Any Everquest gurus here?

[glc]

I have a customer who is an EQ junkie - he's looking at optimizing/possibly upgrading his system as he is starting to get a lot of lag. Pertinent details:

Intel D845PESVL
P4-2.53 533 FSB
1gb PC2700
WD 80gb JB
Comcast 3000/256 cable
Linksys BEFSR81
Nvidia GF4 Ti4400 128mb
Win98SE (yes, it runs fine with 1gb ram with the Vcache limited)

We are thinking first off to upgrade him to XP. Any other worthwhile upgrades without a system rebuild? I feel that the core system is still plenty good enough so please don't talk about motherboards and processors. The one item I'm concerned about - is this still a good enough video card, or would an upgrade there be worth it? Remember, this board is only AGP4X but it will take an 8x card no problem.

[spyder003]

Everything should run EQ ok. Consider a video card upgrade if he plans on playing EQ II, it's supposed to be hungry. Nvidia's high end cards are king right now, but does he play enough to justify a $400 card? Nvidia's midrange (6600) competes fairly well with ATi's higher end cards too. EQ likes alot of RAM, he should be fine with 1 GB. That upgrade to XP would probably be worth it.

[glc]

Just got off the phone with him - yeah, he's got EQ2.

He ordered a 6800GT.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...130-208&depa=0

Thanks for the feedback, spyder.

[Doopa]

EQ2 is hungry with memory leaks aswell. If it is possible go to 1.5gig Ram.

Besides that, everything looks like it should run EQ2 fine on balanced setting+.

Hopefully the 6x00 series card problem is fixed.

[glc]

Ouch. Board only has 2 slots - a 512 in each one. What 6x00 problem is this?

[Doopa]

You should be fine now, the 6800 problem seems to be gone and patched.

And the memory issue don't lose sleep over it. I play with 1g and I can handle it . It is just a nice differnce to have 1.5.

[CaptTuna]

Just a thought, but my Linksys BEFSR41/SURFBoard SB4200 combo now seems to need resetting about every 4-5 weeks. Tech support for Cox.net agrees with this but can not explain why this is necessary.
Speeds would drop to under 1 meg and after resetting speed go back up to 3.5 megs.

[glc]

An update - I was mistaken - the mobo is a D845EBG2L. Did the upgrades yesterday - installed XP Pro SP2, upgraded the firmware in the BEFSR81, stuck a 420w Enlight power supply in. EQ2 runs noticeably better, but still lags a bit with the Ti4400.

Installed the 6800GT, started it up, and the card caught on fire............. !!!!!!!!!!!! Are there any known issues with a 6800GT and a 4X AGP slot?

As a note, the 3DMark 2001SE is essentially the same as it was with Win98 - right around 10000. This is with DX 9.0c and the latest (66.whatever) Nvidia drivers. Everything is totally stock clocked.

The question is this - is the remaining lag due to an overworked video card or bandwidth/router/modem issues? The BEFSR81 is hooked to a 3Com "sharkfin" modem and a Comcast 3mb/256kb cable, file downloads seem consistent with a 3mb downstream. Haven't tried any ping tests. NIC is onboard Intel with the latest XP driver.

XP is configured with simple filesharing disabled, no auto search for shares or printers, firewall on, AVG 7. Startups are reasonably clean. No apparent lan issues, block wan ping enabled in the router, all remote stuff, UPnP, multicast, PPTP, etc. disabled. No ports forwarded. Tests done with no other machines on the lan doing anything and no other background processes or apps running other than what's in the startup.

[spyder003]

Heh, that's too bad about the card. I wouldn't think the lag would be caused by his connection, probably still the video card. Any idea what kind of ping he's getting when he plays EQ2?

Was that the eVGA card that turned into toast?

[glc]

No ping tests yet. Yep - eVGA, 256mb GDDR3.

[glc]

Update - went over today to install the new card that replaced the RMA. In the meantime, his cable modem died and Comcast replaced it with a Motorola - that took care of a lot of issues. However, after putting the new card in, I ran 3D Mark 2001SE again, and it only scored 13500. I was expecting 20k+. I reloaded the driver and DirectX, no change. Changed a couple bios settings as recommended in the eVGA manual (set the aperture to 4mb and PCI latency to 128) - and on the last test (point sprites) it bluescreened, nv4disp.dll. Put the bios back to 128 aperture and 32 latency, ran another 13500. Card is running at 4x and the Nvidia driver settings are all at defaults. EQ2 runs a lot better, but there is still some lag. Any ideas why it's benching so low? Remember, Intel motherboards have very limited bios settings, the 2 I mentioned are about all you can change that would affect video.

[Yuanji]

3dmark01 is largely based on your Proc and RAM. i ran 3dmark01 and only scored 15k the first time through so try a couple of times?

[spyder003]

A couple other things that may be effecting it. AA/AF settings, texture detail, mipmap detail level, and v-sync. Those are all in the control panel for ATi cards, I forgot where they are on nVidia cards. I still think he may be getting a bad server connection with EQ. He shouldn't be lagging with that system.

[glc]

It's only lagging when the video rendering gets intense.

All those settings are on default - and most default to "determined by application".

Hmm - 15k? Then that score doesn't look bad at all - and proves that the old Ti4400 is still a decent card.

[fudtone]

I just put a 6600GT in my system (signature) in hopes on better frames in EQ2. The frames I did not get. With the same settings (extreme performance) my performance has not changed. The picture looks nicer (due to the new shader I think) but when in town or around allot of people its still choppy at best.

As mentioned above I will be trying 1.5g RAM next to increase my performance.

A friend has a p4 1.7 1.3g RD RAM and a 6800OC his loads and plays almost perfect on Balanced settings.

[glc]

Let me know if the ram increase helps, please.