FX5900XT in older motherboard with "slow" CPU

Hi.

This was going to be a call for help but as I was writing the message I got
an idea and now I have no problem anymore. So it became a happy report,
perhaps useful to others in a similar situation.

After reading some reviews, I bought this wonderful FX5900XT board (from
Point of View). The mere looks of it are worth the 199 Euros I spent. But
since it fitted the AGP slot in my computer I figured I might want to play
some games on it too.

My PC isn't the latest thing on the market, it is an Asus K7V with an
original Slot-A Athlon 650 Mhz and the video card to be replaced is a
GeForce2 GTS which served me well for some four years now.

Before anyone wants to give me the song and dance about putting a top notch
card like the FX5900XT into a crappy old PC like mine being pointless, save
it. I just started to hit a number of games that wouldn't run anymore due to
the mere DirectX7 capability of my old system and felt the need for
something more current. Frame rates weren't even a (big) problem (most of
the time) and I felt like getting this neat device, hoping it would make it
easier for me to postpone the major system upgrade I have in mind to some
later moment at which Athlon64 prices may have come down a little and the
full-fledged chipsets and 939 socket boards are more affordable.

So, now for the problem...

I got distorted images in Windows straight away, as if the Windows were
painted and it started to rain terpentine on them. Moving the mouse made it
worse until I could not read text anymore. If I'd grab the caption bar on
some window and dragged it, the machine would lock up.

If I started a game, it didn't take very long until the machine would lock
up either. If I were real quick I could just get a glimpse of those cool
fancy DirectX9 water effects before the whole thing broke down.

My first thoughts were that the card would propably be bad. Then I spoke to
my neighbor whom I had helped out the other day with his brand new PC (which
has a inferior FX5200 that I could now look down on in full satisfaction). I
asked him if I could try the card in his machine, he agreed, and the card
turned out to be trouble free. Brilliant picture, no prolem whatsoever.


I did plug in the power connector (incidently I forgot to do so in my
neighbor's PC and the card still worked fine, although I didn't try to run
Far Cry in 1600x1200 or anything like that). I tried both the latest and the
53-something driver versions. My power supply is new, a 350 W AOpen which
looks like good quality overall. What could be wrong?

The lock-ups due to dragging and the corrupted image pointed in the
direction of AGP traffic. The card should be able to handle anything from 2x
to 8x AGP, the motherboard is limited to 4x AGP which showed up as the
current speed if I looked at display properties. I decided to go through the
BIOS to see if I could somehow lock down the AGP speed to 2x to see if that
would make any difference.

Apperently, I could choose between 4x and 2x. After setting the AGP bus to
2x things looked a lot better!

I started dragging windows, having TV on simultaniously, no problem. Time
for the goodies: games!

My favorite game of the last couple of years is Max Payne. I played "Max
Payne 2" start to end three times on my GeForce2 and it performed relatively
well considering it is a modern game, it has a real clever and efficient
engine. Call of Duty either uses a rather blunt engine or is just done
poorly, I couldn't play that properly even on 640x480 on my hardware while
it didn't look much better then Quake 2. Apart from that it is really boring
but I guess that is a personal thing. With "Max Payne 2" I had to go
moderate on featudes, medium quality and 1152x864 was about what it could
handle but even then I was really impressed by the graphics, it was the
prettiest game I had seen on my machine. And that was "only" GeForce2 with
T&L.

But now I had the big guns! I started the game and immeditely went to video
settings to max out everything: high quality. Furthermore, 1280x1024 seemed
appropriate, I was Mr. Power Graphics now. The results were most impressive.
I saw a whole array of visual effects I had never seen before. Blasts,
smoke, spaying blood, an effective after-glow in movements expressing Max's
half consciousness as het stumbles down the hospital hallways... This is
beautiful! And no hickups or shocky behavior whatsoever.

Then I tried Splinter Cell, a game that wouldn't run at all on the GeForce2.
Jeeezzz, they really made some progress in the gaming industry while I
wasn't looking! Also on maximum quality and 1280x1024, fluently!

Mind I am still running an old Athlon 650 MHz. All that crap about the need
for a balanced system, that you shouldn't combine the top card with a slow
CPU, it's nonsense! Apperently, modern games lean so heavily on the graphics
hardware that you actually do get away with a relatively slow processor.

I was already anticipating shelling out 700 Euro's on new hardware just to
match the graphics card. No way Jose! I am just fine for the next couple of
years with my Athlon 650 MHz and mij FX5900XT, thank you! The results of
just a graphics card upgrade are more than satisfying, I can recommend it to
anyone who is considering spending money on a new PC just to play the latest
DirectX9 games.

Regards,

Martin.