Thanks for the response, I will have a look for the Chipset driver
and install it, I have the latest Detonator driver,
I will look for the 66.81 and have a go.
While that can improve stability in some situations, it
shouldn't make more than a couple hundred 3Dmark points
difference (if that, usually less).
My system is WinXP with a P4 1.3 gig 784 meg ram, not
a massive lot of grunt but adequate,
784MB is sufficient for the vast majority of games that
video card is fast enough to play (that is, IF the rest of
the system weren't bottlenecking the card, if it was giving
all it could performance-wise). Based on a vague
recollection (I chose to avoid Rambus memory as much as
possible in that era), the board would use Rambus memory and
so it avoids the bottlenecks of the lower-end solutions of
that era, IE- not using PC133 memory.
The P4 1.3GHz is a serious bottleneck though, I would expect
a faster CPU to improve scores (and real-life gaming
performance, on most games which aren't solely
video-card-bound) by a large percentage. I don't have that
combo of parts but would guesstimate it should be a minimim
uf 50% faster if it weren't for the CPU.
I work with 200 meg graphic files
without problems so expect I have enough to support the FX5500,
and the issue is the comparison between the 64 and 256 meg card.
Graphic files should perform similarly either way, the video
card in this context is only a frame buffer, not doing 3D
calculations (in general use, though you might have
something more specific in mind like CAD? Otherwise the
video card doesn't matter much at all).
The CPU is still a large bottleneck in manipulations of
200MB files, though in that filesize range, the 768MB of
system memory might be an issue too, depending on applicaton
utilization of memory and caching of files.
3DMark scores are better applied to potential gaming
performance than lesser-related tasks like imaging.
