New video card

[royphil345]

Hi,

Just installed a new video card to replace an old All-In-Wonder 7500 that had a bad TV tuner.

Wasn't looking for anything super high-performance or expensive. Ended up buying this...

eVGA 256-A8-N340-TX Geforce 6600 256MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Retail

Core clock: 300MHz
D-SUB: 1
DirectX: DirectX 9
DVI: 1
Memory Clock: 500MHz
Memory Interface: 128-bit
OpenGL: OpenGL 1.5
PixelPipelines: 8
TV-Out: S-Video Out

Using it with a motherboard that has an 8X AGP slot,  2.8 Ghz P4 with 1GB of memory and a 7200 RPM SATA drive.

It's working fine, but the performance doesn't seem any better than my old 64MB card on games and visualizations (not really into gaming anyway). Just want to make sure I didn't do something wrong. The only AGP setting I see in the BIOS is for the AGP frequency which is set at 66 Mhz. Is that the correct setting? Any other settings in Windows XP I may have overlooked? Maybe the card just isn't that great?

Thanks much for any help!!!
Roy

[Fed]

Get the latest video drivers (not the ones that came with it)
Get DirectX 9.0c.
Look in your bios for graphics aperture size & set it to 256MB.
Leave your AGP frequency on auto or 66MHz.

You won't see a difference playing patience but try it on doom3 & compare.

[royphil345]

Thanks Fed. Doesn't seem to be a setting for graphics aperture size in this BIOS. Have seen the setting with previous mainboards. Guess it's set automatically. Maybe I'll look to see if there's a newer BIOS for this mainboard.

Now that I think about it, I also remember something about viewing "hidden" settings in the BIOS when I installed the mainboard. Have to get the manual out, maybe the setting's in there.

Like I said, no problems with the card. Just noticed when I was setting up Winamp that I got about the same frame rate on the visualizations that I was getting before. Wanted to make sure I didn't mess something up. I will look into the graphics aperture size setting and it may just speed things up a bit.

Thanks again!!!
Roy

[merlin_2]

Motherboard is.........may help........and the rest of i^T........o/s ram.....and so on.......

Bach.........mozart helps me calm down......

[royphil345]

Another thank you Fed!!! The graphics aperture size setting was located in the hidden settings of my BIOS. Had to look up in the manual how to access it. (Had to hit Ctrl / F1 while in the BIOS) Changed the setting from 128 to 256. Wouldn't have thought of it without your help.

[Fed]

You're more than welcome, I hope it's good for you.