PC very slow and choppy performance after installing graphics card!!! please help

after installing my graphics card i have got choppy pc performance. it is slow, when listenning to music it stop and starts.

i have a geforce 5200 128mb. now i upgraded to 256mb x850xt agp card.

here are my pc specs:

3ghz HT
1.5gb ram
256mb graphics card - X850xt agp

i have not installed the drivers for the graphics card yet as it takes alot of time for it to even realize that there is a disk in drive.

i clicked on task manager.

my cpu usage is on an average of 7% but rises to 24% some times.
PF usage is 246mb
commit charge 256m/2156m
Processees: 39

am i doing something wrong.

what could be the problem??? is my pc not good enough? i have met all the system requirements and it still doesn't work!!!!

i wanted to play games but with a slow pc i have no chance

i would appreciate a quick response.

thanks for for helping - in advance

fully appreciated.

regards,

 

What psu are you using and what is its rating.
You may be low on current as your new card requires quite a bit more power than the last one.

 

i have a 400watt power supply.

 

That card should draw about 70Watts, so you need to look at what else is running and how close you are to the max output.
Although it is rated at 400W, depending on the make and quality, it could actually be less than you would be expecting.
A way to check the quality if the brand is unknown would be to weigh it, the better the quality the heavier it will be.
You would expect a good PSU of 400W to weigh from 3lb upwards, any less than 2.5 and your looking at poor quality.
Also what board is it your using and have you removed the old drivers/software for the Nvidia card as leaving thos eon isn't going to help.

# Click the Start button and select Find, and then Files and Folders...
# Make sure the Find applet is set to search your C:\ drive and do a search for "nv*.*" - without the quotes
# Look for any files found in the C:\Windows\System and C:\Windows\Inf and C:\Windows\Help
# Select these files and delete them (do NOT empty them from the Recycle Bin until you know your upgrade has been a success)
# Exit the Find applet

# Click the Start button and select Run
# In the Run box, type regedit; this will open the Windows Registry Editor
# In the left-hand pane, navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation
# Right-click on the Nvidia Corporation key in the left-pane, select Delete, and click Yes to confirm the deletion
# Exit Regedit and hit the F5 key to refresh the registry

 

The X850XT is a Radeon card from ATI. I suggest downloading the latest drivers from ATI and installing them. You are switching from an NVIDIA card to an ATI card and the drivers are totally different.

 

bigDK - thanks for all the help.

i did everything you told me. i also closed down any programs i was not using which tend to run in the background on start up, it cleared alot of ram.

i ran spyware, anti-virus software. after clearing it all up, i restarted again. i did wot u told me with system registery, i removed unwanted hardware etc.

the pc now running smoothly as it was before.

the only problem i experienced was when i install new drivers for a graphics card on the next restart my screen does not show.

Once i installed drivers, i restart my system, the bios loads, windows shows loading but as soon as it is about to load the desktop it goes to a blank screen.

this happened to my old graphics card and now with my new one.

i turned of my pc, and it worked the next time. but if i re-install drivers again i will have the same problem.

is there anything which could do this???

i always un-install previous drivers and run my pc on the built in vga video card.

at the moment i just want to make sure i know wot to do in case it happens again, as its happened 3 times in 1 day when trying to install drivers.

thanks again for the help

regards,

 

If you clarify what video card you see this problem with.
Is it the onboard video but with the drivers loaded for the new card, and if so is the new card fitted as well.
Is it the new card your using with its drvers loaded.
If you have the new card fitted and this is happening, do you see it on both the new card and the onboard or just one of them.
Is there a setting in the BIOS for changing the video from onboard to AGP as the primary video display, if so change it to AGP and then make sure it is set to x8 and 256MB aperture size, although the last 2 aren't going to correct this problem you may as well make sure they are set correctly.
Also what drivers have you loaded, is it the ones on the new cards disk or from the ATI site, sometimes the latest drivers from ATI can be a problem on certain manufacturers cards, so you need to make sure you start with just those on the CD, and then use the Windows update to see what hardware updates they have.

 

ok i will do windows update after this reply.

also when playing hitman contracts pc game, my pc is very slow now. my ram is not being used to much on 400mb,

why is this? could it be that the settings are set to AGP 8x. i tried it on AGP4x, but still game plays ok, but sometimes crashes.

will the graphics still be good if i do it on agp 1x???

and also, what tempurature is ok for my card??? whats the maximum safe temp for it?

thanks for the info

 

oh ye, could it be my bios settings?
wot is agp aperture?? wot should i set it as?
video display? agp or auto?

any other bios settings?

 

AGP x ? is the speed of the bus on the card.
As you have a card which works at x8 then set the BIOS to that, any lower and your lowering the eprformance of the video card.
Set the Aperature to 256MB, it used to be 2x the video card onboard memory, but things progressed so much, that it isn't as important as before, so just set it to the max.
Set the BIOS to use AGP as the primary video display.
Haven't got a clue what the normal operating temperture should be, you'd need to do a google search for that one.

 

i figured out the problems. it was the anti-aliasing. it was on very high. i put it to medium and graphics are still good and game performance is very nice.

i have got everything running as i wanted.

thanks for all the information and help you provided me with!

after i get over my GCSE exams, i will have 2 months no school.

over that period of time i have decided to sell my existing pc and built a customized pc myself.

so i will obviously be asking everything on this site, as i never tried building a pc before, i have just fitted hardware in. so i have a loooong way to go!

 

Least you've got it working well done!

 

ye, thanks to u lot its working.

i went to town centre today and bought some new games just to test out graphics. i got one game, and graphics are excellent, and game runs smoothly.

oh ye, does somebody know wot tempurature is safe to keep the graphics card at?

 

It should idle at about 45-50*C, and will work more than happily up to about 60-80*C.
Getting up to 90*C you getting too hot.
You'd need to check your case ambient temperature as well, as you need to pull away as much heat as possible from the card, otherwise it will start heating up like an oven in there.
You can use the ATI tool to gey a card temp reading.
Its quite normal for GPUs to run hotter than CPUs.

 

is there anyway to check the tempurature of the cpu?
are there tempurature sensors installed???

and can i install sensors inside the case so it tells me the tempurature on the screen. i have seen some small dials which fit on the front on the case which tell the temp inside. are these accurate???

thanks for the help so far

 

Depending on what board you have, you may be able to load a manufacturers program to monitor the temp.
Otherwise you could always run the pc for a while, then reboot into bios and look at the hardware monitor page.

 

ok, i need a problem solved.

whenever i am playing a game, somtimes the game stutters for abit.

what could the problem be? my pc is not overheated. ram is all free. no background programs running.

could this be because of my motherboard. my FSbus is 800mhz. is this too small to carry all the data??? - or am i talking about something i dont know!

i'm just not satisfied with my new card, its not giving the smooth performance. the graphics are nice, but my pc is giving problems.

if i can get this problem sorted i will add more fans, etc bits and pieces to make it better.

just help me out here.

thanks alot bigDK

 

For start, try just clening the pc install up.
You could try a program like tune up utilities 2006 which has a free trial.
Run this and clean the registry, clean hdd, defrag registry.
Next do a proper defrag of the hdd, I use diskeeper 10 pro, it has better features than the basic defragmenter of Windows (Win version is a very cut down version of DKeeper 10).
Running this can increase speed of access to drive by anything up to 30% using the I-FAAST mode.
Chances are, there won't be much you can change in the BIOS on that pc, but you could go through it and make sure all the settings for RAM, video etc... are at the optimal settings as well.
With a 3Ghz CPU, 1.5 GB RAM and an X850 GPU you should be able to play games okay.
What gaes are you trying to play which have the problem, and what settings are you using.
You may want to just drop the display settings down.
Always remember to defrag after loading a new game.
maybe also think of getting a seperate sound card, as otherwise you CPU will have a lot more work to do to process the games sound.

 

i was playing 'hitman contracts' - game lags on high settings - and the game was released like 3 yrs ago

and the more recent game is: imperial glory