G450 and ASUS A7N8X2.0 nForce2 Chipset

[Stephane Grenier]

Just had to replace my motherboard at work (CPU died ). I went for a ASUS A7N8X2.0 motherboard with a AMD XP2500+ CPU( ). From time to time we play MOHAA at work for some good frustration release. On the old motherboard (K7T266PRO) the G450 had a decent frame rate, nothing spectacular, but it was playable at 640x480.

For some reason, the frame rate on the G450 now with the new motherboard is worst. Now the game is unplayable. I have installed the latest nVidia chipset driver, but no luck. I have check all DirectX setting and test, the G450 drivers pass all the test. What give??. Reading through forums the G450 should work with this motherboard. The cards work well in 2D.

Help!!!!!!, I need to play MOHAA for my own sanity!!!

I am using:
- G450, drivers 5.91.008, latest
- Win 2000, SP4 and on and one hotfix
- ASUS A7N82.0
- AMD XP2500+
- Onboard sound card from the motherboard

Note: I try the game with a SB128 PCI card, same result.

Any help or wisdom would be appreciated

Cheers!, Steph

[Wombat]

Have you played with the Matrox Tweak Utility?

I think what may have happened is that the Matrox drivers have turned off your bus mastering because you're not on an intel-based motherboard.

[Stephane Grenier]

I did try the tweak utility, and if I recall the busmastering is ON. I will confirm tomorrow.

Cheers and Thanks!, Steph

[Admiral]

Considering you have switched from a VIA chipset to a nVidia one, have you reinstalled the OS ?

[Stephane Grenier]

Yes I did I fresh re-installed. I try to move directly to nforce, but win2000 didn't like it at all. It wasn't booting at all.

Cheers and Thanks, Steph

[Stephane Grenier]

I have just check via the Matrox Tweak Utilities and BUS Mastering is ON.

Here is what the Tweak Utility Reports:

General TAB:
Tweak Utility: v5.02.04
Car Type: G450 Millenium DH
OS: Windows 2000
MB Chipset: NVidia Corp
??: 2.0-36
SN: KDW48629

AGP TAB:
Motherboard AGP Version: 2.0
Motherboard AGP Speed: 4X
Video Car dAGP Speed: 4X
Motherboard SideBand Addressing: ON

DirectX TAB:
D3D VSync: OFF

Miscellaneous TAB:
Busmastering: ON
BitMap Caching: ON
Subimage Cache Size: 524288 Bytes

OpenGL TAB:
GL Driver Defaults

Thats it folks!!!!

Cheers!, Steph

[Wombat]

Hmm, this is pretty odd. Have you tried anything besides MOHAA? At this point, I want to determine if it's the entire 3D system, or just MOHAA having a bad day.

What do you suggest guys? UT2003 benchmark? Something else?

[Maggi]

Hi Stephane,

I dont' know that particular board, but one thing to check would be if the VGA boot settings are set to PCI or AGP first and make sure it's set to AGP.

Also, in case this NForce chipset is one with built in gfx core, you might want to double check if it's really disabled.

Besides that, you could use one of the older builds of 3D Fart ... errm Mark, ie 2000 or 2001 and post all detailed scores, so that we could have a look and see if anything's out of bounds.

[Wombat]

Yeah, good point there. The other "card" might be taking up resources. RAM, if nothing else.

[Stephane Grenier]

Hi Wombat!

I did some quick test with Day Of Defeat, and the frame rate at 800x600 was really good. DOD is base on the valve engine. That engine is older than the MOHAA engine.

Maggi: Also my boot setting in the BIOS is AGP, and this motherboard doesn't come with a buid in video card.

I starting to suspect that the MOHAA game engine doesn't like the new motherboard. My previous motherboard was with a VIA chipset and a older Athlon 1400. On that rig the game play was much better than the current situation.

If my memory is correct, I think the MOHAA game is base on the QUAKE engine. I will installed QUAKE III and do some testing. Also I will post some 3DMark2001 benchmark later.

Cheers and Thanks for the help!!!
Steph!!

[Stephane Grenier]

Hi Everyone!

I did some 3dMark2001 this morning, and here are the results:

Setup:
Res: 1024x768 => score 999
Res: 640x480 => scrore 2332

CPU: AMD 2500+ Barton
Memory: 512MB single channel
Video Card: G450 DH

If someone can confirm that these are reasonable scores for my setup, then I can start blaming MOHAA game engine for the poor performance. Maybe the MOHAA engine doesn’t correctly detect the new AMD CPU .

Cheers and Thanks!, Steph

[Maggi]

here's a thread with a G450 on a TBird 800

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?threadid=26830

and here's another thread that has some more scores

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?threadid=29303

besides that, you could browse Futuremarks results database for getting more G450 scores

[ncfoster]

nVidia drivers

You didn't state a driver version for the nForce drivers. There are very recent ones from this week (v. 3.13). They are a mixed bag, but I think that they are worth it. You might want to run dxdiag to make sure that you have AGP texturing on. My P750 had AGP texturing off until a recent version of the driver on my A7N8X Deluxe 2.0. There may be some related issue, though I haven't heard of it on the G450.

Nathan

[Stephane Grenier]

Hi ncfoster!

I do have the lastst nVidia nForce (3.13) driver installed, they didn't solve my problem.

Also base on my 3dMark2001 result I am in the ball park, maybe a little low but still within what others are getting.

So it's back to MOHAA engine that doesn't like the new motherboard or the new CPU?

Cheers!, Steph

[Maggi]

just a guess, but if you have your RAM set to run at 200/400MHz, you might want to clock it down to 166/333MHz, so that it runs in sync with your CPUs FSB.

on a friends system I gained quite a bit performance by doing that ...

also, you wrote "512MB single channel", but in case you have two DIMMs installed, make sure they occupy the proper slots for runing in dual channel mode