settings constantly resetting/system underperforming

[shadowbreaker513]

i noticed that on my computer the agp accelleration (however you spell it) was turned off. i turned it up to 8x which is what my mobo (asus k8v deluxe) and my graphics card (radeon 128mb 256bit 9800 pro running the omega 2.5.90 drivers) can support. when i selected to use this, smartgart said it needed to restart my system. upon restarting, nothing had changed. every single change i made was reset upon restarting including my 10/10 overclock thru the smartgart drivers and my force 9800 softmod driver overclock. my computer is underperforming abysmally because of this. and i know my system can support all of this, so can anybody give me some help?
my specs

AMD Athlon64 3200
ATi Radeon 128mb 256bit 9800 pro running the omega 2.5.90 drivers and DirectX 9.0b
Asus k8v Deluxe motherboard
1024mb of DDR400 RAM
SoundMax Digitial Onboard Audio
110 gig 7200 rpm hard drive
(sorry for not knowing the manufactor's of my ram and hard drive. i don't feel like opening my case and the computer didn't detect it)

and i ran 3dMark2003 and i'm not sure of my exact score and i only got about 4700 marks

EDIT: it also seems a bit underclocked at 378.0 MHz core and 337.5 MHz memory

[shadowbreaker513]

i hate to bump this but i really need the help, and according to the 9800 pros in stores my memory is about 300MHz underclocked

[pam123]

Did you install your via 4-in-1s ?
It sounds like the you don't have an agp port driver.

[shadowbreaker513]

ok i'll try that. and i was able to do about a 10/10 overclock but according to other cards it still seems to be running really low. and just fwi, how much of a performance boost will getting the agp 8x on give me?

EDIT: WOW! HOLY CRAP! WHAT A DIFFERENCE! my video score increased by 1000 and my cpu score went up by 400. in the first test i was getting about 200 fps more than before in some places

here's an html document that has my second test after fixing the problem and a minor overclock on the left with my first test without agp accelleration and no overclock

http://www.freepgs.com/shadowbreaker513/compare.htm

[pam123]

Since you have no agp acceleration at all you'll see an improvement.
Also, if you have no agp port driver do you have any motherboard drivers installed or are you using XP's defaults for everything ?
Is this a home built machine or did you buy it ?
The usual steps for correctly installing software are, OS, ,motherboard drivers, video drivers (XP installs LAN drivers by default if you need to download recent video drivers you can do that as soon as you set up the connection ) and then the other drivers.
With a 64 bit athlon you will not be installing SP2 but you will need all the other hotfix updates for security reasons.
How far did you deviate from the usual ?
You don't mention checking your bios either, agp 8X has to be enabled in the bios first before you can enable it in smartgart. I don't have the manual for your board so you really have to check that out.



EDIT : Well better late than never.
Game on.

[shadowbreaker513]

yeah. i did check my bios and it was enabled. i guess i just skipped over the agp drivers while i was installing them (probably because i didn't recognize what the name of them was)