vid card...ram upgrade...little performance boost

[Mr.Drive]

System :
hp pavilion 533
Asus p4g533 motherboard
celeron 2.0 (845gl)
fsb 400mhz
60 gb hd 7200
PCI only , no AGP
XP
200wt ps

I was racing regularly with min. graphics @ around 30 FPS.......most card settings off . Recently my computer got the HD whiped and clean XP install , after that I only got around 20 fps and would freeze up aroound 15.
I was running a Geforce4 mx 440 64mb ddr card (default settings)and the 256mb ddr pc2100 ram .
Game = nascar 2003 ........test with all eye candy on running laps w/23 cars. FPS avg. 16 and would freeze up when they droped to around 10 .
I upgraded the ram using Kingston 512mb ddr pc2700 ,1 stick added to my open slot(total 768mb). After installing I checked FPS , identical but now it would not freeze up.
I upgraded the card with a ATI visiontek xtasy 9200 256mb ddr PCI (not se) Now I can run the game with most eye candy off wit FPS around 30 ( same as origional) Everything on with card default settings it avg. around 12 FPS and doesnt freeze up .
The card instructions said to disable on board graphics in the BIOS ,HP said to disable in device manager (thats what I did) The card suggest at least a 250wt power supply ( could this be the problem ?) Anything in a new XP install that could be choking it ?
any ideas ?
THANKS !

Welcome to TechIMO!

You have downloaded and installed the latest ATI Radeon driver and Microsoft DirectX runtime, correct?

Make sure to turn off FSAA and AA for the Radeon under the ATI control panel. Such filtering routines can bring the 9200 chipset to a crawl. Also try moving the rendering quality sliders back a couple of notches to mid-range settings.

Otherwise, the PCI graphics card is limiting your 3D performance. The PCI bus offers bandwidth of a mere 133MBps; not enough to sustain a high level of texture transfers for quality 3D graphics rendering. Outside of upgrading to a motherboard with an AGP slot, you may have a hard time reaching your desired performance level.

Hope this helps,
Robert Richmond

[Mr.Drive]

Yes I have the latest driver and direct X . Can the power supply have any affect on performance ? Also the instructions said to turn off the integraded graphics in the BIOS , HP said to just disable in device manager.....I read elsewhere that I need to go into the BIOS still...do I ? I looked at it but was unsure how to disable , it said onboard video with option 1mb or 8 mb . Thanks for the help !

[Peter M]

Well, Celeron's small cache, slow front side bus, plus an integrated-VGA chipset, and a PCI graphics card ... any of these alone is enough to ruin the party. All of them combined into one system will of course not make you happy.