For some reason, my computer had been running crappy. Not sure what was up, but I reinstalled XP and latest catalyst drivers. Improved but not real great. So I started poking around in the bios to see if there was something that needed tweaked - because this started going on shortly after I booted one day to a “bios reset” message and had to go in and reset from the defaults.
P4 2.8, Radeon 128 pro 9800. Getting like 20fps in GTA San Andreas, and really bad fps in Vietcong… which given the age of the game should run pretty smooth I’d think.
Anyway, I set the “turbo” thing on instead of auto on the ram tweaking page, and rebooted. Everything spins up but no beeps, no video. So I tried the clear-cmos jumper. Nothing. Pulled the battery, still nothing. Pulled the RAM, and it beeps. Ram back in, pulled video and no beeps. Not sure it would anyway, but there’s the results thus far. I’ve left the battery out and the power unplugged for 20 min to no avail.
I’ve googled the hell out of it, and found other people with the problem but aside from sticking some other type of ram in there that I don’t have, nobody’s had success.
Any ideas?
So, if this fails to work, I’m looking at replacing the motherboard with another, and transferring the 2.8 over to the wife’s computer to replace her 1800xp. So I’ll be shopping for a comperable motherboard that’s socket 478. Additionally, it’s a great opportunity to put an AMD in my box.
Does the A64 have any merit over a 32bit Athlon if I’m not running a 64bit OS?
I don’t really want to upgrade video cards right this moment, but it doesn’t seem like video was my performance issue on the latest games - because no matter if I run them at the lowest or middling-high settings the framerates were consistently 20ish. So, I think I should spend the bling on the processor. I’d like to do a mobo+cpu combo at around 300-500. Asking suggestions of course.