Could my ASUS A7V8X-X mobo be a bottleneck?

Hey guys. I recently purchased a RADEON 9800. After I installed it, I was initially happy with its performance. It scored pretty well in 3dmark2003. However, my system didnt perform as well as expected in real world game tests, namely Unreal tournament 2003. Here are my system specs and benchmark results:

System Specs:
ASUS A7V8X-X Mobo
AMD AThlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
512 Mb DDR400 ValueRAM
RADEON 9800 pro

3dMark2003:
3DMark Score 5399 3DMarks
GT1 - Wings of Fury 148.0 fps
GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 38.3 fps
GT3 - Troll's Lair 33.4 fps
GT4 - Mother Nature 34.4 fps
CPU Score 447 CPUMarks
CPU Test 1 50.2 fps
CPU Test 2 7.9 fps
(All tests done with driver sliders all set to "high performance")

3DMark2001:
3DMark Score 14445
Game1 Low Detail - 189.3 fps
Game1 High Detail - 60.2 fps
Game2 Low Detail - 285.5 fps
Game2 High Detail - 145.3 fps
Game3 Low Detail - 157.2 fps
Game3 High Detail - 68.6 fps
Game4 - 132.2
(All tests done with driver sliders all set to "high performance")

Unreal Tournament 2k3:
-1024x768-
4xAA and 8xAF = 83.7 fps flyby, 49.0 fps botmatch
noAA and NoAF = 167.0 fps flyby,54.5 fps botmatch
-1280x960-
4xAA and 8xAF = 95.2 fps flyby,48.3 fps botmatch
noAA and noAF = 156.2 fps flyby,54.2 fps botmatch
-1600x1200-
4xAA and 8xAF = 50.2 fps flyby,24.8 fps botmatch
noAA and noAF = 120.7 fps flyby,53.6 fps botmatch
(All tests done with driver sliders all set to "high quality")

Anyways, I made a post on the furutremark Forum discussing this, which then turned into a huge 50 post thread all about finding the bottleneck in my system. Well, one reformat, driver updates and BIOS tweaks later, I am still stuck with the same low Ut2k3 benchmarks. (For a full cronicle of basically everything that has been discussed with this issue, please visit the futuremark post at: Futuremark Post )

Now I am simply wondering where you guys think the bottleneck is, I was thinking the mobo but perhaps it could be the RAM or CPU as well, the only thing I am certain it is not is the GFX card; the game4 scores are all pretty good as well as the ut2k3 flyby.

Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated, I really need your help to get to the bottom of this. Thanks a lot in advance.

It may be holding you back, what are you system settings? what are you're mem and cpu buss speeds? Most articles and reviews I read always test the latest and greatest with, the latest and greatest, so if your running your mem and cpu at 333fsb or even with the mem at 400fsb and the cpu at 333fsb, your not getting the same performance as the mem and the cpu at the 400fsb. I'm not that familiar with your board but I believe you can run the mem and cpu buss async, doing this your still limited by the cpu's buss and not getting the full performance out of your ram. Also what timings do you get out of your ram at those settings?
As far as 3dmark goes, your 2003 score of 5399 isn't too far off from what maxpc published for it at 5525 3dmark.

Jim

Ya I am running mem and cpu at 333mhz. Really, the only reason why I bought DDR400 is for O'cing purposes (however I dont wanna O'C until I am happy with my stock score). I am not sure about my RAM timings (I dont know anything about RAM timings so I dont like to mess around with em really) but if I knew how to check I would do it. And about the 3dmark03, you hit my problem right on the nose. My 3dmark03 score is only a little low while my ut2k3 bench's are (relatively) awful.

I read about a system in PCGamer which had an Athlon XP 3000+, a 9700 pro, 1gb of PC2700 DDR RAM (thats 333 right?) and an ASUS a7n8x. This computer scored only 1,000 points higher than me in 3dmark2k1, but beat me by over 30 fps in the ut2k3 botmatch benchmark(At the time of this review 3dmark03 wasnt out yet). I realize that that system's cpu and mobo were better than mine, but could that really make a 30 fps difference? Also, the other system had 1gb of RAM. Is it possible that this is causing the performance jump? Is it worth it to upgrade to 1gb? Or maybe it is just a combination of the three?

Not knowing what the details were in the article you read, but I've seen some companies basically selling o/c'd cards. You should be able to see what your ram timings are in the bios, I don't recomend changing them from what they are auotmatically set to unless you know it can do better.
You should see the cas latency, prechage and such, most of the better ram can do 6-2-2-2. Ther is also a setting in the bios that you can specify how much sys ram your vid card can use, cant remember what it's called, but try setting it to 128 or 256 if it's lower than that. I don't see 30fps difference if both sys are running stock speeds and vid cards are not o/c'd. They may have thier sys and settings optimized or tweaked out to get that extra 30fps. There's probably more to it than I can tell you, you may want to ask in the ati section of the forums to kind of compare score's with similar sys.


Jim

I have the same mobo.In the user's manual says : (Note: When using 333Mhz FSB CPU, system memory suports DDR 333 only.) and also: (Note: PC2700 maximum to 4 banks only. PC3200 maximum to 2banks only.) I m surprised that your Barton(is that 333FSB) works with DDR400 on this mobo. a7v8x-x XP 2600+ T-bred(133x16) Hynix DDR400(PC3200) GeForce 4 MX 440 with agp 8x 40 Gb Maxtor 7200 Rpm

Don't go by the manual. Ive got all 3 banks running PC3200 256mb sticks and it works perfectly. Both CPU and memory at 333mhz. However if you want to overclock, this board is definetely not the board to choose. You will only get to around 170, anything over that that the system will crash and the harddrive can get corrupted. BTW, another thing is that its only got 3 banks, so how are you gonna put a max of 4 banks.