Hello

Ive had an Asus geforce 4 ti 4400 for about 10 months, and I noticed it gets VERY hot. The memory gets too hot to touch, and the back of the stock aluminum cooler gets painfully hot while playing games. I was also only getting about 6000 3dmarks, and about 60% of the frame rates of my friend who has a ti4200. I decided to add a Thermaltake Copper geforce 4 cooler, which really didnt help much. The memory heatsinks are still very hot, and the performance hasnt improved.

No, its not underclocked.
No, its not dangerously overclocked. I cant even overclock it 10 mhz without it freezing after 5 minutes.
I dont know if its the heat, or maybe too slow a processor/memory etc. I have an athlon xp 1600 (more than a year old) with 512 ddr (but only pc2100)

Any ideas for possibly solving the heat/performance problems?

Thanks

That is really weird?

I have the ti4200 and can get over 9500 in 3dmark2001. when I overclock it, it can almost perform as well as a ti4600 going over 10600!

I'm not sure but maybe its got something to do with the fact that I have the 64Mb version which uses faster memory then the 128Mb+ versions ???

Have you done any kind of mods lately which could have caused this to happen?

Sounds more like a graphics driver issue. There could possibly some conflict going on.

Have you tried updating the drivers or refreshing your OS?

When I got my AIW Radeon 8500 it was not properly installed, I only got about 2000 3DMarks. I know for a fact this card is not that slow and reinstalled a clean copy of XP with the latest drivers, and I am getting approximately 7500 3Dmarks now.

My card also gets very hot, but I don't think that is what is slowing down your graphics.

Is your card this card ?

I find it strange that such a high end card doesn't have heatsinks on its memory sticks. Maybe you should consider adding some if you can find heatsinks that fit.

My Leadtek GeForce 4 Ti4200 runs very hot when gaming, it looks like all geforces do. You could try replacing the stock thermal paste with AS3. This was suggested by Radeonman in another thread, I tried it and it now runs cooler (and can be overclocked a bit further). My card has a heatsink that covers both the GPU and memory.

I have an XP1600+ and 768Mb DDR2100. When I first installed the card I got about 6000 3DMarks, then after installing the latest drivers and some tweaking in the bios I got 7500 3DMarks, and then with some overclocking 9500 3DMarks. 9500 is the kind of result you should expect.

Check whether You have some anti-aliasing/aniso filtering on. I get over 10000 in 3DMark with 43.51 Detonators. I haven't overclocked my CPU or GPU, but the Leadtek GF4 Ti4200 I own has stock speeds of GPU 250 MHz/mem 513 MHz (official should be 250/500). BTW, my card has only 64 MBs. The 128 MB versions of Ti4200 should have the mem clocked at 444 MHz, otherwise the two versions should be identical. Ti4400 cards should be clocked 275/550, and Ti4600 cards 300/650. These values are only reference, and some manufacturers have tweaked them a bit higher.

Leadtek cards have nice big heatsink around the card, so they don't get very hot, though I haven't tried to burn my fingers lately on the card. I do have powerful (=loud) case cooling, maybe that helps too.

Cheers,

Jan

ya thats my 4400 in the tomshardware article... though you'd never know from the speeds im getting! They overclocked theirs to 325/685... mine cant even get to 300/600!

Im already using AS3 under my ramsinks and gpu cooler. Im pretty sure i didnt go overboard on the amount of it or anything.

As far as I know i havent done any destructive modding to it...

HD failures have forced a reinstall of winxp TWICE in the last year - reinstalling xp doesnt help. Ive tried with/without sp1.

AA/AF was turned off when i ran them benchmarks.

but get this - I run 3dmark01SE at 640*480.... and i get the same score of 6000-6500..... weird eh? It only drops 700 points to 5500 when i crank it to 1600*1200.

Ive tried many drivers- from 29.80 that asus supplied all the way to 41.09 from nvidia - ill try 43 or 44.

Here's an idea - If nothing works ill plug it into my friend's xp2700 / corsair pc3500 rig... if its still slow then somethings wrong...

Thanks for the suggestions, and PLEASE keep them coming!

Sounds like a fault, that kind of card should be achieving 9000-10,000+ 3DMarks2001SE. Even a Radeon 9000 can easily achieve those kind of scores you are getting.

If it's only 10 months old and hence under warranty I would return it for repair.

maybe its something else on the pc ? if scores dont change much with res it would point to another bottleneck

The 4600 card doesn't have heatsinks on the memory at all. Supposedly they run cool enough to not require them. I'm not sure if the 4400 also uses the same memory, although I seem to recall that the PNY versions do.

It IS rather a rare thing to see chips without heatsinks nowadays. I remember when having a heatsink on a chip was met with the manufacturer replying "of course the production version will not require a heatsink"...

Hey everyone

thanks for all the help so far

I tried nvidia drivers 44.03, and saw a SCREAMING 100 3DMARK INCREASE from 6550 to 6650! wow.......
However, now my comp freezes after five minutes of BF1942 or war3, and within 2 minutes of playing generals. I see no benifit from this.

Back to 41.09 for me...

I found an article about bottlenecking in the asus gf4tis, but it supposedly opens up once you get to about 1400 mhz, which the athlon xp 1600 is.

Im plugging it into the crazy fast xp2700 system on sunday. Ill report back then. Thanks for all your help guys!

I don't think this was mentioned, but can you verify the card is running in AGP 4x or higher?

I have the exact same card, though I have switched the cooler with the Zalman ZM80A, and the massive heatsink gets very hot to the touch, after a few hours of gaming it's so hot that it almost hurts to hold it for more than a few seconds.
With my 2,4@2,7 and 512 PC3200 ram I get around 12000 in 3dmark, so it sounds as if your card is defective.
When I had the standard cooler attached it didn't get any where near as hot as it does with the Zalman, and it worked with no problems what so ever.

agp speed dont make much diff btw

Not exactly true. The difference between APS 4x and 8X doesn't mean much, but the difference between 1x and 4x is a big difference.

I tried to use the asus support site, but it was no help whatsoever. All the forums have been "temporarily offline" for the last few months, and I can find no way to actually ask anyone about it. I cannot find anyone to determine that it is actually defective.

Would the proper installation of the thermaltake copper cooler have voided the warranty?

btw- its in agp4x. thanks for the suggestion.

Have You tried different versions of VIA 4-in-1's? (If You have a VIA MB of course... )

Jan

could be my mobo.. i got a crappy asus a7a266. We'll see on saturday, when i plug the gf4 into a faster machine.

today i got some very good news, and some rather bad news. I plugged my gf4 into a p4 1.8ghz with some rdram, and it scored well over 10 000 3dmarks. It even ran smoothly with 4xAA and 8xAF @ 1024*768. (thats the good news).

We couldnt get it working in the xp2700 though - it was a shuttle mini pc with onboard video that we couldnt disable, even though it was nforce2. It was weird.

So the bad news is that something in my comp is holding me back. My guess is the mobo and ram. The A7A266 (alimagik 1 chipset) was asus's first attempt at making use of the athlon xp series, and definitely is not a speed demon. Now my ram is 512 mb, just generic brand pc2100 ddr, which i got for quantity at the time, not quality.

Hopefully, by the end of the summer my job and the gradual dropping of prices should make a p4 3.0ghz within reach.

Thanks for all your help guys!