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Is a HD6670 this bad?

Soldato
Joined
24 Jan 2006
Posts
2,622
Hi,

My home office PC was showing a good number of sparklies so I replaced the HD3450 with a HD6670 which has cured the issue.

Now I thought the HD6670 would be sufficient for a little light gaming, Portal, Half Life 2 even L4D. This seems not to be the case.

L4D isn't too bad in confined spaces but Portal and Half Life 2 are very jerky, the frame rate often bombs even with the Resolution set to 1440 x 900 and medium textures etc. (1920 x 1200 native).

The 6670 was approx £60 for OCUK, I'd have though it would easily run a game from several years ago at such a low resolution.

This is the card

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-258-AS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1983

Rest of system
E4300 @ 3Ghz
Gigabyte P31-DS3P
4GB OCZ DDR 800 (gold spreaders)
64GB Crucial M4 SSD - Boot
500GB WD Black - Storage + Steam folder

CPUz confirms the CPU is clocking to 3Ghz under load (2Ghz at idle) approx 70% usage in game across both cores
GPUz confirms HD6670 installed in PCI-E 16 slot @ x16
Fresh install of Windows 7 64bit a couple of months back with only office 2007 and Steam installed.

Latest drivers for mobo and GPU.

My soon to be replaced gaming PC with Q6600, 8GB, GTX280 cuts through like butter @ either 1080 or 19x12 but for some reason this HD6670 doesn't cut it. I had hoped to use the 6670 for some in-house multiplayer but wanted a low wattage card as the PC is on 16hrs a day.

Am I expecting too much of the card .... 480 stream processors seems a fair amount!

Any suggestions welcome

Cheers

AD
 
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Thanks, I'll keep on with it for now to see if I can get the performance up to more reasonable levels.

I did wonder if the GDDR3 was an issue but the card has more shaders than the 3850 which should mince early source games.

Drivers are the latest, even did an full uninstall of the GPU driver before the latest catalyst.

Cheers

AD
 
In that build I'd say the limiting factor is the CPU.

Several years back I used the run the CPU with a pair of 8800GTS 512's in SLI without issue.

At 3Ghz its still a good CPU for light gaming. It's only the modern multicore games which would suffer. HL2 is from 2004.

Cheers

AD
 
My Llano A8 3800 plays those games fine, the onboard gfx is slightly worse.

Just installed Portal with these settings,
hl22011-11-1008-31-30-38-1.jpg

hl22011-11-1008-31-24-09-1.jpg

Playing test chamber 6, FRAPS says the fps is 80-90 average.
 
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"Multicore rendoring" disabled? :p An't that just making the game run on one CPU core?

Who cares? its still silky smooth.

And like I said, I just installed the game and set the resolution to the native of the monitor, then played it.

Also notice that is the recommened setting for the system, and I have just tried it enabled and the fps are about 10 less.
 
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Try installing msi afterburner, it draws a graph of gpu usage amongst other things, so you can check it's being utilised fully when gaming.
 
Thanks for the inputs ... I now think this is more of a system issue.

I loaded up 3dmark06 and @ 3Ghz I get 5300, with a CPU of 1050. Reset everything to stock 1.8Ghz and I get a score of 3200. Forgot to look at the CPU score.

The 3dmark we page indicates something is wrong. Typical scores for a E4300 are CPU 2400, 3dmark06 with HD6670 - 10,000.

I'm wondering if there is an incompatibility with the e4300 and the GA-P31-DS3 as I previously had a E1200 celeron installed which got a much higher windows experience score despite the lack of cache. The e1200 used to be clocked at 1333 FSB to give 2.7Ghz.

I've installed the latest Chipset inf files from intel
Installed the latest catalyst drivers and CAP profile.
Upgraded the BIOS from 08 to the latest beta = 10A

MSI afterburner shows GPU usage at around 50% in HL2

CPUz shows memory at 400Mhz though BIOS shows at 800Mhz so I assume this is just a DDR2 feature as the memory is installed at 2.4:1 ratio on a 1333 FSB.

I may have to dig out the Abit Fatality FP-IN9 which clocked the E4300 nicely with 8800GTS SLI as at the moment this gigabyte board is killing performance and I can't find an issue with anything in the system.

AD
 
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Update.... for anyone who finds this thread on a search

After a day of swapping boards and reinstalling on a spare drive etc it seems the Gigabyte mainboard is faulty. CPU score doubles in the FP-IN9 SLI and big increase in the 3dm06. I've also swapped the CPU for a 2160, another 1.8GHz conroe which clocks to 3Ghz @ 1333Mhz FSB. Exact same results in the gigabyte.

MSI Afterburner shows the card is now maxed out during the graphics tests though for some reason I can't get the PCI-E slot to register at x16 so the card shows as a x16 card in a x8 slot.

Cheap G41 with a splash of DDR3 will have to fill the gap for now as the FP-IN9 was never the best of boards, it's lived in the back of the cupboard rather than getting sold on.

Gigabyte G41MT-S2P Intel G41 @ £38.99 has plenty of features and the gigabyte site shows it can support 130W CPU's and has adjustable CPU and memory voltages. Actually looks like it has near the full range of gigabyte OC from the manual.

AD
 
Stick the E4300 back in. It's better than the E2000 series and has double the cache. The boards pci-e slot will be version 1.0 so 16x is the equivalent of 8x on a pci-e slot version 2.0. The card is pci-e 2.0 but is backwards compatible. Maybe afterburner is confused?
 
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