SATA II and performance question

[dknippe2]

Well, you guys are my last resort. I've contacted Asus and Seagate and they can't/won't help me out. I just put $1100 into a new machine, built it from the ground up. It's an AMD Athlon 3500+ on an Asus A8R32MVP Deluxe, with an ATI x1900xt, Seagate SATA II 3 g/s HDD, and two 1gb sticks of G.Skill ram with heatspreaders.

First problem (from whence I think all others are stemming...) is that my HDD is only showing up with an Ultra ATA 133 transfer rate, now isn't that about a third what it should be!? Secondly, I'm getting about 20-25 fps in FEAR and Oblivion. What makes me think that it is related to the HDD thing is because initial loading makes fps drop to the single digits. I'll walk outside in Oblivion, and until I shake the mouse around a few times I get about 5 fps.

I've updated my bios, which helped a bit and I have the lastest Catalyst drivers, but the only way I could tell was my 3dmark06 score went up about 400 points...to a whopping 4400...everyone else's tests I've seen on a very similar system have been at least 6500, what did I do wrong?? It was even with no anti-aliasing! Any and all help/advice is greatly appreciated, I've been tearing my hair out over this for about 3 weeks now, and I'd just like to get the most from my investment!!

 

[OvErHeAtInG]

First, I highly doubt gaming perf is caused by a problem with the HDD. What makes you say it has ATA133 transfer rate? Some kind of benchmark?

The problems you have sound like you don't have your mobo chipset drivers installed. Check Asus' website for Xpress 3200 chip drivers. Did that motherboard come with a driver install package? Low HDD performance could also have to do with not having the disk controller driver installed.

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: dknippe2
First problem (from whence I think all others are stemming...) is that my HDD is only showing up with an Ultra ATA 133 transfer rate, now isn't that about a third what it should be!?

OK, 2 things here:
1) where are you seeeing ATA133? if it's in the BIOS that's as it should be until your into an OS & have a driver for the controller

2) SATA150, SATA300 & ATA133 are interface limit speeds but the mechanics are essentially the same on all of them (Raptors excepted) & it's the mechanics that are the limiting factor on transfer speed & not the interface limits.
In other words there is very little difference between the performance of any of them.

 

[Peter]

... and even the Raptors don't come anywhere near saturating the SATA-150 interface.

Utilities displaying the interface mode often show bogus results for SATA. UDMA mode 6 (aka UDMA-133) is the most frequently seen bogus result.

In other words: Don't bother. Your harddisk is operating to the best of its abilities, and your problem is elsewhere.