Help and advice please

[justalink]

HELP: Unable to use 8x AGP. Using latest ATI drivers (3.9). Have tried 3.7 and 3.8, and still revert back to these for certain games.
My system reverts back to 4x AGP after reboot and changing fast write from off to on changes nothing with regard to that.
Bios has 8x enabled and fast write enabled. Do I really need 8x? I do play the latest pc games.

Advice: Will performance increase justify the cost $120 +/-of installing a second hd in raid 0. I am not really experiencing any perforance issues, but am always interested in incremental performance boosts. Have never used raid so I am not familiar with the "real" benefits.

Thanks to all who reply.
-justalink


My sys: (No modified clock speeds)

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
AMD xp3000+ (333)
Kingston HyperX 2 x 512mb (dual chan.)
Seagate 120 gb SATA
ATI 9700 pro All-In-Wonder
on board sound
Good cooling: (26 and 33 idle) (CPU under 40 w\load)

 

[justalink]

Forgot to mention that ram is pc3200....thanks again

 

[Sideswipe001]

I wouldn't be too concerned about the 8x AGP thing or Fastwrites (they cause more problems than they solve from what I've heard, and you won't be seeing a performance difference anyway). It sounds like SmartGART problem to me. Have you completely uninstalled the drivers? Cleaned off all remnants of them and then tried installing them again? And do you have the nForce drivers installed?

Secondly, RAID will help load times, booting, that kind of stuff, but if it's noticeable is subejct to personal opinion. This is being talked about a lot lately (do a search for RAID). I personally like it, and I'd never go back willingly. I rarely have people load faster than I do in a game.

 

[justalink]

First...thanks for the response

Drivers are fresh. I always clean-up drivers before installing. I've read different posts advising to "enable 8x". I've never used it as my old board would not support it. I assumed I could uses it now, but I guess I just won't worry about it.

RE: Raid It seems that as long as I'm ok with load times and such, I won't necessarily see a performance increase when gaming. If so, I'll spend the money elsewhere.