Can't find cause of occasional ~1 sec freezes, maybe cpu spiking

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Just recently I rebuilt my machine, specs are

Soltek DRV5
Athlon 2000XP
512 Samsung DDR
PNY Geforce4 4400
IBM 40G
Sound - Audigy
OS - WinXP Pro
Filesystem - NTFS

I installed the 4 in 1's, and have tried 28.32 and 23.11 Nvidia Drivers, went through a lot of tweaks, turnd a lot of default services to manual, etc.

My symptoms are most pronounced in Unreal Tournament but I notice it elsewhere so I don't think it's just a UT thing. In UT, I can play fine for the most part, but every now and then the game will freeze for about a second and then keep going. The sound doesn't skip like the game does.

Just playing MP3's, they'll skip with almost the same frequency. It's a short skip and I only miss about a second, but it's noticable.

The short freezes seem to happen in some other games I've played, War3 beta/Dungeon Siege, though I perceive it as less than UT and shorter skips.

I thought it might be some service having temporary CPU spikes slowing things down, but I couldn't find anything while watching the monitor.

Right now I'm looking for 4 in 1 upgrades and maybe updated bios/motherboard drivers.

I haven't tried the hardware combination with another operating system yet so I don't know if it's XP or something else.

Anybody have any ideas of how to fix/troubleshoot the problem?

Thanks

 

[Zim Hosein]

What programs are running in your system tray BlehBlehAmiga?

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Just trillian.

 

[xospec1alk]

maybe spyware?

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Not unless you count XP

It happened even the first time I started up UT which was the only thing on the machine besides Windows.

 

[Mem]

Hmmm I did read about some Soltek boards having cpu voltage problems so have you tried bumping up the voltage on the cpu see if this improves the freezing problem.
Installing latest drivers and bios update is a good idea of yours,also try moving the Audigy to a different PCI slot.

 

[Zim Hosein]

BlehBlehAmiga, if you unload trillian, do you still have the 1 sec freeze?

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

The voltage should be default, probably 1.75V. What's a good setting, 1.92V or somewhere in between? Cooling should be ok.

I don't disagree that moving the Audigy may help, but what's the logic behind it? Just for my own knowledge.

It happens with trillian unloaded.

 

[Mem]

<< The voltage should be default, probably 1.75V. What's a good setting, 1.92V or somewhere in between? Cooling should be ok. >>




Try 1.78v or 1.79v for the CPU,I want to see if the Audigy has anything to do with the freezing,you could try taking it out of the PC as well just to see how the cpu responds.

Last question what PSU do you have?

 

[acidvoodoo]

exact thing in UT is happening to me, EXACT, yet, i have i piece of crap system that iwll be replaced tommorow (k6-2 450, 128mb ram, v3)
one thing u can try that was suggested to me is, open the UT console and type preferences, find game engine heading(of something) and but cache size to 16, as at default it is 8. this helped abit
i'm not sure about it happening in windows and music though :S

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Thanks for the suggestions, I will check them out tonight.

My PSU is an Enermax 330W P-4 PS. Other than the listed hardware the only thing in the machine is a Plextor CDRW so it shouldn't be overloaded, though I guess I shouldn't count it out.

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

I tried both removing the audigy and putting it in another slot and no help.

Upped Voltage without help.

Changed UT cache without help.

I tried to flash the bios last night but for some reason awdflash wouldn't even finish when I just ran it to see the arguments (/?). I'll play with that more later.

I saw a few threads on ars technica about mp3's and dvd's skipping (my mp3's do, maybe they just weren't playing UT), nothing that seemed too helpful but all the systems were different so I don't know if it's a specific hardware issue. I'll keep digging, but anybody have any more ideas?

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Last night I learned about the VIA PCI Latency patch, I tried that out but it didn't help. I also tried a few things with the sound card, removing everything, using on board instead of the audigy, but nothing helped. Anybody have an idea?

 

[Pilsnerpete]

do tell what you figure out, cause the video on UT was skipping on me, too, yesterday. Also, my mp3's skipped when I played them in Media Player. Not winamp though! Maybe unrelated, but I hope to learn something here.

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

Well after 2 reformats I'm 100% certain it's not the Audigy, I reformatted twice without it.

It happens with a fresh install of windows and only UT installed.

However, I thought I checked this before but it seems that it's only happening online, and it seems to get worse as I play longer. It's not a server side issue, it's not ping or packetloss.

In XP, this time I don't have QoS running, but before the first format I had QoS but tweaked it to not reserve 20% bandwidth. My NIC doesn't have XP drivers, but it installed something for them that apparently works, or maybe it doesn't and that's been my problem. It installed it as a Winbond W89C940-Based generic adapter, but my card is a Linksys lnepci2. I suppose I could pick up another NIC with supported XP drivers.

Is there any other possible problem/tweak that might cause something like this to happen

 

[Mem]

<< In XP, this time I don't have QoS running, but before the first format I had QoS but tweaked it to not reserve 20% bandwidth >>



I actually removed QoS from XP,which helped me a lot in online gaming like CS,as for your NIC well I`m out of ideas apart from moving it to a different slot,also being they are cheap I guess it`s worth a shot,the Netgear FA311 works great with XP.

 

[BlehBlehAmiga]

It appears as though it was the Nic. I picked up one today that's supported by XP and all is well (at least it has been to this point).

Thanks for the help