Is My 9800 pro CPU Limited??

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Hall
  • Start date Start date
J

John Hall

As the subject line indicates, I have a 9800 pro in an Asus A7N8X Deluxe
motherboard running an Athlon 2100 XP+ cpu. I have 750 megs of DDR ram
running at an FSB of 266.

I'm wondering if my 9800 pro is being limited by my cpu. Incidentally I'm
thinking of upgrading to a Barton core version of the Athlon which has an
FSB of 333.

Are there any websites that have done benchmarking on this point?

JK
 
John said:
As the subject line indicates, I have a 9800 pro in an Asus A7N8X
Deluxe motherboard running an Athlon 2100 XP+ cpu. I have 750 megs
of DDR ram running at an FSB of 266.
Click to expand...

What speed RAM? What core CPU?
I'm wondering if my 9800 pro is being limited by my cpu.
Incidentally I'm thinking of upgrading to a Barton core version of
the Athlon which has an FSB of 333.
Click to expand...

or 400 (200MHz)
Are there any websites that have done benchmarking on this point?
Click to expand...

Loads, maybe.

If you have a T'bred CPU, you could always try increasing the FSB to the
maximum that your ram will support, then setting ram speed to 100% of that.
A T''bred A should be able to do ~1.8GHz, a T'bred B ~2.3GHz so adjust your
multiplier to get you that sort of speed, probably a good idea to start
conservatively and increase the multipler incrementally.

Check your temps when overclocking.

alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd is your new friend.

There's no gain if any in running your fsb faster than ram, or ram faster
than fsb.

If you do this, you can check yourself for any improvements in gaming speed
with increases in cpu speed.

Ben
 
If you have a tbred B and good PC2700 or faster ram you can run the cpu
at 166 MHz / 333 fsb no problem. That motherboard should be capable of that
for sure, just make sure the PCI / AGP divider is set to lock those at their
spec 33 and 66 MHz. To answer your original question, yes the 9800 is CPU
limited, an athlon 3200 would surely give better performance. Personally, an
OC tbred is the better route for you, Bartons are nice but unless you have $
to squander then they really dont give a huge performance increase. Yes they
help, but not when a tbred B OC to 2.2 or more GHz for free is faster than a
2500+ running at stock speed ~ my tbred B at 2.2 has better benchmarks than
a 3000+ in Sandra ~
 
if you dont want to overclock then get the barton. it will make a diferance.
but your gona be holding that barton back with that ddr 2100 ram. it realy
needs to have ram run at same fsb as the cpu.
if it was me i would try overclocking that 2100 or i would just hold off
till i was ready to upgrade cpu and ram.
if you do go with new ram you might as well get DDR 3200 just to have the
head room to overclock it later or a faster cpu later on. and i would also
get 2 sticks of 512 win xp runs great on a gig or more ram and with the
matched sticks of ram you can use the The 128-bit TwinBank thing "dual
channel".

some one said somthing about the barton 2500+ great overclocker mine runs at
3200+ speed with no problems and stock cooling 43c to 58c at full load. a
damn good reason to get ddr3200 ram so you can set fsb to 200
 
Sorry guys, I forgot to mention that my ram is DDR 2700. It's running at
fsb speed of 266 because that's the default fsb of my 2100 XP +. My next
cpu will have an fsb speed of at least 333.

JK
 
your CPU _can_ do 333 fsb if it is a tbred B ~ go try it and see, mine
has been running at 333 fsb for months
 
Or 400 for that matter....

John said:
your CPU _can_ do 333 fsb if it is a tbred B ~ go try it and see, mine
has been running at 333 fsb for months

load.
Click to expand...
 
John said:
If you have a tbred B and good PC2700 or faster ram you can run
the cpu at 166 MHz / 333 fsb no problem. That motherboard should be
capable of that for sure, just make sure the PCI / AGP divider is set
to lock those at their spec 33 and 66 MHz. To answer your original
question, yes the 9800 is CPU limited, an athlon 3200 would surely
give better performance. Personally, an OC tbred is the better route
for you, Bartons are nice but unless you have $ to squander then they
really dont give a huge performance increase. Yes they help, but not
when a tbred B OC to 2.2 or more GHz for free is faster than a 2500+
running at stock speed ~ my tbred B at 2.2 has better benchmarks than
a 3000+ in Sandra ~
Click to expand...

Yeah, but if you're gonna overclock the T'bred, you'd overclock the Barton,
right? And clock for clock the Barton is gonna win on memory throughput due
to the increased L2.

Ben
 
Yep, it's a tbred B. I'll have a look in the bios and see about changing
the fsb to 166x2.

JK
 
Come to think of it, when I installed the motherboard and was trying to
figure out DDR ram, I set the FSB to 166x2 and ran into stability problems.
What changes would I make to the mobo bios?

JK
 
CPU limited depends on many things and can vary from game to game and
settings within the game. For example,

Flight Sim 2004 is very CPU intensive and with most settings, even with a 3
GHz processor, you will still be CPU limited but you do have the option of
upping the strain on the video card by raising the resolution, adding 6xFSAA
and 16x Anios until you become limited by your video card.

A game such as UT2003 for another example is very video card intensive but
can also be CPU limited if you run at lower resolutions and don't use FSAA
and/or Anios filtering.

When websites review a CPU, they will run benchmarks at 640x480 because even
in graphic intensive games, that resolution will always tax the CPU more
than the video card. When they review video cards, they'll use higher
resolutions and FSAA and Anios cuz that will tax the video card before the
CPU becomes an issue.

----

The way to tell if you're particular game is CPU limited or Video Card
limited is to benchmark it at the settings you currently play. Then raise
the resolution or up the FSAA and see if the FPS changes significantly. If
it does, you are video card limited. If it doesn't change much, you were
CPU limited at that prior resolution. Keep repeating the above until you
notice a drop in performance so you will know when you have the perfect
balance.

-Tim
 
John said:
but he would have to BUY the Barton, not worth it
Click to expand...

I was the first person to reply to John Hall, and said he should overclock.

My comment was to you (hence my reply to you) on comparing apples with
apples.

Ben
 
Been found that the AIT Radeon 9800 Pro or GeforceFX 5900 Ultra even exceeds
a 3.2 Ghz eqv. CPUs.
This the case the Video Cards are now faster than current CPUs. So try get
to 3GHz at least otherwise don't worry about it.
Take like UT2003 or Return of the Jedi (CPU intensive games) you'll notice
the FPS will increase much more largely with a faster CPU than OCing the
Video card. FPS in OCing a Video Cards always been almost pointless IMHO.
 
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