My rig lags in games :(

[HikkiFan]

When I play SOFII or any 3d games it shutters like hell when the hard drive is being read. Could it be the hard drive or chipset problems? I also tryed to down clock all my overclocked components to it's default settings but no luck

My Rig:

1.6ghz@2.133
Th7II-Raid
256 Samsung pc800 rambus
Geforce 4 Ti4200 (300/560)
WD 100GB 8 mb cache

That topic heading annoyed the heck out of me.

AnandTech Speller Mod

 

[zzzz]

shut·ter Pronunciation Key (shtr)
n.
One that shuts, as:
A hinged cover or screen for a window, usually fitted with louvers.
A mechanical device of a camera that controls the duration of a photographic exposure, as by opening and closing to allow light coming through the lens to expose a plate or film.
shutters Music. The movable louvers on a pipe organ, controlled by pedals, that open and close the swell box.

 

[splice]

Originally posted by: zzzz
shut·ter Pronunciation Key (shtr)
n.
One that shuts, as:
A hinged cover or screen for a window, usually fitted with louvers.
A mechanical device of a camera that controls the duration of a photographic exposure, as by opening and closing to allow light coming through the lens to expose a plate or film.
shutters Music. The movable louvers on a pipe organ, controlled by pedals, that open and close the swell box.

wow, what helpful insight.


HikkiFan: what OS are you running? what background tasks are you running? Is the HDD running in DMA mode?

 

[TheCorm]

Is the hard drive screwed in securely?....are the CD-ROM bays also secure, if they are not could be causing excess vibration. I'm have never used the Western Digital 8mb cache specials, are they noisy/prone to vibrate more than others?

Corm

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

you know what really pisses me off, it's when you people with insane post counts think you can come into someone's valid thread and just post utter nonsense that has nothing to do with the subject.

yet when someone else who isn't recognized immediately does it they are considered to be thread-crappers.

To the question at hand, 256 mb is a little low for todays games. to experience stutter free gaming your gonna need at least 512mb of ram. Also what OS are you using, if your using XP you can tweak it so that it doesnt use up as many resources as it does at default. Taking a look at your specs, it doesn't seem that you should be having a stuttering problem though, make sure your harddrive is set to master and doesn't have any other drives connected to it. Make sure DMA is enabled for your HD. Also turn off all background progs, virus checkers/scanners, and defrag your system.

 

[Maggotry]

What kind of resolutions are you running? AF & AA turned on or turned off?

For example, if you're running SOF2 at 1600x1200x32, 4xAA, 8xAF, V-sync on, with all the visual options turned on, then yeah, it's going to run like crap. If you're running the game at 800x600x16, no AA, no AF, V-sync off, and still getting low frames, then you've definitely got problems.

So, before offering advice, tell us what settings are you using when you experience low frames?

 

[Mem]

More ram is always good for gaming,anyway good suggestions here like disable background programs etc, also make sure you have the latest drivers for everything,that includes,chipset,sound card,video drivers etc,also defrag might help,some bios gaming tweaks won`t do no harm so disable all video shadowing,disable video ram cacheable,disable fastwrites,disable system bios cacheable,and AGP aperture size should be set to 64mb or 128mb.

 

[HikkiFan]

I tried all your suggestions none of that solved the problem but I really appericate you guys attempting to help

 

[Chadder007]

If you have an intel Chipset motherboard...which It looks like you do, you may want to try Intel's INF chipset update utility and after that is installed, install the Intel application accelerator.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

well one option could be to reformat your entire computer. This should only be your last option though, and you can try installing win98se. Win98se should provide people with 256 mb of ram with a smoother gaming experience than XP does. Try dualbooting, put your games on the 98 partition, and everything else on your XP partition. I think if you reformat, update bios to latest one, get the latest geforce drivers, install all windows updates, install latest soundcard drivers, make sure DMA is on for everything, you should be able to get rid of the stuttering.

 

[PaveLow]

One thing you might want to try is turning off the sound in the game. Sometimes certain sound cards do weird things.

 

[BFG10K]

Like I said a long time ago, 512 MB RAM is pretty much the minimum required these days for all games to run well.

 

[HikkiFan]

Might going to try dual booting xp and 98se I'll let you guys know if it solved my problem

 

[BFG10K]

Even with DMA enabled on your drives excessive paging will really damage your framerate. Of course DMA will make a large performance difference so you should check your settings anyway, whether or not you buy more RAM.

 

[Bovinicus]

Sounds like it's time for good old mister FORMAT! The greatest problem solver in the PC industry known to date.

 

[HikkiFan]

Nope formatting will not help in this case...

 

[HumbleFish]

Go to DirectX Diagnostic Tool (in Win98 it's located in System Tools/System Information/Tools) and turn down Sound Hardware Acceleration... It might help... It always stops my games from freezing.

 

[UsandThem]

Like I said a long time ago, 512 MB RAM is pretty much the minimum required these days for all games to run well.

I have 256 MB DDR in my system (Windows 2000) and everything run perfect on my machine. I actually tested it with 512 MB and 256 MB. I dropped from 8000 3Dmarks to 7918. I play all new games and never have had a problem with 256 MB

My guess is your hard drive is running in PIO mode. I know that when 2000 was first released, it would show your hard drive as running in UDMA but it was actually running in PIO mode.

Try a hard drive benchmark utility and see if that is the problem.

Make sure you have all resource hogging programs out of your start menu as well. The Microsoft Office garbage they stick in there can really slow down your PC.

Also set your Virtual Memory to a set size like 768, instead of it's default of 384 - 768 (in Win 2000 anyway).

 

[BFG10K]

I play all new games and never have had a problem with 256 MB

Yeah? Try RTCW or SOF2 at 1600 x 1200 with all details maxed and brace yourself for a paging frenzy.

 

[spyordie007]

It sounds like it could be a hard-drive access problem like "antiABIT" suggested. I would change the settings for UDMA rather than PIO as Win 2K just about always starts you off after an install on PIO. You should also try running a hard drive benchmark as that would ensure that HD access speeds are as they should be.

If you've already wiped your drive clean than reinstalled windows and the problem isnt fixed I would start looking for other hardware issues, ensure that your CD Rom and HD are not on the same IDE Channel!

Good Luck

-Spy

 

[HikkiFan]

nope, it's always been in udma mode and I tried reinstalling xp many times and no difference

 

[HikkiFan]

Also the game seens to run fine and loads very fast when I tuned down the settings. My benchmarkings just doesn't look right it runs at the speed of an ibm 30gb

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: HikkiFan
My benchmarkings just doesn't look right it runs at the speed of an ibm 30gb

Sounds like that might be your problem.

-Spy

 

[HikkiFan]

ok, the low scores were due to a bad ide cable

 

[fluxquantum]

this will give you a boost once you have your issue resolved.

Intel Chipset Drivers