GForce mx400 really slow with Abit KD7?

[Raycaster]

I recently put an Athlon 2200+ machine together for my brother-in-law and everything went smooth. He has a nice Abit KD7 (non raid) motherboard with a 2200+ Athlon. He went with a cheaper gforce2 mx400 64M card and new hd & cdrw etc.

Installed XP Pro & SP1 nicely with zero problems. Updated everything possible and the machine purred. Latest DirectX, drivers, bios, everything I could imagine. The bios has all the AGP stuff set for speed, I believe.

I loaded up Battlefield 1942 and was horrified to see it stutter just playing the "DICE" logo intro. I have the latest NVidia drivers, latest mb bios etc, and I am stumped. The game plays ok on very low settings but no where near my Athlon 1.333GHz machine with the same video card.

The video display is normal without AA etc. I ram 3dmark 2001SE and it was about 25% of my machine. (3500 I think, can't remember exact)/

Anyone figure out what I missed?

 

[GoNz0]

BF1942 was never designed around the GF2. You got a great PC and got a crap £20 GF2 MX, for £40 you could have got a GF4 MX and had no problems at all. Cutting the corner was the only problem there. Sorry but the box may say GF256 and up but in all reality minimum settings and a forced 640x480 will not drag more than about 20FPS. the PC is bottlenecked around the video card.

*disclaimer im drunk

and to play games the video card is 50% of the choice when buying a new pc. My old 1ghz 256mb PC133 system is running Bf1942 at 60-80 FPS with a GF4 MX460, and the guy who owns it loves it.

oh and i get 13,000 3d marks. http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6229905

 

[Taurus]

yeah, but gonzo... this is the catch:

Originally posted by Raycaster
I loaded up Battlefield 1942 and was horrified to see it stutter just playing the "DICE" logo intro. I have the latest NVidia drivers, latest mb bios etc, and I am stumped. The game plays ok on very low settings but no where near my Athlon 1.333GHz machine with the same video card.

i'm not sure what the answer is. here's a checklist:

- directx 9.0a
- via hyperion 4.46
- nvidia detonator 43.45
- close out any background programs
- double-check FSAA and AF are disabled
- make sure there are no conflicts or hardware problems in device manager

and you sure you have the same video card as him? i doubt you could get 4x more 3dmarks than him. especially with a gf2 mx. i just looked up some scores and if he's getting anywhere near 3500 3dmarks with his setup, he's doing pretty damn good.