The move to a new apartment is in about a week. I haven’t started packing my junk yet, but I did put RMA replacement mobo in my PC. Old mobo took a while to die, it was sad and painful. The new one doesn’t have any issues with my Radeon. Before I had it switching to VGA safe mode (640x480, 16 colours) all the time. I was blaming ASUS and Nvidia designs, but is was just a defective mobo.
Here is my current home PC specs:
Mobo: ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Rev. 1.01 (NForce2 Ultra) CPU: Athlon Barton 2500+ @ 200MHz FSB (3200+) Paste: Arctic Silver 5 Cooler: Zalman 7000Cu-A RAM: 2 x 512MB DDR3200 Infineon (2.5-3-3-8) Video: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder 128M Case: Thermaltake Xazer III V1420DU (7 fans) PSU: Thermaltake PurePower 420Watt (came with the case) HDD: 2 x 80GB SATA Seagate Barracuda ST380817AS DVD-RW: Panasonic LF-D521 CD-RW: LG GCE-8400B (40x12x40)
I plan to play Half-Life 2 on it. I hope it will be up to the task.
Zalman cooler weight two and a half pounds and is in the air flow generated by six fans, so heat exchange is good. Overclocket barton is 43c while idling and 48c under full load.
Here are the stats from Halo PC 1.0:
Date / Time: 07.11.2004 13:56:41 (345546ms) 2200MHz, 1024MB, 128M ATI Radeon 9800 PRO (DeviceID=0x4e48) Driver=6.14.10.6462 Shader=2.0 C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Halo\halo.exe -timedemo -nosound (Version=1.0.0.564) Frames=4700 Total Time=122.75s Average frame rate=38.29fps Below 5fps= 0% (time) 0% (frames) (0.712s spent in 3 frames) Below 10fps= 1% (time) 0% (frames) Below 15fps= 3% (time) 0% (frames) Below 20fps= 19% (time) 8% (frames) Below 25fps= 27% (time) 13% (frames) Below 30fps= 32% (time) 16% (frames) Below 40fps= 47% (time) 31% (frames) Below 50fps= 74% (time) 62% (frames) Below 60fps= 96% (time) 93% (frames) Memory used Max=153MB, Min=124MB, Ave=142MB
I think ASUS A7N8X* motherboard owners should ignore Bungie advise about switching Windows XP to file caching mode. Leave everything as is. If you tweak performance settings, your video card may start going into VGA safe mode. I suspect if isn’t necessarily a specific defect in one A7N8X-E Deluxe, but a model and/or Nvidia NForce2 Ultra chipsed deficiency. Same video card works like a charm on ASUS A7V600 motherboard (VIA KT600 chipset) with System cache option enabled. A7V600 is slow, but very stable.