Strange problem in some games...pauses every second.

[imported_Shaq]

This problem is similar to the AMD dual core I had without the optimizer installed. Every second there is a half second pause, but only in a few games...most are okay. It happens in Windows XP and 7. I tried 4 different Nvidia drivers and it is the same result. I put bclk at default and without turbo, hyperthreading is always off. Chipset drivers are installed. These games were okay on my q6600 system. The windows 7 install is fresh on the new setup and XP isn't.

I figure it is a CPU issue as it is every second on the second.

 

[Idontcare]

Checkout the DPC latency tool and see if the deferred procedure calls on your rig are excessive.

 

[imported_Shaq]

Thanks for the link. After brief testing it is 720us maximum. <1000us seems to be the acceptable limit. I will test more and disable devices and see what is causing it.

 

[Idontcare]

Did you run the the tool in the background while playing the game(s) that cause the pause?

 

[imported_Shaq]

yes. I ran two games so far. It doesn't seem to be registering in the program? I disabled LAN and sound card and it didn't help. I also disabled several processes. Isn't there a way to boot to a stripped down version of windows? Safe mode won't work as it doesn't load the video driver.

There was a game once that didn't like HID devices. But I have been using the same keyboard/mouse as my last rig and most of the same programs. A couple of games I ran on the old rig and were fine. About 20% of them are doing this behavior. I tried turning off things that were new on this rig vs. the old one, but haven't found a solution yet.

 

[ShawnD1]

Sounds like a hard drive issue. Having a slow hard drive will cause lots of freezes and slow downs when doing things. Fallout 3, for example, is very sensitive to hard drive lag.

 

[imported_Shaq]

This is different. The hard drive doesn't need to be loading to make it happen. You can stand in one place and just move the mouse and every second or so there is a "catch" and it is hard to aim the mouse. Or run around in a circle and it will hitch every second. Hard drive thrashing occurs when running to new areas and the hard drive is loading and trying to catch up.

It looks like it might be the video drivers as 186.08 fixed one of the games. There are 4 or 5 more that are still messed up though. The DPC latency tool never went over 750us so I imagine that points to video drivers also. I thought it was the drivers to begin with as there have been a lot of problems lately with Nvidia drivers and SLI especially. I guess the 180 series still aren't mature. At least not on the X58 platform. Like with the 182.50 drivers you have all the refresh rates available and the drivers after that only go up to 85hz.

 

[Idontcare]

Yeah I agree it sounds like you can safely rule out DPC's as the cause.

For drivers, can you roll back to a much earlier driver and see if the problem occurs?

 

[Alienwho]

I was having this problem playing GTA 4 with my X3 720. It stuttered everytime I pressed a key on the keyboard.

The following fix I copied from another forum solved the problem for me.

FIX FREEZING ON WINDOWS 7


""""Now, Go to start bar and type "services" Inside the search bar, and click on "services"

now go down to "Windows Event log" , now what you need to do is Right click it and go to properties

now go to "Start up type" and select DISABLE,

this will not really effect much as far as im aware, and it wont just let you DISABLE IT, it will probly say ERROR

So anyway once u have selected Disable under Start up type, Restart,

and Wala! PROBLEM SOLVED!!! NO MORE LAGGING!

 

[imported_Shaq]

I have tried about 10 different drivers from 180.24 to 190.15 and it does it in every one of them. The 186.08 drivers make one game a little better. I can't figure it out. Like I said it is similar to an AMD dual core running without the optimizer. It happens in the menus of games also. Dirt and Ghostbusters have shapes and cars in the menu that hitch about every 1-2 seconds. It isn't possible for part of a CPU to be defective is it? I figure if it were the CPU every game would do this. But I believe the AMD dual cores did this in only a few games also which is why I mention that it is exactly the same behavior. I was going to try and uninstall and reinstall the chipset drivers but I don't see an entry in programs and features. For now though I consider it to be defective video drivers. I tried the tip above and it didn't make any difference nor disabling antivirus software.

 

[imported_Shaq]

Holy crap I fixed it! lol I bet no one could guess how. I bought an older game to play and to my dismay it was doing the hitching also. I was reading up on how people fixed it and there was a suggestion to set the affinity to 1 core. So I finally got around to it tonight and tried it and it worked. That got me thinking since it was doing the same thing in my other games. But it was hitching in new, multithreaded games like DIRT and Ghostbusters. And why would I even think of setting affinity for a game that supports 4 threads?

I said WTH I'll try it and see what happens. I load the game and it's hitching of course, then I alt-tab out and set the affinity for 2 cores.....voila! DIRT ran at full speed on 2 cores...damn this i7 is nice. lol Then I say let's try 3 cores and that works fine also. Then I set it back to 4 cores to see if it hitches again...and guess what? No hitching! So now when I load the games I have to alt-tab out and set affinity to 3 or less cores and then back to 4 cores. I can do this right away...in only a couple seconds.

So what is causing this? I have not heard of anyone else having this problem. The games are set at four cores by default but for some reason it needs a "reset". Like I said earlier, about 25% of my games are doing this. I tried a couple of them in XP and it does it there too. Anybody have any idea why this happens? It is a bit of trouble to do this every time, but right now I'm just happy to play the games properly.

 

[Idontcare]

Do you have the option in your BIOS to turn off/disable hyperthreading? It would be nice to know whether HT is at all related.

Regardless, what you might have uncovered is an errata issue with the chip. This might be a documented problem, maybe not documented in terms of your symptoms but the root-cause might actually be already ID'ed and fixed with the D0 maskset.

 

[imported_Shaq]

So what you are really saying is that I should buy a D0 and get rid of this one? lol But seriously is this an RMAable problem? I think Intel owes me a 975 for doing this research for them. lol I do have hyperthreading off as most games don't even support 4 threads much less 8.

Are there any programs that set affinity before launching? I will have to look into that. I don't know if I would want to RMA it as I might not have a PC for a month.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Shaq
So what you are really saying is that I should buy a D0 and get rid of this one?

Not specifically, but what I am saying is that there are erata for the C0 which were eliminated in the D0.

I don't know if the symptoms of those erata have anything to do with your symptoms but it would be something to check out if you ever get the chance to test a D0 sometime in the future.

Originally posted by: Shaq
But seriously is this an RMAable problem?

Not really because you haven't isolated the root-cause to know what exactly needs to be RMA'ed. You have observed a symptom (stuttering), and you have observed that changing affinity in your OS mitigates the symptom but you've yet to convincingly identity the root-cause of the symptom as being a faulty CPU. You could have a corrupted BIOS implementing bad/wrong/outdated microcode for your CPU for example.

This is one of those cases where buying a DELL would have put you in a position of being able to rma the whole damn rig as it wouldn't be your problem to identify the root-cause any further than that.

You probably could make enough noise at a customer service rep that they'd issue you an RMA, but you are really just gambling your time and effort that it truly is the CPU that is the culprit. If it isn't, then you'll still have the same problem when they send the cpu back.

Originally posted by: Shaq
Are there any programs that set affinity before launching? I will have to look into that. I don't know if I would want to RMA it as I might not have a PC for a month.

I looked into this myself a while ago and there wasn't really all that much out there for you to use. IIRC there was a program produced by tomshardwareguide actually that kinda worked but it modified the exe file in some way that caused the program I was using to then view itself as having been compromised (financial software, so it checks for that sort of thing on its own) so I couldn't use it.

 

[imported_Shaq]

If I set the affinity to 1 core it totally eliminates the pausing, but 2 or more cores it has a really small hitch still but is 99% better. There is a new BIOS for my board that I guess I will have to try now, but I think that it is an update for the 950 and 975. Since I have a C0 it was supported since the first BIOS was released and I have the 5th version installed which even supports the D0. This is only in a few games though and I did try BIOS defaults and all that.

I found a program that is on someones personal page that will even save your affinity settings called Core Affinty Resident that works pretty well. It has to stay resident in memory to work so I don't believe it alters any files. I set it to 3 cores and it is fine from the start, only when 4 cores are enabled from the beginning does it hitch.


Edit: okay I updated it to the latest BIOS and it still does it. I forgot to mention that this CPU had a RMA sticker attached to it when I got it from NewEgg. I guess I should have sent it back, but the box hadn't been opened as fair as I could see so I installed it anyway. I'll see if I can RMA this one and if so I'll buy a D0 and sell the replacement so I'll still have a working computer. This would be a very weird CPU defect I agree with you but it seems to be most likely the CPU. If that's not it I guess it would have to be the motherboard.

 

[Idontcare]

Do you know anyone with an x58 mobo or another i7 cpu that you could swap your cpu with theirs just for a quick test to confirm it is the cpu and not something to do with the mobo?

I agree your best (only) option here is to rma the cpu, but it would be nice to not waste your time as you say perchance it does turn out to be mobo related.

 

[Denithor]

Something easy to test - enable HT, turn off the affinity setting software (restore games to default) and see if the problem is still there.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Something easy to test - enable HT, turn off the affinity setting software (restore games to default) and see if the problem is still there.

I'm also wondering if it is something screwy with the PCU and the power-saving features of the cores.

Not exactly the same thing but the link does speak to the potential for power-saving features to get poorly implemented and impact performance.

The OP might try disabling all power-saving features in their BIOS to see if that modulates the symptom at all.

 

[deimos3428]

It sounds like you've got one core running slower than the rest. Try putting everything at stock clocks, no power-saving/optimizers and see if the problem still occurs.

 

[OCGuy]

In Left 4 Dead I actually have to use the option in the game to disable 1 core for it to not stutter......

:angry;

 

[imported_Shaq]

I have all the power saving stuff disabled. I can try enabling hyperthreading to check if it does anything. I believe some games will refuse to run at all with it on however.

I tried everything at stock but not at stock with power saving off. I can check that too.

And L4D is one of the games that runs fine for me with all 4 cores enabled. lol Go figure.

I just don't see how any of those settings would only affect SOME of the games and not all of them. It isn't possible for there to be some i7 compatibility issues with some games is there? And could it result from any of the new instruction sets/optimizations etc.? These games were okay with my Q6600. I assume it occurs in certain game engines that don't play nice with the i7. Source engine games seem okay so far, Gamebryo is fine, Id is fine, Unreal is fine, Cryengine etc. Ghostbusters, Riddick and DIRT all use in-house engines so that might be a problem. This is just a preliminary thought until I swap out CPU's. I left a post on Intel's support site so if they ever post a reply maybe I will figure out the cause and resolution.

 

[imported_Shaq]

I just found the cause of this problem. It is the on the fly bus clock detector in CoreTemp. I decided to play one of the games tonight that was hitching and was going to load the program to force it to use 3 cores. I tried to play the game first just for the heck of it and there was no hitching because as it turns out CoreTemp won't load when Windows boots up for some reason even though I set it in the settings box.

I thought at first it was my new RAM but I looked up the date that I bought it and it was before the date on the affinity program cfg file so I knew it couldn't be that. Then I remembered CoreTemp wasn't loaded. So I loaded CoreTemp and it hitched again. I then thought it might be the frequency detector since it uses resources and unticked the box and loaded the games again and that turned out to be it....no hitching with CoreTemp loaded. So luckily I won't have to swap out CPU's or motherboards. I will tell the designer of CoreTemp about this. That setting is normally off anyway but I turned it on because it looked cooler. lol It is strange that some games don't like it but others are fine.

That is a load off my mind. Thanks for trying to help with this problem. I should have removed these programs and tried the game earlier.

 

[Idontcare]

Thanks for posting your resolution of the issue. I never in a million years would have thought it was due to coretemp running in the background with that particular option enabled. Sometimes luck is all you got going for yourself when it comes to debugging stability issues. Good sleuthing :thumbsup:

 

[maregg]

Hi, just wanted to point out that I had simillar issues with a temp/overclock utility. Took me a while to pinpoint the problem.

I was mostly suffering from small hiccups in sound while gaming.

It was all due to Easytune6.

I have come to dislike those utilities. I use them only in the innitial overclocking setup to monitor temps. When everything runs nice and cool, I stop using them. They are too "close" to the hardware for my liking.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Thanks for keeping thread updated. Its one more thing I learned.