Alright... I have a Socket 478 Pentium 4 (northwood), 1Gb PC-133 Ram, Radeon 9800Pro (256Mb-DDR, 128-bit, AGP 4x) And I can give the rest of what's in my PC if necesarry, but those are what I imagine matters for this question.... so, here it goes...

No matter what I set my settings to in CS:S... it will NOT go above 30 fps... all low, all maxed... still 20-30ish fps... UT2004 I get 50-70... I got a new motherboard, which runs AGP 8x, and takes DDR2 533 (with a gig of DDR2 533 RAM)... will that hopefully make a diff? Either way the new parts were free but... can someone explain to me why that is with high and low settings my FPS stays the same?

Make sure you have it set to "fps_max largenumber"
Aside from that unlikely fix I have no idea.

I thought CS:S and several othe rgames limited the maximum framerate for syncing purposes.

Sounds like V-sync is on, CSS should go to whatever frame rate your machine can put out.

Some games, usually bad ports from console games (e.g. The Godfather) have a fps lock at 30... something for the console version that was never removed for the PC title.

Well, I disabled v-sync... no luck, halfed my resolution down to 1024*768, turned down to Trilinear filtering and 4x AA... still nothing... it'll hit mid-40s now but still, doing all that should give me more of a performance increase than that shouldn't it?

Or is my hardware just not up to par for good framerates? It doesn't bother me too much, I can play like this, but I mean who doesn't want more FPS? lol

Well...I can't say for sure, but that PC133 is akin to having a Supercharged 500 inch Big Block Chevy with only a 2 barrel carb!!!

The DDR-2 should wake things up quite a bit, but I have a strong feeling that ram is severly limiting your performance.

See what Si-Soft Sandra's memory Bandwidth has to say!



Your approximate performance would be the bottom, a extremely restrictive 957MB/S, my AMD XP at a meager DDR350 2-3-3-8 at the very top in the "Current Chipset" bar pulls in 2.5 times that at 2577MB/S ...and various other Intel's in the other bars, including DDR400, DDR500, and DDR-2 533 (5704MB/S, what your upgrading too...it will have over 5 times what you have now!)

Other possibilites would be video drivers, some kind of weird game setting, or a wonky OS, but when you change motherboards, your going to have to reformat it anyways (There are ways around that..but your performance will suffer over a clean install)

Attached Thumbnails

 

Thanks Solid, that pretty much (for the most part) verified what I was thinking... I figured it had to be the ram or my AGP speed... obviously more-so the ram above all.

And yes, I always, ALWAYS format and do clean installs.
Just feel dirty doing it any other way.

Thanks again, hope the new memory (and faster AGP bus) works as planned... actually, I should be getting it today!

So, RIGHT after posting this, I went outside to walk my dog and bring her in... seen the UPS truck, though wow, coincidental.... then watched it speed right by my house. lol

Thats pretty weird that you cant go over 30fps, my old computer a Dell 256MB PC-800 P4 1.7GHZ GeForce 2 MX ran 50 fps on Dust2, and over 20 on most other maps. I think this is late but you can always use this configuration that takes away shadows, the rag doll effects and other stuff. Here:

Css Cal Config Client - CASEYS config

It helped my fps.

Alright, well, this is sucky.

NewEgg only shipped ONE of the two RAM sticks I ordered... on top of that, it won't boot with that stick. I don't know NewEggs RMA stuff, never had to send anything back before, but I hope I don't have to send everything back... I wouldn't anyway. Fortunatly I had a few DDR sticks laying around, so I know the motherboard works.

I just stupid forgot to back up what I need from my C: in my excitement of new hardware, and DDR2 instead of PC-133. lol

So atm, I'm on my moms computer backing things up...

I plan to check when I get things done, but does anyone know how NewEgg would deal with my situation? Or even close guess? lol

Thanks everyone.

Wait a second here..they only sent one of the DDR-2 533 sticks?

Why didnt' you order them as a "Kit"???? (2x512)

And...if you have a "Northwood" P-4...is it a 800FSB "C" or a 533FSB "B"

And..if I am not mistaken..I though DDR-2 only ran on socket 775 boards! (Wich would mean your CPU wouldn't work with DDR-2.

You also said you know the motherboard works, cause it booted with sticks you allready had laying around? DDDR-2 isnt supposed to fit in DDR-1 slots, unless you got some weird hybird board that has slots for each kind.

Can you link the parts you ordered?

I did order it as a "Kit"
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail


Motherboard:
ECS
ECS P4M800PRO-M478 (1.0) Socket 478 VIA P4M800 PRO Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail


I do know NOT to shove a ram stick in a slot it doesn't belong. lol

And yeah, it's some crazy DDR AND DDR2 motherboard, can only use one type at a time though, which I did... still only booted with the DDR400/333.

I emailed NewEgg, and I am going to RMA the RAM Monday, hopefully they'll get it right this time and send me TWO WORKING sticks.

And yeah, I'm hitting 50-140 fps now, in various levels/servers, thanks everyone.
Also thanks particularly for that graph of RAM speeds Solid, I've always wanted something like that, makes everything simple for my brain to compare. lol

Forgot to mention I'm using a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz @ 3.15Ghz (Prescott) now, playing around with OC now, never done it before... any tips?

Well, even though this is a dead topic... this ram worked in that mobo... actually using it now.

Newegg.com - A-DATA 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail

Still waiting for the RAM I ordered.