PCA Forums

dont know if any one is interested but found this on amd mb forums

http://www.amdforums.com/showthread.php ... ight=nview


Cheers

Interesting. I haven't got a fast card in this XP333 board yet - I'm doing stability testing with a TNT2 installed. Once I'm certain the board is stable for desktop apps I'll install the Geforce 3 Ti200 from my old system and try some gaming.

I'm glad to see that someone in that thread is recommending the 1.82 ALi AGP driver. I downloaded it from IWill but have been afraid to install it. I've heard bad things about the latest ALi unified driver so I was planning to stick with the drivers that came with the mobo.

My big concern is stability over speed right now. I'm going from a P3-1000 so I expect to see a big performance increase just for that.

I've heard mentioned somewhere else about enabling AliAGP for better performance and I might try that eventually. I've copied this thread to a text file for reference.

I'd personally avoid enabling fastwrites. Past experience on other mobos has shown that it leads to instability (especially on overclocked systems) with little performance benefit.

the 1.82 or 1.83 ali agp drivers are good. DO NOT INSTALL the integrated 1.07 drivers. Actually install them but do not install the AGP 1.90's.... the AGP is disaster. radeon 8500 newest catalysts on my epox was 99xx installed those drivers and got a 72xx with 3dmark2k1 and about died. Dumped the AGP drivers installed the 1.83's and shot up to 94xx. The Ali AGP isn't as fast as the VIA is so i knew i'd lose a few points. But i don't see any real world difference in games so i'm not real concerned.

*edit*
http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/support_driver.htm

Go to Ali to get the latest drivers. I just noticed they have a integrated 1.09 out now. Haven't installed it yet, will do that tomorrow night once i get home from work. Looks like it still is using the 1.90 AGP driver though.

I've got the 1.82e AGP driver downloaded but I won't install it until I've done some serious game benchmarking on this thing with the present driver so I can be sure the new ones are doing something.

System seems rock stable right now and I don't want to mess with it until I get all my apps installed and Ghost it.

Pred, does this AGP utility they're talking about in that thread come with the AGP driver, or is it something that has to be downloaded seperately?

You have to download it separately from Ali's site... Its kind of a crued program. No installer just extract the zip to a folder and run it. The AGP is usually set into normal mode... I don't know how it will act for the Nvidia card since i'm running a 8500. But fast writes aren't supported with the 8500 so i can't enable that it won't even let me. I set mine to turbo mode and noticed very little difference. Normal just sets everything default. I might do something for your system you can always set it back to default and delete the program. I did install the 1.09 integrated driver... Had about a 400 point gain with the IDE drivers which isn't enough to notice in the real world but hey its an improvement The AGP drive is ver 1.91 so it did change also... Haven't ran 3dmark2k1 yet so i'll see if its any better than the 1.90's were... hopefully i can get back up to 99xx... Cause then all i gotta do is up the radeon to 300/300 and i'm well into the 10k mark with this puppy

i dont think fast writes are worth the touble you get maybe 1-2 % improvement with loads of stability problems or so it seems

Cheers

Yeah. On my BX boards I never enabled fastwites or sidebanding. Both generally lead to stability problems and prevent you from overclocking the vid card (Geforce anyway). You get more performance by disabling them and overclocking the card.

I went ahead and installed the 1.82e AGP driver and the utility. At least I can confirm now that I'm running at AGP 4x and sidebanding & fastwrites are off.