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. BIOS Settings Can Cost You FPS
© 2000 by Joseph Delgado

I like AMD processors they give a good deal of performance for a lot less money than a Pentium III. Presently I have four, one is a 233 MHz that's excluded from this study. The other three computers have a Voodoo 3 AGP 3D Card, a Dlink 100 MHz Network Card, Windows 98 SE, Full Install of Quake II, the 3.21 Patch, the latest drivers, and BIOS updates. All computers have 100 MHz DIMM memory.

The 550 MHz has a SoundBlaster Live sound card and 128 MB RAM. The 500 MHz has 128 MB of RAM and a SoundBlaster PCI 128 Sound Card. The 400 MHz also has a SoundBlaster PCI 128 and 64 MB of RAM.

How I tested
I started with a clean boot and ran Quake II. I brought up Quake II's console with "~". I typed in "timedemo1" and hit enter, on the next line "demomap demo2.dm2". It went through the demo and displayed the average FPS. I discarded the first test and did the test five more times for each system. Between tests, all you need to do is press the up arrow and the last command in typed for you.

Before Results
Originally performance really sucked. I followed some safe BIOS setups for Voodoo 3 from www.tweak3D.net, because I had problems with Aliens vs. Predator where it would exit out to the desktop after a few minutes of play. Well it solved the problem, but take a look at the results:

Obviously, I didn't want a 550 MHz running 18% slower than a 400 MHz System. So I took the recommended BIOS settings for Voodoo 3 from www.tweak3D.net and added AGP Turbo mode to enabled.

  • Assign IRQ to VGA: enabled or auto
  • Video BIOS cacheable: enabled
  • Video BIOS shadow:enabled
  • VGA Palette snoop: disabled
  • PCI Palette snoop: disabled
  • C8xxxx-CBxxxx shadow:disabled
  • AGP Aperture size: 64MB
  • AGP Turbo mode: enabled
  • Significant Improvement
    With a few changes, I had a good jump in performance, between fifty and sixty percent. Aliens vs. Predator ran a lot better and so did Unreal. I wouldn't mind seeing if the performance increases even more with a TNT2 Ultra 32MB Video Card, but the card wouldn't take advantage of AMD's 3DNow. Probably still kick ass.

    From the results, I'm replacing the SoundBlaster Live Card and replacing it with a PCI 128, trailing nine frames behind a 50 MHz slower system is not good. Plus with only two speakers, environmental audio is not a pressing concern. I'll save the Live card for another Pentium based system down the road.

    Bottom Line
    We're always talking about high FPS (Frames Per Second) rates and how fast the latest hardware is, but it's worth checking out your system settings, but before playing with your BIOS make sure you write down the original settings. Since using "Restore to Defaults" can leave your system in worse shape than when you started. (7/6/00)

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    Copyright 1996-2004 by Joseph Delgado. Enchanted Quill Press, All rights reserved.
    Webmaster: Joseph Delgado updated this page on 08/27/00.

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