Inanis.net

I was challenged by Zarek to try SimCity4 on Ubuntu 8.10 because I was “complaining” about Ubuntu performance. This will be the second time I have done this, but the first time I will have blogged about it. Here’s what happened… More »

So, about a month ago my video card died. It was an MSI Radeon X1900XT 512MB PCI-e. Nice card, quite fast. One day, it just refused to show video.

I gave the part back to my vendor, since it was within 1 year and said “replace it”. The vendor sent it back to MSI for repair/swap.

Fast forward to yesterday. It took MSI forever to get my card back to me, but they did come though. I got the replacement card, and there was good news. It was an upgrade. A free upgrade. To a much nicer card. An nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB. MSI seriously pumped my video performance for free. WOOT! (Check ‘em out on Toms’ Hardware…)

I took out the crappy PCI Radeon 9250 I had been limping along with and installed the 8800GTS. Went to nVidia’s website. Installed the newest drivers. Everything looked great. My LDView models looked great, and rotated faster than 1 frame every aeon.

Naturally, because of the nice upgrade, this called for updating the 3DMark scores on the website here. I fired up 3DMark and ran it through the minimum tests required to get a score. I thought it ran slow, and I was right. The final score was 2000 points SLOWER than the card I had originally.

WTF!

I did some research and tried everything everyone said about this card, my Motherboard, and even the card brand. I uninstalled drivers, ran DriverCleaner, and reinstalled. No joy. I tried updating DirectX. No joy. I removed all unnecessary cards, drives, and peripherals. No Joy. I made sure my powersupply was properly rated for the card. It was. I even went so far as to disconnect my OS drive and connect a new one, then install a clean copy of Windows, then the chipset driver, then the
video driver, you know, the proper order to ensure happy video goodness. NO JOY!

The only thing that I could think of is that the CPU is overclocked, and perhaps there was some sort of odd timing thing. I dropped the Core 2 Duo E4300 from it’s happy perch at 2.7 Ghz back to is lowly origins at 1.8Ghz. Lo and behold, the card perks up and is nice and snappy.

WTF, part 2!

Now, I researched specifics about my card coupled with my motherboard, a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 v2.0. Nobody had any real suggestions. So I started playing with Front side bus settings, memory ratios, and PCI-e bus settings. Nothing I tried worked. I decided to flash the BIOS from the version I had, F9, to the newest, F11. No joy.

I then did some more Googling, because by this time, I am ready to try any hairbrained idea I could find, and I found this cool forum post talking about how to get the most out of your DS3 motherboard. I tried doing everything they said there, including increasing the PCI-e bus to 102mhz. Still, no Joy. I tried 104Mhz. No POST.

At this point, I start fudging around with the FSB setting, starting at the default of 200Mhz and bumping it one Mhz at a time, trying to see where the breaking point was. I found it, at a measly 205mhz. I needed to be at 300Mhz to get my machine back to 2.7Ghz. All of this leads me to think there is some sort of weird timing/sync issue between the FSB and the PCI-e bus that makes the video card wait for a couple of cycles before pushing out data, or whatever.

I went back to that cool forum post and read all of the comments at the bottom. Some people were reporting about instability issues, and stating that there are many people who had success with this instability by bumping up their PCI-e bus above 110-115mhz stabilized their systems. I thought “fork!” because mine would not work above 104! I dropped back into the BIOS and set it to 110, thinking “what the hell, worst that will happen is it won’t POST again.”

It worked. OMGWTFBBQ, it f***ing worked. At a PCI-e setting of 110 mhz, and with my CPU overclocked to it’s fast 2.7Ghz, the machine POSTed, booted, ran 3DMark06, and gave a nice score of 9551 3DMarks.

I HATE COMPUTER HARDWARE, and love it at the same time. What else can exasperate you yet engage your mind to it’s fullest at the same time?

Not much, that’s what.

Check out my new speccies, here.

Just thought I would jot down the names of some of my favorite video game songs and/or whole games with great music:

• Super Mario Bros. – NES: Main Theme. Need I say anything.
• M.C. Kids – NES: The thing that’s really cool about this game is how cleverly they -engineered- the music, along with the creativity that went into making the music fit the game and sound really memorable. My favorite here can be heard in level 4 of Ronald’s Clubhouse, or on track 6 in the NSF file from the game.
• Megaman 3 – NES: The whole game has awesome f***ing music, but Magnet Man in particular is great.
• Dr. Mario – NES: Fever. Catchy Tune
• Final Fantasy 7 – PS1/PC: Gold Saucer Music