I have an Athlon 1900XP system with 1G of RAM. It had a Gigabyte GA7DX
motherboard and a Geforce 3 Ti 500 card. When I would run the
benchmark Madonions 3dmark 2001 I would usually get a sore of
7100-7200. I had a problem with my system and I had to return it and
the motherboard was replaced with a Gigabyte GA 7VTXH motherboard.
Everything else is exactly the same. I now get benchmark scores of
5300-5400. I also have downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers.  I have
also updated my chipset drivers. I have also checked my AGP setting in
the bios and it is set to 4X. Any help with this problem will be
greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Jeff

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Request for Question Clarification by blader-ga on 25 Jun 2002 21:15 PDT

Dear jard1:

Were you using the same nVidia drivers as before when you first
conducted your benchmark after getting your new motherboard?

Best Regards,
blader-ga

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Clarification of Question by jard1-ga on 26 Jun 2002 12:35 PDT

I ran the test as soon as I received my computer back from ABS using
the older nvidia drivers, dated around Jan. 2002, I then updated the
drivers to the most current drivers. I got scores of around 5100 with
the old drivers and it increased to about 5300-5400 with the new
drivers.

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Clarification of Question by jard1-ga on 26 Jun 2002 19:27 PDT

yes. same drivers. I got 3Dmark scores of 7100-7200 using the old
nvidia drivers before I sent it in for repair, I got scores of
5100-5200 after it came back using the same drivers.

Have you tried updating to the latest BIOS? here is a page with bios
downloads for your motherboard.

http://www.giga-byte.com/support/viakt266.htm

Also this might just be a limitation of the motherboard, maybe there
is a design problem or something that prevents it from performing
better. Here is a comparison of your motharboard against the Asus
A7V266-E

http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/motherboards/ga7vtxh/ga7vtxh_5.htm

I kinow it's not much, but maybe it will point you in the right
direction.

The only thing that would make sense to me is that your video card is
having issues with the new chipset.  Your old motherboard, the GA-7DX,
used AMD's 761 chipset and your new motherboard, the GA-7VTXH, uses
VIA's KT266a chipset.  I know I have seen and heard about people
having issues with the 266a chipset with their video cards (including
some of ATI's products).  If at all possible I would try to ask for an
exact replacement of the previous motherboard, because the issue lies
between your video card and the chipset on the new motherboard.  VIA
is notorious for these sorts of things.  It's extremely unlikely that
you would lose nearly 2000 points in 3DMark from having a different
set of drivers installed for your card, if not impossible.

Besides the different chipsets on the different motherboards the only
other thing that I could think of causing such an issue would be that
maybe something happened to your video card while your were having
problems with the other motherboard, or the video card was the problem
in the first place.

You should really try to see if you could get the first motherboard
back instead of the one you have now and if that is done and you are
still experiencing those performance issues then getting the video
card replaced by the manufacturer might be necessary.

Hope everything works out for you, take it easy.

make sure you have the bus speed specified correctly. Sometimes the
system default is something like 100 with a high multiplier rather
than 133 (ddr=266) with a smaller multiplier. Also, make sure your ram
is clocked correctly. Surely you are using DDR so make sure the clock
speed and the latency is set appropriately. Incorrect settings here
could DRAMATICALLY affect performance.

well this means the 3d card isnt working as hard as it can
so that means u can safely overclock the GPU(graphic processing unit),
u can some it to upto 1.25 its original speed, try that, its
definately safe and it might bring u to7 000