My graphic card's performace seems lacking

[PaCiNoLiFe]

I should be getting pretty good FPS with my current graphics card but it seems I have to overclock to get a decent frame rate in games or 3dMark tests. I should be getting this with my card's default settings right. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Here are my specs below.

MB: SY-KT600 DRAGON PLUS v.1.0

CPU: Athlon XP Barton 2500+ at 1.83GHz

Vid: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB

Mem: Kingston 184 Pin 1GB DDR PC-3200

HD: Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM 36GB

PSU: 450 Watt

[Mekrel]

CPU is a bottleneck for sure

[ripken204]

its a big time bottleneck

[PaCiNoLiFe]

I agree with both of you. Do you think the Barton 3200+ which is the limits of my mobo be sufficient with my current card? I really want to hop aboard the 64 club but can't currently afford it. Man that new BFG 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra card will make your 64 so sweet. I bet the 3DMARK05 scores will be insane.

[Mekrel]

Im affraid to say I dont think the bottlenecks are down to speed alone when it comes to bartons. So I think buying a 3200 wouldnt really help, I think that because the A64's carry more instruction sets capable of offloading some of the work from the graphics card

but you never know... a 3200 is much faster than a 2500 and might help so go for it.

Nope if anything an 512 Ultra would make 3dmark05 scores go down if I replaced it with my GT.

Any standard 6800 ultras wether it be 128/256mb have slacker memory timings so the ram can run at the faster speeds of 1100mhz compared to the 1000mhz of the GT.

But alot of GT owners are reaching 1100 on the memory easily and with the tigher timings this means more bandwidth. Now with normal RAM in a system you will notice that 512 modules have tighter timings than a 1GB module because getting a 1gb module to run at those kind of timings isnt possible yet. Same with graphics card memory, 512 means the timings are going to be slacker.

Apparently its only doom3 which will use 512mb of onboard graphics memory. Also in your bios you have an arpature(sp?) size which is how much ram of your system ram you allow the graphics card to use if its onboard memory becomes full.

[ripken204]

i would get that cpu if u want to, it will help but it will still be a bottleneck, only b/c with the card u have, u need to have an FX to unleash its full capabilities

[Aegis]

Man that new BFG 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra card will make your 64 so sweet. I bet the 3DMARK05 scores will be insane.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Only available for Falcon Northwest computers. Your CPU is a definite bottleneck, but there may be other problems too. Do you have the latest driver for your graphics card? I'm not too sure about this, but maybe there's a PCI Express driver too?