w2k/overclock/AGP2x & performance

[jmcdonald1]

Well I've been messing around with Win2k as everyone has and I'm very happy and want to share some information.

I'm running a 500E overclocked to 720mhz. The G400Max runs rock solid at 96mhz AGP (wahoo). Yes, my Micron ram runs rock steady at 144mhz FSB. And windows 2k is not THAT picky, I've been running it for weeks and no problems.

As for AGP... with the latest drivers I went through the Registry and did a search for "User.AGP". I set it to "00 00 00 00" everywhere. When I rebooted PowerStrip reported AGP2X. Maybe that will solve some issues for some people who can't get AGP2X in win2k.

I used the powerstrip to overclock the max to 160/220... yeah it's only modest but every little bit counts.

Another thing everyone should do is go to regedit.com. There are a tonne of minor tweaks to get win2k up to win98SE performance. The biggest one was optimizing the secondary cache size (256k in my case).

So what about performance? Does Win2k really suck compared to Windows98SE?

Hell no! It runs at exactly the same speed if not a few frames faster! Everyone on the web whining about win2k sub Win98 performance in game must be wrong. With the latest matrox driver (5.03) my quake performace is right on par with my optimized win98SE setup.

So what were my numbers? I tested using 1024x768, 16 bit color, Vertex lighting. 77.1 fps.

A little secret for you Quakers out there. If you don't set your desktop bit depth to 16bit, then quake3 will run in 32bits no matter what you do. It made a 40% speed difference. This was the biggest thing I found that fixed my performance.

Quite pleased. Thought people might get some useful info from this.

-James

[paulcs]

Thanks for the information, James.

I've noticed a lot of people with AGP 2x enabled, and some stability problems, would actually like to switch to AGP 1x. Have you figured out a way of doing this, short of closing your AGP aperture to 4 MB. (I suspect you were getting AGP 1x because of the overclock. It's good to see that you're still stable.) Can you remember what the value of "User.AGP" was set to before you switched it to 00 00 00 00?

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[jmcdonald1]

The original value was "01 00 00 00". I believe this is value that lets the driver decide the most stable AGP setting. This was the default value after installing 5.03. I had AGP1x with that value. I think AGP2X only gave me a few FPS, but any FPS is good FPS. It also improves load time. Home this helps. You can try running pstrip.exe /AGP:1x but mine would lock up.

-James

[TomT]

I can't find user.AGP in the Win2k registry. Where did you find it?

Thanks