Best/fastest driver-mix for G400/K7M?

[Indiana]

Hi, I´d like to know if there are any cracks that could suggest the fastest (but still stable) drivers/bios mix for my system:
Asus K7M, Athlon 600, G400, Win98.

I´m asking because after several upgrades I get lower fps numbers than I had. I´ve tried reverting to some of the older drivers but couldn´t really figure out what was causing the slowdown.
My 3DMark99Max score in default res is ~6100 but I already had 6550, the same goes for the 3dMark2k scores which went down from 2920 to 2840. When looking at the details you see that the main difference is in the "real life" game fps-tests.

My system is stable now, but then it was stable at the time I got the higher results either. Only in the process of upgrading the drivers I had some mixes which gave terribly instable results, often bumping me back to desktop in 3D-games and benchmarks.

It can´t really be the SBlive card that I´ve added that is responsible for the slowdown?!?

[ParaKnowYa]

Well for me the 1003 K7M bios and the v1.4 driverpack (G400) are quite stable and fast. The v1.4 driver pack does feature the 5.53.017 PD and drivers and is for me faster than the 5.52.015 but still has all the features!

best regards
PKY www.paraknowya.de

[Indiana]

Thanks for the reply. I treid the new driver but it didn´t seem to change anything - neither Direct3D nor OpenGL speed or visuals.
However I´ve encountered no problems either, so I´ll keep the new driver version.

To my speed problems: I found the reason after some testing with a real program (Sisoft Sandra). It was due to wrong memory-speed settings in the bios - even though I still don´t quite understand how setting the CAS/RAS/... settings to 2 or lower manually can be slower than SPD...

Some questions:
Do you use the old 1003 bios-version for some reason? Why not the 1009?
Which AGP miniport / 4in1 - versions should be installed?

[ParaKnowYa]

The AGP driver MUST be the one from AMD otherwise you do not get the full performance! If you did not use the AMD AGP driver yet, this could be a reason for the slow performance.

I use the bios because it's quite good but I did check the newest but I kind of think it's not the better of the two.

For the rest, IDE controller drivers, ... I'd use the latest version of the via drivers/ the latest 4 in 1 release (but remember, it must be the AMD AGP driver!)

best regards
PKY

[Indiana]

I know that I have to use the AMD miniport drivers... During upgrading the drivers for some time I had accidently installed the VIA ones - in my case they didn´t really cause a big performance hit but lead to unstability, always bumping me back to desktop after a few minutes using any 3D app.

The question was more about the issues VIA 4.17 vs. 4.20 (4.17 is claimed to be faster?) and AMD 4.61 vs 4.45.

Anyway, after changing the memory settings back to auto-configuring I´m now back at 6600 3DMark99Max and 2920 3DMark2k scores which isn´t that bad for a oc non-MAX G400 on an Athlon@630.
I´d still be interested how setting CAS/RAS/Precharge/... values manually to a setting of 2 or lower can be slower than the autoconfig.