Help--Athlon 1.33G scores a dismal 3DMark

[AmdMELTDOWN]

>Now I know why so many intel users have trouble with AMD systems.

what are you some kind of superior being because you've saved some $$$ and your rig is miraculously stable? how long did you have to fiddle with it to get it going? huh?
did you feel like a dweeb while at it? I bet you did.

none of your >10 post to this guy is going to change anything, AMD platform is full of sh!t!

"AMD...you are the weakest link, good bye!"

 

[Kelledin]

I had to fiddle with mine all of four hours. That includes the time it took to reinstall Windows and peel a new ghost image.

Apparently, it doesn't take that much to be superior to <i>you.</i>

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

 

[AmdMELTDOWN]

oh, wow, you are so f**k'n briliant! 4 hours installing winblows w/ghost no less!

here's a dog biscuit...go fetch!



"AMD...you are the weakest link, good bye!"

 

[Kelledin]

That <i>included</i> the time to manage software. It also included the time to take out peripheral cards, give the manual a once-over, drill out a non-ATX-compliant standoff, mount the motherboard, and put all the cards back in.

Sorry to break this to you, but a new motherboard/CPU doesn't magically install itself every time you reload your O/S.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

 

[Guest]

Hmm. Well thanks for all your patience. I guess us "Intel folks" are just spoiled. We expect plug-and-play everything, drivers that work, and documentation written in English.

Personally I think it's an interesting balance. Over the past week I've learned first-hand the differences between Athlon and Pentium. One side with ease-of-use, reliability, good driver support, documentation written in English, low speeds, and high prices. All this time I took all that for granted. The other side with high speeds, even higher cpu temps, low prices, crappy drivers, worthless chipset support, incredibly difficult and involved installation, and documentation poorly translated from Chinese. But it's sooo fast! A difficult choice indeed.

The installation procedure may not seem difficult to you, until you realize that one wrong move and the whole thing is toast. Start over. Reformat.

Teaching myself how to build these systems over the years, I've made a lot of mistakes as you might imagine. However, never has the penalty for cutting a few corners been so severe and costly in terms of time and lost data. But, I'm not giving up. I want this damned thing to work even if I have to start all over, AGAIN.

 

[Guest]

With regard to IDE drivers. What exactly do you think I should do after booting into a clean installation of Win98SE for the first time? (With the new PSU of course.) Last time when I tried to enable DMA with the standard IDE bus master driver in there it just disabled the two IDE channel drivers after the restart and put my drives into "MS-DOS compatibility mode".

 

[Ncogneto]

"Hmm. Well thanks for all your patience. I guess us "Intel folks" are just spoiled. We expect plug-and-play everything, drivers that work, and documentation written in English."

Well, even if you were going from your bx chipset to another platform you still should'nt just replace the motherboard and hope. Now, maybe if going from one bx to another....maybe....

"Personally I think it's an interesting balance. Over the past week I've learned first-hand the differences between Athlon and Pentium. One side with ease-of-use, reliability, good driver support, documentation written in English, low speeds, and high prices. "

LOL, even some intel boards are made overseas ( tiawan etc.) and have crappy instructions. THAT all depends on the company you got it from.

The other side with high speeds, even higher cpu temps, low prices, crappy drivers, worthless chipset support, incredibly difficult and involved installation

Yes, I agree there is a bit more to an install on a via board, not that much more but more none the less. However, you must see that by making certain assumptions without first consulting your manual you made this even worse on yourself.

"Teaching myself how to build these systems over the years, I've made a lot of mistakes as you might imagine. However, never has the penalty for cutting a few corners been so severe and costly in terms of time and lost data. But, I'm not giving up. "

Well, if the corner you cut with the power supply is the issue, then all the above does not apply. Everything you did was for nothing. Yor retailor should have told you that you needed such a ps for one. There is however a chance that the motherboard is bad, it happens, quite a bit lately I am afraid. This is not an amd problem but again a problem with quality control at Iwill, Asus, Abit or however and is not limited to Via chipset either.

lets see what happens when you get the new power supply and then we can for once definatly see if in fact the motherboard is bad. but please, make no assumptions and follow my instrauctions exactly ok?




A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Ncogneto]

"what are you some kind of superior being because you've saved some $$$ and your rig is miraculously stable?"

No I am definatly no miraclous being. And for your information I am typing to you on an Intel P3 800 on a I815 chipset board ( msi ) as we speak. I also have three AMD machines on my network as well at home. A slota classic at 1 gig, a slota t-bird on an irongate board, and a socket a 850 t-bird overclocked by means of a hard mod at 1 gig. All my systems run stable. The intel is no better or no worse than the others ( well a little worse but that is do to the fact it is crippled with a S3 savage4 video card that is specialy made to run my 21 inch sun monitor). I do not take offense at people who prefer Intel, its there money afterall. However, What bothers me is people like you that have nothing better to do than laugh at people with problems and call them stupid for buying an AMD system. Your time would be better served helping the people with Intel systems that have problems.

Further more I think the p3 is a great chip, now with a price cut it can even be considered competitive, lets see what happens with the tulatin.
As much as I like my I815 mobo, I think intel could have done better with it seeing how it barely beats the old bx. This may or may not have to do with the fact Intel so badly wanted to shove Rdram down our throats, and was at the time afraid to embarass themselves having the I815 totally smoke the I810-I 840 mobo's. ( yes sure you can make an argument for Rdram and the p4 but don't even try it with the p3).

The only chip from intel I do not like is the p4, however when the northwood comes out, I am sure I will have to get one of these as well.

So, now that you know exactly were I stand, consider me an AMD zealot if you must, however I do not see it that way at all. In conclusion I would like to ask you this, and would appreciate an honest answer. If you had the same system as this user, and went to upgrade from his bx platform to an Intel p4 platform, would you expect to be able to just put in a new motherboard and processor without reformatting the drive, and then use the old 250 watt power supply with it and expect things to work? ( And yes I know it wouldn't even fit, just humor me and say it did).

Well, despite all the postee's problems at least he has yet to smoke his CPU as you claim is so easy to do.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Ncogneto on 04/23/01 02:55 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[jollygrinch]

mine took 30-60 mins to throw the hardware together and however long windows took. another few minutes to install the drivers (just once mind you). that's my personal system and i've had simmilar experiences with every other system i've built (including intel, so don't accuse me of being one sided).

At the core of every system: "I'm sorry dave, i'm afraid i can't do that."

 

[jeffg007]

Ncogneto that was one hell of a post! I hope the rest take note and follow.

Jeff

 

[Guest]

I agree there. The best way to prove one's intellectual superiority is by showing the ignorant folk how it's done, (and to have it actually WORK), not by bragging and laughing at others just because they have not been where you have been. Once I get this Athlon system together, I'm sure I could probably do it again and again in record time as well. Heh, won't that make me feel like a real man, woopee.

Ok, so now that that's over with, my new Enermax EG365W PSU is installed now. A couple of extra "Pentium 4" cables are left over.

I have heard from some other people that say they got the Microsoft IDE driver working in Win98SE, but they didn't say how. I must have done something wrong when I tried it, but like I said before I wish this motherboard wasn't so damned unforgiving when you make a mistake in that area.

Then there's the original problem of why 3DMark2001 doesn't run. Hmm...

 

[Ncogneto]

Yes, you very well may have two unrelated problems going on here and when this happens, time for the tylanol I really hope all goes well with the new power supply and the reformat. The biggest asset I have when building computers is having access to several, thus making swapping out parts and quick pinpointing of the problem so much quicker. That is why in this case, you should keep things down to the bare minimum hardware wise and once up and hopefully running stable you can add each addtional component one at a time. I have read thru a few posts on this specific motherboard and most of its users love it, though they do profess at it being very very picky to get configured. It does appear though, once up and running it is a very stable board. A couple of other areas of interest, I have seen some reported problems with the software to the onboard sound ( pretty sure we are talking software not hardware). there also is a usb filter driver tha appears to be installed on your installation CD. And also, from what I uncderstand you do not want to use the highpoint drivers. And last but not least, if all else fails and you continue to have problems with your ide controller there is one last option. Get a promise ata66 or 100 controller and be done with the onboard IDE. You can pick up the ata 66 for under 20 bucks, they perform aevery bit as well as the ata 100's and in MHO perform better than any other onboard IDE ( excluding IDE RAID).

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Guest]

Thanks for all your help Ncogneto. Unfortunately the power supply hasn't solved any of the problems yet. (Prior to the reformat.) But I still feel a lot better having the 365W Enermax in there rather than the 250W generic.

I did a few tests just for curiousity's sake. I underclocked the cpu down to 9.0x100MHz FSB = 900 MHz and tried to run 3DMark2001. Now remember that this is a 1333, which is supposed to run at 133 MHz FSB, and the SDRAM has been verified good at 150 MHz CL2 on other systems. Guess what? It failed again, EVEN at that low speed of 900 MHz w/100 MHz FSB, which a system of this caliber should easily handle.

I'm not sure, but that seems to say that it's probably a driver issue, and not anything to do with heat or power or timing, (assuming that the board itself isn't defective). Yet, I've tried four different Nvidia drivers from 6.50 on up to 12.0 and none of them have helped either. So it must be that the main problem is that I installed the Via drivers AFTER installing everything else. Perhaps the order in which one installs the Via drivers and patches really does matter. Call me stupid or naive but this really is a concept new to me. The order of installation shouldn't matter, and if it does, then such a mistake ought to be correctable. Unfortunately that's not the case here, so I've convinced myself that a reformat and reinstall with the 4in1 drivers FIRST really is the only way to fix things.

 

[jeffg007]

I want to know what happend? Ya, I would do the via drivers first. Who knows what is in the registry by now. There could be so meny differnt drivers floating around in there and to clean it out is next to imposable.

Also I would check the bios settings. I had problems with 3dmark2000 not runing all the way and bios tweeks fixed me.
The main one was setting 4x to 2x.
I had an Abit kt7-raid. Good luck.

Jeff

 

[Ncogneto]

Ok after the power supply, did you do a reformat and re-install or just put the new power supply in and give er a go? Please give the reformat and install exactly as I posted earlier, run your test and if it still fails then RMA the board. Here is the order in which I would like you to do this.

In bios disable agp 4x or set to 2x ( not exactly sure how your bios words this. Also disable fast writes.

1) reformat
2) With only video card installed and one HDD (preferably the ata 100) reinstall windows.
3) After re-install first enable dma, reboot.
4) Install latest drivers for your video card from your video cards site, not nvidia. when promted do not reboot. Now install via 4.29 final drivers using only the agp drivers not the busmaster drivers. Install in standard mode. when promted do not reboot. Now install ( hopefully you have this on file) The version of direct x you plan on using. Now reboot.

If all is well, load your cmi sound card drivers. Then install 3dmark and test for stability. If all is still well we can begin to make adjustments and find out when and were the problem occurs.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Guest]

I am cursed. The new hard drive (IBM 75GXP 45 GB) failed the Drive Fitness Test I downloaded from IBM's hard drive support site. The test runs off a special boot diskette, so it's not anything to do with my drivers. Now I know why the Microsoft IDE drivers weren't working for me with that drive plugged in. The Microsoft drivers are working now with the new drive gone, but the only thing I've got left is my old 8-Gig WD Caviar (ATA-33), until the replacement drive comes back.

The drive is now on its way back to IBM for replacement, overnighted way out to California. <Sigh> What a tale of woe this is. Well I guess it's a good thing I have money to burn otherwise I would be up a creek right now.

 

[Guest]

Ok I've written everything down. Yes the BIOS does have 4X disable and Fast Write settings. The GeForce2 Pro card is from MSI which uses Nvidia Detonator 6.72 as their drivers, although there is some other stuff on that CD. I don't know what it is because I've never touched it before. I'll use the MSI CD this time though.

Fortunately Iwill includes DirectX 8 on their driver CDROM so that is one less thing I'll have to download, but only Via 4.25(1) 4in1, not 4.29.

 

[Ncogneto]

Yeah that really does suck sorry for your bad luck there. You should still be able to run 3d apps such as 3dmark 2000/2001 to see if that is taken care off. Remember only the agp drivers and in standard mode, no busmaster drivers. Also, make sure to leave fastwrites disabled in bios! Let me know how you do.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Sihs]

Ncogneto, I have been reading this thread for a couple of days and I must admire how you have all this patience to help TimF. I hope I see you around when I get my next pc.
Good luck TimF.

Sh!t Happens.