Ok, some of you read in my other thread and some of you tried to help me out about my PC when it quit booting. That is now all under the bridge since I bought a new PC. Or, so I thought. Instead of amending to that thread, I'm starting this one in hopes someone could help me out on the new PC. In short, I am pulling my hair out trying to get it to run games/sims, not just LFS, but all games/sims I've tried. To start I'll post the system specs for the old and new PC.

Old PC
HP pavilion 564w
Windows 98SE
P4 2.5 GHz
533 MHz bus
Slot 754 I think
512 MB PC2100
PCI ATI Radeon 9250 onboard 256 MB
normal memory usage with just windows running: 100 used/400 mb free

New PC
Compaq Presario SR1750NX
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Athalon 64 3500
bus speed, I don't know
Slot 939
1024 GB PC3200
ATI Radeon Xpress 200 256 MB shared
normal memory usage with just windows running: 250 used/750 free

I have unbelievable crappy frame rate now in all games I've tried. They are listed as well with frame rates on old and new PC.

LFS: 35-45 on old vs 12 on new
NR2003: 60 on old vs 10 on new
MS Flight Sim 2004: 20 on old vs 1.5 on new
GTL demo never tried on old pc, new one: 15

One really bad point is while I was waiting to purchase something, I was using the really old Celeron 667 MHz machine to surf the net and I tried MS Flight sim. I did have to leave the settings at default, but I was able to fly on that machine with 15 FPS!!! Now on the Athalon 64 I get 1.5 in the flight sim. That's just insane!!! I raced offline with NR2003 for about half a year on the Celeron PC as well. I didn't get much better frames, but they were better, on a Celeron 667 for crying out loud.

On the old PC (I'm back to talking about the P4) I ran everything in 1024x768x32 bit with graphics set mostly medium to high. LFS I ran high graphics, NR2003 was mostly medium, but with 43 cars drawn ahead, sun glare and the dirty windshield option turned on along with shadows on the ground. MS Flight sim, most graphics were on high. I tried to match all the graphics options over to running on the new PC. I have no idea why my performance has ground to a halt on the new PC. I was expecting to be amazed when I fired it up.

I browsed through the hardware section here and noticed some people with Athalon 2400's and such complaining about getting 40 FPS. I GET FREAKIN 10 in every game I try!!!!

A few things I did do with the Athalon PC was install and switch to the Radeon 9250 card from the onboard to see what would happen. I also used the ATI driver cleaner and uninstalled the drivers and installed Cat 5.11 drivers since I saw people were having so much trouble with the newer than 5.11 drivers. I also disabled the onboard sound and installed my fairly new soundcard from the old PC. The frame rate listed above was also with 4x AA and 4 or 8x AF on the old machine. The new PC I left AA/AF turned off. I also had stuff like sound accelleration and hardware accelleration turned down a notch on the old PC, so I duplicated that on the new one.

Someone please please tell me what the heck is wrong. I hated to buy an off-the-shelf system, but at $500 (usd) after rebates ($800 was the full price) I couldn't pass it up since I really don't even have the $500 to spend let alone spending the money on a custom built. Other than games, this thing really screams. My dialup feels like broadband compared to what I was use to on the old system.

One more note, when reading through the other threads, I noticed some were posting their 3DMark scores. I found that it was loaded on this machine so I ran it. I got a score of 844 (not a typo) compared to others who started threads about performance with similar specs were posting in the thousands!!!

So, is there something really wacked out on a setting somewhere? Or does this machine need to go back? I can see complaining about not quite getting as many frames as you thought, but this is absolutely ridiculous! I'm going to contact Compaq support as well, but, you all know how they are. They just start following steps from a troubleshooting procedure wasting a bunch of time on stupid stuff. I figured I'd come straight to the real techno wizards of the world first.

Hmm, sounds weird. Maybe you could do a run of superpi so that we can see if your CPU/RAM config is performing. If it is then at least we know it is a GPU issue. In the program just click on calculate, select 1M and tell us the time for the complete calculation. I guess it should be 40-ish or something.

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 256 MB shared <- uuahhhhh
This is obviously the reason for the bad performance.
I hope it's not a notebook, so that you can get a better Graphics card.

But be careful when buying one, the price often doesnt represent it's performance - there are usually very slow cards with loads of vram, and they suck... depending on what kinda games you wanna play, you should decide what to buy.

I can recommend a 6800GT, really good one. Price is ok, too (i'd say around 200€ with 256MB, but I havent looked at the prices for a while.)
Another good one would be a 6600GT, dont ask me what it costs, though. I'd guess you can get one for around 100€ already.
If you dont have the money, you should take a look at ebay, Im sure you can get some rather nice ones there for very few bucks, like a 9700pro or 9800pro, but you cant run the latest games with those (fear, doom3, etc.).
If you only want to play LFS, they are fine though

Quote from ORION :

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 256 MB shared <- uuahhhhh
This is obviously the reason for the bad performance.
I hope it's not a notebook, so that you can get a better Graphics card.

But be careful when buying one, the price often doesnt represent it's performance - there are usually very slow cards with loads of vram, and they suck... depending on what kinda games you wanna play, you should decide what to buy.

I can recommend a 6800GT, really good one. Price is ok, too (i'd say around 200€ with 256MB, but I havent looked at the prices for a while.)
If you dont have the money, you should take a look at ebay, Im sure you can get some rather nice ones there for very few bucks, like a 9700pro or 9800pro, but you cant run the latest games with those (fear, doom3, etc.).
If you only want to play LFS, they are fine though

I completely agree, IGPs arent usable for gaming, no matter what game, no matter what resoliton or detail settings, IGPs CANNOT run any actual game sufficiently. They use shared system memory(which is SLOW in comparsion with REAL GFX memory systems, for ex. my GF6600GT has 1000MNz mem bus).
Orion is right, get something like GF6800, X800 Pro, at least GF6600GT or X800..... GF6600GT is really cheap today, and it is good to run any today sim well.

Absolutely. Shared graphics memory isn't going to offer anything like the same performance as a proper graphics card, it's all about how fast your card is not how much memory it has, and onboard video isn't very quick.

Even a budget AGP card like an older Radeon 9600 or Nvidia 6600GT will do better than what you have now.

Having that crappy video card on a pc that has that fast cpu is just plain insanity.

That's what "pc vendors" always use to screw you over when you don't do your homework. I mean they go on shouting about "look! this video card has 256mb memory! It's the fastest there is!" - "I'll buy it!". When you build your pc from components yourself, you know what you get and stuff works

You would propably be fine even with a 9800 Radeon (pro or XT) if you're short on cash. They are hardly over 100€ these days.

That really sucks m8

Agreed onboard graphics are normaly cheap and nasty and shared memory really sucks ... wgooden asked what I thought about a system today also, it had onboard graphics immediately I said to him look for another one without onboard graphics illepall

If you can, take it back! and either get one without onboard graphics or get a refund Alternatively if you can't do either of the above disable the onboard graphics and put in a nvidia 6600GT or better (hopefuly the PC has an AGP or PCI-E slot or you really did get a lemon)

And in future ask before you buy or atleast take LFS on a CD and tell them you want to see it running before you buy

P.s. the fps you listed for the new machine, was it with the 9250 card or the onboard graphics? And did the 9250 card improve it over the onboard? Also what was the 9250 card connector type (PCI, AGP or PCI-E) if PCI it wouldn't be much different to the onboard...

If the motherboard has onbnoard gfx, this doesnt mean that you cant update it with a new card, at least in most cases.
So I think the best to do is take a look at the actual components, or ask someone know to take a look at this (maybe in the shop where you bought it? I guess they will have some gfx cards, too. maybe htey can even update it for you.)

im using an athalon 64 3000
1gig memory

6600 gt card

frame rate on line in lfs is about 90

so a 6600gt would be enough for you

[sarcasm] Ok guys, you got me. I had no idea that onboard graphics were this bad!! [/sarcasm]

Nah, the onboard graphics can't be the whole problem. I agree onboard isn't the way to go, but comeon, it would affect it this bad? My old PC (the P4 2.5) had 8 MB shared onboard before I got the 9250 card and I played all of these games before I got the card. I couldn't make it as pretty, but it ran! NR2003 ran fine, Flight Sim ran fine, and B2B@300, you saw me posting in that other thread that I was running LFS at 35-45 FPS on the P4 with the onboard (8 mb), I just had to have some of the LFS settings turned down. After installing the ATI card, it just allowed me to turn up the eye-candy.

Problem I had was I had NO PC. I would have built it myself (or had it built) as I'm of the same opinion of of-the-shelf system, but I don't have the money for that. I wouldn't have been able to do a gfx card or a monitor and printer (both of them needed replaced as well, both 10 years old). I also played NR2003 on the Celeron 667 with an old ATI Rage 128 16 mb card for a few months before I aquired the P4 system. I later found out that the onboard gfx (11 mb shared) ran BETTER than the old Rage 128 card when I loaded up S1 demo for my 5 yr old to run.

Quote from B2B@300 :

P.s. the fps you listed for the new machine, was it with the 9250 card or the onboard graphics? And did the 9250 card improve it over the onboard? Also what was the 9250 card connector type (PCI, AGP or PCI-E) if PCI it wouldn't be much different to the onboard...

Yes I tried with both onboard and the card. Yes the card is PCI (all I had available on the old PC). Performance was the same with onboard or with the card.

Quote from tinvek :

im using an athalon 64 3000
1gig memory
6600 gt card
frame rate on line in lfs is about 90
so a 6600gt would be enough for you

This is what I'm talking about. Do you all really think if he pulled his gfx card and ran onboard his performance would absolutely stop? Like I said, I had been running NR2003 and MS Flight sim with onboard for quite a while (the old PC's). With the onboard gfx of this new PC, I wouldn't expect to get as good of performance as others who are running separate cards, but I do expect pretty good performance compared to what I had with a P4 2.5 and 8 mb onboard.

Quote from J.B. :

Hmm, sounds weird. Maybe you could do a run of superpi so that we can see if your CPU/RAM config is performing. If it is then at least we know it is a GPU issue. In the program just click on calculate, select 1M and tell us the time for the complete calculation. I guess it should be 40-ish or something.

i did this last night after seeing your response. I got around 50 seconds.

I ran through the DirectDraw, Direct3D, and sound tests on dxdiag this morning. They all passed. I also found PC Doctor 5 preloaded so I ran that and everything passed there. I also configured NR2003 to use OpenGL to test that and it ran even worse. Dropped down to 5 FPS on OpenGL.

I appreciate all the responses, but I will say, even though onboard isn't the way to go, that is NOT my problem when using an Athalon 64 3500 as well. If I can run NR2003 at 12-18 FPS on a 7 yr old Celeron 667 with onboard, then I surely should get better than 9-10 on the Athalon 3500 with 256 mb onboard.

Quote from mrodgers :

I got around 50 seconds.

That's pretty slow for a Athlon 64 3500+. You got spyware? forgot to install some drivers?

Quote from Lautsprecher[NOR] :

That's pretty slow for a Athlon 64 3500+. You got spyware? forgot to install some drivers?

Brand spankin new PC. Only 30 hours old or so. Only place I've been on the net really so far is here, LFS race server, and RSC. And, whoops, I forgot where I put the stinkin superpi program. I got 42.672 seconds. The 53 was just from memory, which seems to be worse than the PC's memory, LOL.

Just for S&G's, I'm getting ready to pull the harddrive and put the drive from the other PC with Windows 98 loaded on it. Just curious what will happen trying to run LFS. I should be able to just boot up since it's the same gfx and sound card if I leave them in it.

I would've format the thing, and put a fresh install of XP on it. You never know what problems the crappy software HP, Dell etc. put on their machines might do.

42 seconds is fine. That means it really is the graphics card although I agree that it shouldn't that bad. I looked for some benchemarks and you should be getting about 6000 points in 3Dmark2001se which is about the same as my old Geforce3 and is more than enough for LFS. So you should probably try to reinstall everything.

I just had a quick look at the ATI website. The onboard GPU drivers are not the same as the Radeon drivers. Maybe you got the wrong ones?

I must say, LFS at Blackwood is simply stunning looking at 1280x1024x32 with 8X AA and 16X AF and all gfx driver settings at max at 35 FPS. I realized I didn't test the onboard graphics after uninstalling the drivers and installing 5.11. So I pulled the PCI card back out and reinstalled the drivers and made sure the resolution and refresh rates were all matching.

I have hardware accelleration clicked down a notch as well as sound accelleration. At the res. I was testing with, 1024x768x32 with 60 hertz refresh, I'm now seeing 60 FPS, YAHOO!!!! I have to make sure I have the other games configured correctly as well now. A quick test of NR2003 netted me 30ish frames, around what I was running on the P4. I may have some options higher in NR2k3 than what I ran on the P4 machine. GTL still runs like crap and I haven't tried MS Flight Sim yet. Now, my next thing on the list is to see if Victor kindly gave me an extra unlock sometime this past 40 or so hours so I can test the S2 content (driving around BL in the GTi for testing purposes is hard, it's soooo slow).

I re-ran the 3DMarks test and this time got a score of 1277. Still not real good numbers. That was with max AA/AF and other options in the graphics drivers set at max. I'll run it again with the settings I will be using (if it matters, I don't know).

Off for some grub, then some more testing and hopefully I'm racing tonight!!!

Again, thanks for the responses!! Happy racing!!

Quick Edit, Beautiful, Got me an unlock for tonight!!!

Well, it's almost 3:30 am and I just got done with racing for around 4-5 hours. I am stunned at what I was missing on the old PC. I'm now hitting 50-60 FPS at 1152x684x32 (max res with the onboard) and 85 Hz refresh. Got me a little AA/AF going on and I am a happy camper .

I was having a little trouble at Westhill because I was too busy looking off in the distance at the mountains with the haze turned on, unbelievable!!! The problem was all in the settings of many things (which is what I was figuring), sound accelleration, hardware accelleration, gfx drivers and the settings. I think it was mostly the sound accelleration. I turned that down a click. Now I have the kid's PC to rebuild/put back together so they stay off this one. Lucky for me, most kid's games run at 640x480 and 256 or 16 bit color, so the Celeron runs them fine. Got the PC's networked so wifey and I can surf together when she comes down to bother me and want's email. I tried racing a long time ago while she surfed on the other PC, but that didn't work so well on dialup.

I even managed to get 30 FPS in GTLegends running at 1152x864x32. I have to tweak that yet and see if I can better it.

That's the close of my saga of the new PC. Now I'm estatic about it. In the future I'll better it with a gfx card, but for now, I'm running about 300% better than the old PC and 1000% better than when I first booted this one, LOL