Possible fix for some of you with Vista and poor Graphic Card preformance low Fps

Other people may have better ways of doing this, but I initially got RivaTuner v2.22 just for the capability to monitor the cards, which is how I learned that they were running underclocked and using it's other features to manually adjust all the settings. I knew something was wrong because the PC would frequently freeze up especially when trying to play games, which led me to looking for a way to monitor system performance.

As far as the current operating specs of your cards, you're probably going to have to look on the box, builder's website, or search for the part's specs on the web to determine what it should be running at. Keep in mind that different manufacturers may tweak the specs for their card, so not all 4870X2s may be the same. I'm running dual 3870X2s, so you should also be in the 825MHz ballpark.

EDIT: Played with this after getting home. The power settings changes haven't made any discernable difference in regards to the performance of my cards (yeah, I updated both through the GUI and regedit), they still want to run underclocked without using RivaTuner. Updated to latest 9.6 ATI drivers and CCC (dated 6/15/09) which I hadn't seen yet in case latest drivers would maybe correct the issue, but no luck there either. No harm done I guess, since I already stated that I'm working fine with RivaTuner.

Hmm ok I vill check out ze RivaTuner.

Just wanted to say thanks, I'm glad I stumbled on this.

Hi - I stumbled upon this thread last week and made the registry change from balanced, since then I've had pretty bad issues when logging into wow using keyclone, the machine just hangs and I have to reboot. If I login 1 at a time it's ok and the pc runs well. Has anyone else experienced this? I have a gb motherboard and am using the easytune software to overclock it a little so that could be it too although it's been oc'd for months now.

specs:
Windows 7 RC 7100
Q9550
8g RAM
keyclone

Good articles - thx. Just a note that is also applies to Win 7 the same as Vista (at least the Win7 RC).

@ Simulacra - I've had a terrible time OCing my CPU with WoW. I'm still running an old C2D E6300 (dual core 1.83GHz) on a G-Bit board as well. I used to overclock it at stock voltage and stock heat sink to 2.4 GHz pretty easily. The EasyTune option never worked that well for me though - I got much better results tweaking it myself in the BIOS. I kept it at 2.4GHz for well over a year. But at some point I updated the BIOS. Since I did the BIOS update I haven't been able to get a stable overclock above 2.0 GHz (It will POST at 2.1GHz, but win 7 will bluescreen just a few min after booting up - even I don't load anything). So I dropped down to 2.0 GHz, but then I started getting errors with WoW. I played with it for a few hours but didn't see anything obvious. So now I'm back to stock 1.83GHz myself. I don't know if it just that loading WoW is very CPU intensive, or if there's more too it. It probably doesn't help that I have a 3-year-old CPU at this point. I'm looking for a cheap 9550 at the moment.

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Originally Posted by keyclone

cute... the control panel showed 'high performance' but the registry was set to 'balanced'. fixed. we'll see if it helps.

when i want to save power, i turn off the computer.

thanks for the heads up!!

:thumbsup:

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Awesome... mine was too. And I suppose it's been like that for the last 9 months I've owned this thing.

Seriously, power saving features like that on a desktop? That's totally worth the performance hit:

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6939/powerbill.jpg

Overlap between lighting and other category - $13... and that also includes tv, xbox, stereo, 2 monitors, fans, and air filters. This thing probably costs $3/month to run. maybe $3.50 in high performance mode!

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Originally Posted by heyaz

Awesome... mine was too. And I suppose it's been like that for the last 9 months I've owned this thing.

Seriously, power saving features like that on a desktop? That's totally worth the performance hit:

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6939/powerbill.jpg

Overlap between lighting and other category - $13... and that also includes tv, xbox, stereo, 2 monitors, fans, and air filters. This thing probably costs $3/month to run. maybe $3.50 in high performance mode!

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I know the computer itself doesn't cost as much electricity, but I know that if I leave my computers on while im at work, the house is VERY hot , therefore it must take more energy to cool it back down. After I moved, I started shutting my computer down at night, and while at work (previously it had been on 24/7, when I moved the computer ended up closer to my bed, and the noise bothered me) and my power bill has been cheaper ever since, from a combination of less juice sucked up by idle computers, and less AC required to cool those same computers back down.

It's a vicious cycle...

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Originally Posted by daviddoran

I know the computer itself doesn't cost as much electricity, but I know that if I leave my computers on while im at work, the house is VERY hot , therefore it must take more energy to cool it back down. After I moved, I started shutting my computer down at night, and while at work (previously it had been on 24/7, when I moved the computer ended up closer to my bed, and the noise bothered me) and my power bill has been cheaper ever since, from a combination of less juice sucked up by idle computers, and less AC required to cool those same computers back down.

It's a vicious cycle...

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I haven't noticed much when just running 1 PC and 2 monitors. The room is maybe 2F warmer. I would say 99% of my cooling costs is getting the house from 110F to 78F... I'm in Phoenix :)

Thanks a lot for the link about the profile. It works fine!

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Originally Posted by Vmpwraith

I just did this in vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935799.
I belive my problem was the power setting in Vista said Preformance in the area to change powersettings but was in fact set to ballance in the registry and was chocking my cards power. After applying this fix and setting the reg to preformance my FPS jumped from 6-15 to 45-50.There are probably a few more teaks out there but this has made a huge imporvement. Anyway its explained on the website and use it at your own risk, regedits can kill your machine.

edit a second fix for some with multiple cards maybe:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936710
" When a DirectX 10 application runs on a Windows Vista-based computer that has multiple graphics cards, the computer does not use the secondary graphics card"

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im a windows 7 user and i just did this and it increas my fps i game about 4-8.