am not sure what the cause is. The specs are as follows:

Asus K8T800 K8V Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3000
Western Digital 7200 120gb
Crucial 2700 512mb DDR Ram
I forget what the video card he has but it was on the low end of cards

I plan on going over to his house tonight and was hoping to have a look at it and see what is going on. Any input would be a real help

Well 3DMark is goign to be largly based off of your video card, if you are using a very low end card, your performance is going to suck. There are many decent cards out there that are $100-$150 that run well enough that you shouldn't be using an old MX style card if you want a decent system.

Its probably the video card. That test is primairly dependant upon video and cpu speed. If one of them is slow, as you say it is, then it wont be a good score. Find out what kind of card it is and let us know, then we can know a little better.

For sure it is the crappy video card.

He should slap in another 512 mb stick of RAM too.

No, he doesnt *need* more RAM. 512 is enough for 99% of users. Unless you run some *harcore* stuff, or want it for bragging rights, there isnt really any need for a gig of RAM right now. He would be better off spending the money on a new video card.

well that depends. If he plays Sim City 4, he could use all the ram he can stuff in there. Some games are coded so damn loose that you burn thru your ram and start on VM very quickly.

Anymore RAM won't increase a score on 3d Mark after 512 MB. Faster RAM will increase the score, but MORE RAM won't.

I don't care if you have Tom's Hardware's overclocked 5 GHz P4, you won't get a score worth a shit on 3d Mark unless you have a good videocard. If you have a good videocard and a shitty processor, the same thing will happen like sailor420 said. With that processor, he'll get a VERY good score if he has a good videocard. Keep in mind that the score won't be *really* good unless he spends money on a high-end card. The new budget cards from NVIDIA and ATI are good for gaming, but an old GF4 TI4200 will do as well on 3d Mark 2001.

Oh, and make sure you're talking about 2001 here -- 2003 is out, and 4,000 would be a respectable score on that one.

Tell us which videocard he has, and we can tell ya the average scores he should be getting. My old PC (2.2 GHz Athlon XP Barton with a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra) got 16,000 on 3d Mark 2001 and almost 6,000 on 3d Mark 2003. If he gets a good videocard, then his scores should reach those marks easily.

-Lasereth

I checked and he has a Radeon 9200SE.
I think I am going to let him try out my Geforce ti4600 and see what it does to the score.

The Radeon 9200SE is one of the biggest pieces of shit on the market. You'll get a better score if you used a 1 MB on-board video with a 486. Ha ha, sorry to be so harsh, but that videocard is truly worthless.

The TI4600 should put him over 10,000 on 3d Mark 2001 and probably around 2,000 on 3d Mark 2003.

-Lasereth

Well I just tried it with my ti4600 and he got about 9000. So I think something is still wrong becuase my computer gets a 10500 and I have a slower processer. I was wondering if there is a FSB setting that could be off?

Thanks for everyones help

Damn, I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon XP with a GeForce 4 TI4200 and mine gets about 9,500. That doesn't make any sense! Have you tried 3d Mark 2003?

I have no experience with Athlon 64 motherboards, but I do know that many Athlon XP motherboards totally screw up the FSB rating on the XP models. You have to flip a jumper on the motherboard or change it manually in BIOS to fix it.

Which NVIDIA drivers did you install with the TI4600?

-Lasereth

Windows XP recognized the card so I just used the generic drivers because I didn’t want to load up a bunch of nvidia stuff on his machine if I didn't have to. I also tried to use CPU-Z to see what his bus speed was but it was just grey box. Apparently the software has issues with the Athlon 64's

Well, Athlon 64's have a theoretical bus speed around 1.6 GHz, so I'm not sure how well CPU monitors will work with them.

Always, always, always install the NVIDIA drivers on a machine with a NVIDIA videocard! The XP drivers for videocards are raw shit. NVIDIA's drivers are what makes the videocards run on games and benchmarking programs. I suggest you install the 45.23 drivers from www.nvidia.com and run it again!

-Lasereth