nForce2 upgrade woes

[galt]

Previous system:
Athlon XP 1800+ TbredB @stock
ECS K7S5A Pro
512MB PC133 SDRAM @stock

Upgraded to:
Athlon XP 1800+ TbredB @ 1925mhz (11x175) (same chip)
Shuttle AN35N Ultra (nF2 400 Ultra)
512MB HyperX PC3200 2-3-3-7 (haven't tried 2-3-2-6 yet)

Items carried over:
Enlight 360W PS
SB Live 5.1
Maxtor 160gb, 8mb
Geforce4 Ti 4200 @ stock

Here's the problem. The new system is rock stable (tested with prime95 and Sandra 2003). Everything runs perfectly. Everything, that is, except Quake 3. The frame rates have increased overall. But the game stutters.

I'll try to explain it. It pauses every second or so for a millisecond. Like playing on a server with lag. But the lag is always present, but in very short bursts. Or to put it in another way, its like playing in stop motion. If you have seen any stop motion videos (Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' music video is an excellent example), you can see the motion stop and continue persistently. Its like .5 second of normal motion, then a .1 second freeze, then .5 second normal motion, then .1 second freeze ... and so on.

Since I play quake 3 more than any other game, I've spent close to 7 hours trying to fix this. These are the things I've changed so far:

fresh install of xp (has windows drivers for everything, including sound)
install 44.53 dets, try playing. problem persists.
install 3.13 nForce2 (with older ethernet driver). problem persists.
remove soundcard (physically). problem persists.
put s.card back in. install sblive drivers. problem persists.
mess with v-sync, color depth, bi/trilinear filtering, frame cap. problem still persists.

Just for the hell of it, I installed and tried ut2003. And what do you know, it plays perfectly fine.

Im about ready to sacrifice a small goat and dance around a bonfire for this. Its such a waste to upgrade everything and lose the one thing I play. Quake3 worked perfectly fine on my older system. And on top of worrying about the IDE driver fiasco with the nF2, I have to suffer this Q3 diaster. Anybody got any ideas?

I mean, if you can fix this, I'll mail the small goat to you.

 

[XMan]

Try patching Q3?

 

[MDE]

Try the 44.03 drivers?

 

[Twista]

try some older drivers.

 

[j@cko]

it doesn't sound like a mobo problem....

 

[Ionizer86]

Hmm, what about older nForce AGP drivers? Maybe other users have comparisons of the new and old AGP drivers.

 

[galt]

Thanks for the ideas. Will try older nForce2 drivers. Quake 3 is patched to the latest version (same as it was on my old system).

I tried with and without nForce2 drivers as well. Maybe an older version of nForce2 will work. I'll let you know how it goes.

By the way, what kind of packaging should I use for a small goat, if I were to send it by 3 day ground shipping?

 

[poppyq]

Is this problem while playing online? Try limiting your fps in game to something like 150 and see if it fixes it. This may seem odd but I had a problem where Q3 would stutter with too high of a frame rate...like the game couldn't keep up (doesn't make sense) but limiting in game FPS to 150 fixed it.

bring down console in game and put in:

com_maxFPS 150

and then try playing and see how it plays. If that works, put it in your q3config.cfg in your baseq3 directory (or the cfg file in whatever mod you're playing)

 

[Sideswipe001]

Is there any noise to go along with it? (like is the HD being accessed constantly, etc).

Are you running anything else, or any other USB devices or something?

 

[galt]

Its not just online play. Even single player does that. And there's no weird hard drive or any other activity. The only USB device I have attached is my mouse.

But poppyq has a very good point. When I had it set to 175fps max, the problem did mostly go away. It's playable again, but I'd still like to know how to fully fix it. (I thought that was more a hackjob than a proper fix, so I uncapped it again). I guess I'll just set it to 150 and keep playing. Atleast now that I know I'm not the only one with this oddity.

On the plus side, this is the first time I've had a problem with having too many frames per second in quake . I remember when I had to run at 640x480 with everything turned down just to get 30fps. Those were the days...

Thanks for the help guys. And double that for poppyq. For now, its quake3 time...