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Fastest AGP System?

Associate
Joined
12 Feb 2003
Posts
83
Location
East Sussex
Thought I'd do a little project and try to build a mid-range gaming system using some old and new parts and see how cheap I could get a half way decent system together. Had a spare E6300 I had bought for my son's gaming rig but upgraded his to an E6600, an old colors IT 600W power supply, a bunch of old cheap PC3200 CAS3 DDR, an old Bliss 512mb 6800GS (was ok in this system but have just upgraded to the Gecube x1950XT AGP with TEC (peltier for us old schoolers) an old Alien Plastic knock off case (great case with excellent cooling, even has vents on top to blow all the hot air out of and an old Dual Layer DVD writer.

Bought new Asrock Conroe865PE (only stable up to 312FSB), Seagate 500GB HD, thermaltake Power Express GPU PSU (the X1950's are amperage hungry and didn't trust the Colors PSU). So with new parts about £250 and old parts laying around but costing about £450 when purchased, I have a decent gaming rig that scored 5994 on 3dMark06 (see below) and runs everything I thow at it on my 21" 1680x1050 monitor (bought new for £150) very well.

I highly recommend the Gecube also, without it this would not have been possible. Clocks well also for the core below I had it at 715/810. Because of the TEC it doesn't go over 70 degrees too! The C2D does 3.2GHz at stock but because of the 865PE chipset I can raise the FSB high enough to get a good CPU score which would have pushed 3dMark score up another 500+ points or over 6500 but pretty happy with this! Would almost like to get a multi unlocked CPU like the X6800 or QX6700 but that would defeat the purpose of this project!

Can anyone beat that? I can't search the orb site well enough to compare against AGP but it looks pretty good against single card PCIe systems.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1731001

Daz
 
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not many people have c2d rigs with an agp card so i think you win.... :p

i have an agp x1950pro but only get 4500 odd because of my single core cpu. :D
 
Have played around a bit more and got an e4400 and put the e6300 in another system for my daughter. Can't get this e4400 over 2.8, needs more volts but I cannot find a volt mod for the e4400. These Asrock Conroe boards are good and stable but do not give a lot in the way of OCing volt config capabilities. Any one know of a conductive pen volt mod for the e4400?

Anyhow all the way up to 6552 on 3DMark06 and 6638 on PCMark05 now. If I could get the cpu faster I could probably break 6700 3Dmark06. To compare since not many people have a Conroe AGP system, just compare the Graphics and HDR test scores. That takes out the variable of the CPU for non dual core systems. Pretty good system for a very reasonable price!

3DMark06

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1865885 (Published my new higher score of 6660 so can't link to this one now)

3DMark Score 6552 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 2514 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 2787 Marks
CPU Score 2464 Marks

Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 19.168 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest 22.732 FPS

CPU Tests
CPU1 - Red Valley 0.782 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 1.242 FPS

HDR Tests
1 - Canyon Flight (SM 3.0) 28.031 FPS
2 - Deep Freeze (SM 3.0) 27.701 FPS

PCMark05

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm05=856589

HDD - XP Startup 8.14 MB/s
Physics and 3D 252.18 FPS
Transparent Windows 850.77 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader 394.04 FPS
Web Page Rendering 3.26 Pages/s
File Decryption 77.43 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 1917.94 FPS
HDD - General Usage 5.19 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression 2816.74 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding 510.36 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit 191.03 Pages/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression 39.56 MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression 6.6 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encryption 37.4 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 22.86 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random 16 MB 12.45 MAccesses/s

Daz
 
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Found a volt mod for the E4400 here - http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=3904&s=4 - and can now break the 3Ghz barrier. I used the 1.55 mod since this Asrock Conroe865PE board undervolts and mine was a 1.35V CPU. U have to use another mod if you have a different default volts CPU. I was stuck at 2.8 before. This E440 is pretty good if you have an FSB limited motherboard, there's only about 5% in encoding and other multithread apps between this one now and my son's E6600 running at the same speed. Of course his gets up to 3.6GHz on a DS3 lol. My new 3DMark06 score is 6660 with this rig. I'm sure I am close to the limits now. My GPU is not stable beyond 722 and Ram at 854 so far, but I am sure I will be able to tweak a few things just to get past 6700. Have a look here if you are interested.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1879279

PCMark05 -6998

System Test Suite
HDD - XP Startup 7.99 MB/s
Physics and 3D 275.74 FPS
Transparent Windows 828.02 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader 478.2 FPS
Web Page Rendering 3.48 Pages/s
File Decryption 82.83 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 1903.63 FPS
HDD - General Usage 4.96 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression 3104.69 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding 514.67 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit 204.57 Pages/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression 42.23 MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression 7.0 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encryption 40.76 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 25.33 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random 16 MB 12.97 MAccesses/s
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
someones managed 10k in 3dm06 with an agp setup forgot who did it though.

Unless you provide a link, I just can't see that happening tbh. AGP doesn't have SLi/Crossfire and no AGP card I know of can do that on its own. It would need a monstrous overclock to achieve that.
 
titaniumx3 said:
Unless you provide a link, I just can't see that happening tbh. AGP doesn't have SLi/Crossfire and no AGP card I know of can do that on its own. It would need a monstrous overclock to achieve that.

thats what i thought, but as far as i can remember the guy was running a quad core cpu on it, and the cpu makes a lot of difference in 06 scores. i can't remember what gfx card he was running but it was deffo agp and had some monsterous cooling on it.
 
from dazmans results I can well belive the extra cpu power from a madly clocked quad core could push out a 10k result.
 
Only 50% of the CPU component gets added to the overall score. Higher CPU only adds less than 1% per 200MHZ (that's C2D processors don't have any AMD's currently) to the Graphics and HDR component of the score. Even if this mythical rig scored 3000 on both the Graphics and HDR component of the score (which is impossible for a non-8800 class card) he would have to score over 8000 on the CPU component. The highest CPU component score on ORB is 7307 scored on an Intel Core 2 Quad @ 4876 MHz. All this taken into consideration makes me think 10K on an AGP system is impossible, but willing to be proven wrong.
 
I've seen the original Gainward 7800GS+ Golden Sample version with water cooling on a core 2 duo (can't remeber exact specs off hand) getting fairly close to 10K in 3D Marks 06 so its probably possible... but your talking about twice the performance of the stock videocard to reach that... and a very very big boost from the CPU scores...
 
Yes, someone thought that they saw something like that before, when I 1st posted. The guy in the link below has a seiously overclocked quad running at 4365Mhz with two 7950GT running SLI and he got 11356 3dMarks. I just dont see how a single 7800GS+ could come close to that even though I know it had the 7900 series core in it. I'd love to see it but it just don't seem possible given what I've seen. Perhaps it was the 3dMark05 score that was around 10K, I could believe that. I'll download it now and see. This is the guys compare:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1934110

If you can find the 7800GS+ score it let me know!

Daz
 
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Fastest 7800GS+ I see on ORB is http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=702776

But I have seen a thread with one on core 2 duo getting into the mid 8000s but its awhile ago and I don't remember where.

EDIT: It is possible it was 3D Mark 05 scores... but mid 8000s isn't really that big a deal for 3D Marks 05 on a GS+ (they do over 7K on stock in 05).
 
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Yes, I saw that one also. I think to get anything over 7.5K in 3dMark06 on a single 7900 series GPU is near to, if not, impossible, due to AGP chipset FSB limitations. If a seriously OC'd Quad with 2 SLI'd 7950's that were also seriously overclocked could get "only" 11356, then the single card would get half that plus say 25% which would be about 7.1K marks. It must have been a 3dMark05 score. I just ran '05 and came up with 12924 score. 1st time I have ever run it, went straight from '03 to '06.

EDIT: Just saw this score, the highest for a GS+ of 11197 on same M/b as mine but CPU @ 2705Mhz:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=2810617


Daz
 
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I dont see any limits FSB wise, I had a NF2 running over 500FSB (could do 550FSB) and 2.8GHZ.

A 2006 Score will be CPU limited though so 2005 is best to score GPU as even with high overclocks the older CPU's are far slower than newer lower MHZ CPU's
 
Wow, I had an old Epox NF2 board years ago running a Barton. Had nothing but problems with it. The plastic M/b power supply connector eventually caught on fire and had to retire it, lol. Never got anywhere near 500 FSB either. That's pretty impressive.

Daz
 
Yes rare but it was a ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe and a AMD 2600M (Mobile CPU 1.45v 45watt) running modded Trats bios with DFI inputed Romsips).

It ran @ 480FSB and 2.7GHZ with no mods but after that had to increase VCore (Solder) and VDD slightly (Pencil) and then cool both NB and SB better than stock but still passive. (SB is uncooled on stock)

Reason I was at 550FSB was I bought some Corsair XMS PC4400LL to replace the XMS PC3500LL but as of older Memory Contoler on Mobo it did now run tighter timings on the PC4400 (slacker by default) so I opted for the PC3500 for keeps and ran at 500FSB or slightly above with better tighter timings.
 
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A C2D on a 865PE chipset? wow mega old I wouldnt of belived that, I had a DFI 875P-T that only took P4's :eek:
 
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