[Luck]

My new board is running slower than my old board. I didn't upgrade the cpu , gpu or ram yet but I don't think that with the same stuff it should be running so much slower.
I have a stick of ddr 2700 512 and a stick of ddr 2100 256 next to eachother in single channel mode with a celeron 2ghz 400 mhz fsb as a cpu and a pci fx5200.
Right now this board is the only thing changed and it is running all my graphics benchmarks so much slower than my old 845gl based board.
I plan on upgrading everything but the last thing I wanted was a performance cut from a new board.
I managed to get closer to speed by adjusting my ram to 2,5,5,5 timings. I know im lucky they run so fast and I doubt if my old board which had no settings for them was running them so fast. So, why is the board still slower? The bios tells me its running my cpu at 2.07 ghz which is faster than my other board which was running it at 1.99. Still the old beat it in all the benchmarks.

 

[clintfan]

I don't know if this helps you --I don't usually chime in on performance issues-- but here are four thoughts off the top of my head:

1. If you want graphics benchmark numbers, get an AGP video card. You didn't say what your previous mobo was, but I'll assume it used an ICH4 chip for the PCI. Your new one uses an ICH5, having a similar architecture. On both these chips, PCI is farther from memory than in the old days. So PCI video cards will take longer to do their job. At the same time, AGP is closer than ever before. Your new mobo can run AGP at 8X speeds. That should give you the best benchmarks you can expect.

2. Your new mobo has an 865G chip which offers integrated onboard video. Try running your benchmarks with that and see if it's better than with your PCI video. It ought to be, since unlike the PCI, it won't have to go through the Southbridge to get to host memory.

3. As you know, your memory speeds are mismatched. On top of that, they are running single-channel, as you noted. Get some matched PC3200 memory in there and I think your Celeron will crank much better numbers.

4. Newer is not always faster. Sometimes older is leaner and meaner, but newer has more features and thus takes longer to decode them all. Case in point: for a long time, 486-based PC's outran early Pentiums.

-clintfan

 

[Luck]

Oh thanks for the response . Well one thing is for certain. The onboard graphics are not as fast as the PCI video card.I tested it out of curiosity since the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 is onboard and I hadn't tried that one before.
Im still curious what exactly is slower about this board though.Is it the PCI bus? Or was my old board really optimised well for single channel RAM.
I really hadn't heard of dual channel RAM until after I installed this board. I was planning on upgrading to a 533fsb at one point and that is why I bought the pc2700. It is backwards compatible to pc2100 though. I wonder if just one stick would be faster?
Im not having any trouble at all with the 2,2,2,5,8 timings.

 

[clintfan]

I was planning on upgrading to a 533fsb at one point and that is why I bought the pc2700. It is backwards compatible to pc2100 though. I wonder if just one stick would be faster?

Yes I would try just pulling the 256MB PC2100 stick and see what happens with 512MB PC2700 by itself. The 845G chip datasheet section 5.2 has all kinds of memory configuration tables but I can't figure them out, so I cannot explain what the chip is doing to your memory speeds; without significant extra research, it's beyond my level, sorry.

-clintfan

 

[Luck]

Well to follow up on this, so far I made a couple changes which have improved things a little. One was upgrading my power supply. The other was adding a case fan. I think my old board had enough power and was cool enough but the new one was having heat issues for some reason. Half-Life is running smoother now just with the case fan and power supply upgrade. I'm not sure if power was scarce before but I had a feeling it was close and adding another 12v fan would surely have pushed it over the limit.