At least yours works; I decided to upgrade the slowish AGP card in my low-profile Dell Optiplex G150 with a PCI geforce4 mx440. It worked great until I ran Halo on it for 16 hours straight and cooked the card or something. Now it displays increasing numbers of specks on the screen until it freezes the system. 
I have a Ti4400 that used to freeze on me all the time. The solution was craking up the CPU’s core voltage in the BIOS. I cranked mine to 110% of normal, but you should increase it by the smallest amount possible to play. There are plenty of powerful CPU fans out on the market if you feel frightened by this prospect.
You have a good video card, don’t pitch it.
I have an Asus FX 5600 Ultra. It has a feature I find very cool! When doing typical Windows stuff, the fan is normally spinning at very low RPM or not working at all.
When you play a game though, the fan starts spinning at full RPM making a LOT of noise!
What amased me with UT 2004 though, is that at 1024x768 with FULL texture detail, the fan wont start! I had to crank the resolution to 1600x1024 (which is the maximum) to get the fan spinning! And by the way, the game even at that resolution runs like a dream.
The rest of my specs: Intel P4 with 800Mhz FSB at 2.6Ghz, 1GB RAM
To answer and deal with several questions in seperate posts…
I am led to believe the bios was updated by the shop I bought it from. the power supply is 350v
The AGP speed is set at 4x. I seem to have a mobo capable of 8x but for some reason my card defaults at 4 and won’t go higher.
The AGP apeture size is 128. What performance hit, if any, would I experience by lowering it to 64. and would that be preferable to the underclock?
I said to a friend the other day (so I’ll say it here) I think I’ll just wait until the underclocked (250MHz from 300MHz) card becomes inadequate for the tasks it is assigned to perform (playing UT 2004 and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow) and buy a Geforce 5 or FX (are ‘5’ and ‘FX’ the same thing?) 5600, rather than trying out pci or case fans.
I’m up for an SDMB UT2004 clan type thingy, as long as enough other peope are.
What about the 5600FX?
Nanoda I’ve heard the MX (budget) cards are actually worse in performance than a Geforce 2. (but don’t take my word for it)
Dog80 That worries me as (noted above) I may get an fx 5600. Are you sure there isn’t something wrong with your card that the fan won’t start?
P.S. What’s the deal with FSB? Is there one for the processor and one for the memory or something? The reason I ask is that I have a P4 and an 800fbs motherboard but I remember seeing somewhere that it’s set at 400 or 200 fbs. I could be wrong. I’ll check the bios after posting this.
P.S. When I say ‘wimpish’ I don’t mean it performs craply. It performs well in my games. It has the muscle. It just lacks the stamina.
Very little performance hit. Give it a try, it can’t hurt.
Your 4600ti should still kick it’s ass. The only downside is that the new FX series is DX9 capable, where the 4600 is only DX8.1. There aren’t many games supporting DX9 functions right now, so you’re not missing out on much.
Technically there is no Geforce 5 as this line is the FX line.
I wouldn’t upgrade at all if I were you, but if you do you should wait for a few weeks. Both ATI and Nvidia will be announcing their next-gen line very soon, which should reduce prices all around.
Does your motherboard use a VIA chipset? If so have you applied the VIA Hyperion drivers?
you forgot to upgrade the most important part of you computer - the case/enclosure.
it does not matter how many fans you have INSIDE your case if the temperature in the case is high.
the following would be an ideal case if it didnt look so silly :
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Reviews/cases/X-SuperAlien/pg_2.htm
its like an improved version of the case i have, except mine does not look retarded.
vasyachkin you’re almost right. I forgot to mention that I upgraded the case.
qts via chipsets are only on AMD based motherboards aren’t they? Mine’s intel.
I won’t upgrade unless I absolutely need to. e.g. the card dies, resumes pausing (ironic phrase that), or becomes too slow for the games I get.
I have an Intel P3 system (Abit VP6) with a VIA chipset.
What’s your case/system/motherboard temperature (they all mean the same thing), Lobsang? I’d suggest you go for a slot exhaust fan, you toss it in the first PCI slot and it sucks hot air off the face of the videocard and blows it out the back of the system. If your case temp is up in the high 30s © or so, you’re going to need to do something more drastic to improve airflow.
The Geforce4 Ti-4600 only support 4x AGP speed. Though right now, there is little diffence, maybe a frame a second, between using a card at 8x AGP and 4x AGP.
I also have a Ti-4600, and wasn’t able to tell any difference between 128Meg apeture and 64 meg apeture.
The Geforce4 MX cards are in fact little more than renamed Geforce2 cards, with slightly higher clockspeed. The old Geforce3 is actually faster than them.
The newer Pentium 4’s use a quad-pumped bus, 200mhz x 4. Your processor’s clockspeed is 800mhz x Processor multiplier.
Here’s the skinny on AGP Aperture. One of the functions of the AGP bus is, in the event that the videocard runs out of onboard RAM, textures and other data can be stored in system RAM, and accessed directly by the videocard. Now, this is a lot faster than the old method of going through the CPU to read and write data to the system RAM, but still DOG SLOW compared to accessing data directly on the videocard’s RAM. Now, the AGP Aperture controls how much of the system RAM the videocard can see and use to hold textures when it runs out of onboard RAM. If set below 64MB, some games will fail to run. For the best performance (by about 0.1%), you should generally set this to the most that’s possible, usually 256MB. Now, the AGP Aperture setting doesn’t actually RESERVE any RAM, thus setting it higher doesn’t mean you have less RAM available for your applications. If the memory allocated through the AGP Aperture fills up, then data overflows to unmapped system memory anyway, so all you do is incur the loss of AGP memory transfer performance for no gain. In reality the AGP Aperture setting doesn’t matter too much for performance, for the simple reason that if the videocard is hitting system memory, performance will be so unusably slow that all videocards are designed explicitly to prevent the card from ever having to store needed data in system memory.
Summary: Set your AGP Aperture to as high as you can or equal to your system memory. If you have problems for some strange reason you may lower it, but DO NOT go below 64MB if you like having your stuff work.
Funny you should ask. Yesterday I bought one of those PCI fan things (It hasn’t been delivered yet)
Wouldn’t putting it next to the gfx card cause it to work directly against the card’s own fan? causing a kind of tug-o-war with the airflow. Or does the card’s fan actually blow air away from the chip?
My bios won’t show me the case temp, only the CPU temp which off the top of my head is around 32C going up to 37C during heavy usage (playing games)
I had that concern as well, but in practice, it’s not an issue. Lots of warm air gets vented out the back, and the videocard gets a good bit cooler. Oh, and it sounds like your BIOS is actually displaying the Case temp instead of the CPU temp, with the CPU temp not appearing. You would have to have some godlike watercooling system on your CPU to have the temperature only range between 32C and 37C max load.
I’d say THIS is the ideal case, for cooling: http://www.envador.com/Photos/PVCII/OpenedUp1.JPG
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
I checked after posting. The bios definately says “CPU temprature” and it was at 37C
It is possible that it is in error, but I would have thought that 37C was about right for a cpu temp.