Radeon 4870 problem

[jaqu]

Hi,
My friend got a Radeon 4870 last week, but something is wrong, because we believe it is underperforming. He scored 8451 on 3DMark06, while I score 9700 with my nVidia 9600GT. Now obviously something is wrong. If you have any idea on what could be causing this, my friend would be grateful.

I dont know all his system specs, but here is what I have :
Intel motherboard (965 chipset)
Conroe E6300 @ 1.86GHz
450W PSU (I dont know the manufacturer or any of the rail's current)3 drives (1 x SATA + 1 x PATA + 1 x DVD-RW)
2GB DDR2 (800) RAM
Force3D Radeon 4870 512MB DDR5

Here's my thoughts. His mobo only supports PCI-X 1.0. Although that would be one reason, it would not make that much of a difference? So if it is not that, maybe his PSU does not have enough juice? But why is his pc starting up if the PSU is insufficient? He should score around 15k in 3DMark06 (I think). His PSU has only got 1 power plug for the card, but he got an adaptor to power from the molex connector. Maybe his adaptor effort doesnt give enough juice? Anyway my point is, if the card gets insufficient power, in any of the ways mentioned, why is his card running without any problems (except for the underperformance thing)?

j

[ShyguyXPC]

the CPU is holding it back significantly...

its a step below mine, an E6400 @ 2.13GHz & I think mine is holding back my 512MB 8800GTS a tad, so almost certain an E6300 will be bottlenecking an HD4870 with out a doubt.

The PCI-E slot isn't really an issue, since the single 4870 shouldn't be maxing out the 1.0 slot yet (its PCI-E 1.0, PCI-X is actually a completely different interface, there was PCI at first, then PCI-X on high end servers, Then/Now PCI-Express aka PCI-E, 1.0 & 2.0 are backwards compatible, & as far as I know there aren't any cards on market that max out 1.0... YET...), unless for some reason its a PCI-E 16x slot & electrically its running at something like 4x or possibly 8x (but hard to say on latter).

99.9% sure its the CPU holding it back.

[jaqu]

Uhm...ur being too technical :0 Its PCI-Express 1. And for the CPU, I have a E2160 (1.8GHz, FSB 800, 1 MB L2 cache), with a nVidia 9600 GT scoring 7,600 (running at 2.88GHz now and scoring 9700, but thats not the point). Could the CPU make that much of a difference? So much so that a 4870 hardly outperforms my 9600GT?

[ShyguyXPC]

yes its possible, thats why most have been saying for a while to those that want to upgrade to some of the newer GPU's out there like yours & mine & above them, but are stuck with older Pentium 4's or Pentium D's, or single core Athlon 64's etc, etc, that the CPU will be bottlenecking the card...

basically the CPU won't be able to feed enough data to the video card to let it reach its optimum performance.