Radeon 9200 SE problem...

[Uncle Sick]

Alright.. here's the deal - my wife wanted to give EQII a shot and it's very demanding graphics performance wise (needs a card that can handle pixel and vertex shader etc. etc.).

So what I did was to exchange her Gforce MX440 with a Radeon 9200 coupled with an upgrade to 1GB of memory and a complete XP reinstall.

The 9200 is a 8xAGP card - the ATI Smartgard tool shows it only as 4x and performance in-game is very sluggish.
Another thing that troubles me is that on start up (before you are able to hit del to get into the BIOS) the card won't show up. Instead it says Intel 854 (iirc)...

It's a SG51G Shuttle running Win XP prof.

... and yes - onboard AGP is disabled. Any ideas? Should I reset the BIOS?
Is the 9200 SE just plain shit? *sighs*

As usual - thanks for your help in advance.

 

[Jonty]

Hi Uncle Sick

This isn't going to be much help but anyway ...

Firstly, the 9200 only just meets the requirements for a 'DirectX 9 compatible. Pixel shader and vertex shader compatible hardware with 64 MB of texture memory.' video card. Granted, it's better than the GeForce card, but performance probably won't be stellar. The additional RAM will help, but depending on how flush you are feeling, you could pick up an 128MB GeForce 5700 LE or Radeon 9600 (admitedly not so good, but both better than a 9200) for around £50 new.

As for the AGP speed, I wouldn't worry too much. First off, if you mean the Intel 845 chipset (Shuttle don't seem to have the specs for the SG51G) then I think that it's only AGP 4x anyway. Even if not, however, I don't think there are many games which really require AGP 8x (so I'm told) so running at AGP 4x is no big deal.

As for the BIOS, I'm not sure what the story is there. Perhaps visit Shuttle's site and see if there is a BIOS update for your Shuttle's motherboard. So long as the onboard graphics are set to disabled, it's not sharing any system memory (both settings in the BIOS) and Windows says it's running on the AGP graphics card, then I wouldn't worry too much.

I don't really know what else to say. What kind of CPU are you running? Also, what is 'sluggish'? Worse than the GeForce?

Kind Regards

 

[Uncle Sick]

I got the 9200 cheap (the SE comes with 128mb off DDR RAM) for $50. That's why I got it.

And it's the SB51G (sorry for the spelling error) - it has onboard graphics which you can disable. That shuttle used to be mine and I ran a 9800 pro in it and iirc Smartgard showed 8x AGP enabled.

According to her EQII is running like a dream now with stunning graphics et all.

Thanks for your reply, Jonty. I ll check the BIOS settings as soon as I can pry Mrs. Sick away from her computer.

 

[Jonty]

Hi Uncle Sick

Thanks for putting me straight about a those things, glad to hear it's running well

With regards the 9200, with a 128MB DDR RAM things are better than I thought, but that aside performance won't be amazing. That said, I've never played EQII, or anything in that genre, so I'm not aware what kind of demands it puts on one's system.

I found the specifications for the SB51G. It is a maximum of AGP 4x, but as I said, I don't think that's anything much to worry about. Note also that the processor and RAM will be capped to 533Mhz/333Mhz respectively.

There is a BIOS update, if you haven't already got it, available at the SB51G downloads page. That said, if all is well then I guess there's no rush to install it.

Kind Regards