Poor 4830 performance -- gets worse with overclock!

[rodent84]

I built a new system the other day with a Phenom II X3 720 and a Sapphire 4830. I loaded up The Witcher and was extremely disappointed with the performance - ran like a slideshow, 5-15 FPS range. Further testing was also sad: 3dMark06 score of around 8000, World in Conflict averaged only 22 fps on the built in benchmark. Furmark scores were closer to where I thought they should be, at 4200, but still a little low. Strangely, overclocking the 4830 -- I tried many ranges between the stock 575/900 and 700/1100 -- helped bring the Furmark up to 5000 -- but 3dMark slowed to a score of 2600, and WIC ran at 15 FPS. Overclocking the CPU between 2.8 and 3.6 GHZ brought no change in Furmark and, again, drastically decreased performance in 3dMark06 and WiC.

WTF???

Ive been running all sorts of monitoring utilities while running these tests, and nothing seems amiss. The voltages stay nice and steady, the clock speeds register as they should be, its running at PCIe 2.0 x 16. I was puzzled that GPU-Z never found the GPU load to exceed 55 percent -- but other programs (Riva tuner, gigabytes Easy Tune) showed it hitting 99 percent during the tests. The CPU load never came close to 100. The GPU got a bit hot when overclocking, 55 degrees C, but I don't believe thats too extreme? The CPU stayed around 40 C.

Ive reinstalled XP twice and tried both the 9.1 drivers that came with the card and the latest 9.4 ones.

One possible complication is that my 19 inch monitor only supports 1440x900 -- so I had problems with the default 1280x1064 resolution in some of the benchmark programs. But running at 1440x900 or lower supported resolutions didnt change much.

What's going on? It seems like my scores are at least 20 percent below the lowest ones Ive seen, and less than half some of the higher reported scores for the 4830. And why would overclocking bring lower FPS?

Of course, in the end its not about the scores, but the games -- I wouldnt care if it was some 3dmark conflict, but I want to be able to run my games (mainly RTS like command and conquer, wic, and rpgs like Witcher -- no hard core crysis stuff) at decent 25-30 FPS. Can the 4830 not deliver on this? is the x3 720 bottlenecking?

Thanks for any help.

MY RIG

Gigabyte GA-MA790x-UD4P
AMD Phenom II X3 720 processor
4GB PC6400 ddr2 Corsair RAM
Saphire Radeon HD 4830
Corsair VX550w power supply
Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM 3.0Gbs SATA HD
Windows XP Pro x64
ATI Catalyst 9.4 drivers
junky old dvd-rw drive -- but I tried disabling that, changed nothing.

 

[mactronix]

Well it has been known for Overclocking to make things worse as there are no guarantees that the chips will support any extra Mhz.
That aside your system at stock should be to be frank pissing all over what you are asking of it.
My E4600 and HD3850 2GB Ram score 7500 in 3dm06 @1440x900.

Its strange that Overclocking the CPU makes little differance as 3dm06 is biased that way and so should have showed a change.

So have you tried games on it yet then ? As you say benchmarks are pretty meaningless really as long as games play ok.

Possabilities could be that the XP Pro 64 isnt playing nice with the drivers ? or something else i would check if the games dont play well is the Ram. Pull a coulpe of sticks and run with 2GB and see what happens, its possable you have a faulty stich which would mean checking each stick on its own.

Wait for a few more answers as these are only speculations on my part and someone else may have had a similar issue and know a quick fix for it.

Mactronix

 

[SolidSnakeGr]

Sorry for my late posting.. but I just got here.. and find a bit weird the things that happen to you..
I have a Sapphire HD4830 like you, default @ 575/900 oc'd to 700/1200 using ati catalyst latest drivers.
Also my CPU is AMD 5200+ default @ 2,70GHz oc'd to 3,25GHz through bios.
And I can say that the system performs greatly even for the latest games.
I currently play Batman Arkham Asylum @ 1920x1200 all settings maxed, plus 8x antialiasing + 16x anisotrophic + adaptive antialiasing enabled, set from the Catalyst and it does it all smoothly!

In 3DMark06 i get ~10800 3Dmarks.

Have you tried other games to see how it performs?