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Help me... what in my setup is slowing me down

S

sagejoshua

Junior Member
I built a new rig over christmas, and while it's a little faster than my old AMD XP 1.3, it's not like I'd want it to be. Can you guys tell me the weakest link here? What should I be working on? Here's my rig:

AMD64 3400 Socket 754
Asus K8V-X board
1 gig PC3200 RAM (1 Corsair XMS, 1 Corsair Value Select... I was rich, then poor)
Rosewill 256MB AGP Radeon 9600 128bit
3 HD - IDE WD 80gig 7200 (WD800JB) for system, old 40gig WD for audio data, and 200gig WD for storage

So what's slowing me down here. I just feel like my computer should be running faster than it is... small things like load times etc. The WD gets something around 25 MB/s in Sisoft Sandra. That's pretty slow, right? Should I get a small raptor?

Thanks for your input,
-josh
 
The vid card is a little weak given the other stuff you have in there, methinks. The Corsair Value stick is limiting your RAM timings too, which can make difference in more recent games.

What apps in particular are giving you bad load times? If they're sapping all your available RAM and Windows is hitting up the HD for space, it puts a serious dent in your loading speed. When I went from 512 to 1 GB of RAM in my system, BF1942 maps loaded in literally a third of the time, using the same HD.

Raptors can help, but I don't think they're as insanely effective as people make them out to be unless you've got a RAID array, and that's overkill IMHO. You'd be better off spending that much money to kick your RAM up to 1.5 GB of XMS.

And, of course, make sure you've done the usual spring-cleaning of spyware and that you're running all the latest drivers.
 
I feel like I have pretty good speed on everything else besides the Hard drive. I mean, isn't 25MB/s a pretty small bottleneck for a system like mine?
 
Originally posted by: Ike0069
Uh, no.
Click to expand...

now THAT was an informative response.

Indeed, your video card is pretty weak, but doesn't really apply to what your talking about. A 36gb raptor definantly wouldn't be a bad idea, but at the same time, you could just pick up a new WD 80gb IDE for about $50...its up to you. How old is the 200gb? you can try using that one.

Edit: Just as a comparison, i ran Sandra and got 45mb/s on my WD800 80gb SATA drive, 7200rpm 8mb cache...
 
Originally posted by: Hyperlite
Originally posted by: Ike0069
Uh, no.
Click to expand...

now THAT was an informative response.

Indeed, your video card is pretty weak, but doesn't really apply to what your talking about. A 36gb raptor definantly wouldn't be a bad idea, but at the same time, you could just pick up a new WD 80gb IDE for about $50...its up to you. How old is the 200gb? you can try using that one.

Edit: Just as a comparison, i ran Sandra and got 45mb/s on my WD800 80gb SATA drive, 7200rpm 8mb cache...
Click to expand...

I have a WD 80 GB (PATA) and I get about 25-30 MB/s... *shrug*
 
We have pretty much the same system, save the video cards. Mine is more than enough power. Sniperruff may be right, you may have an SE 9600, which will slow you down.
 
So there actually is a difference between the IDE and SATA WD80? Or do you think there's something wrong with the one I got?
 
Originally posted by: Machine350
We have pretty much the same system, save the video cards. Mine is more than enough power. Sniperruff may be right, you may have an SE 9600, which will slow you down.
Click to expand...

No, it's not the SE. It's a regular old 9600. I don't really have much of a graphics particular problem... It just seems like my machine should be faster. Have you checked the bandwidth of your HD? I'm really particular about the processes I allow to run on my computer... the only extraneous things I run in the background are the ATI control panel, a mixer for my Delta sound card, and FreeRAM, a small memory management program. Those ain't slowing me down, are they?

I'll give you a for instance of what I'm talking about: I use Firefox's mail program. When I open it, it takes about 5 to 10 seconds to open up. It seems to me that a small little program like that should just pop right up. Right?
 
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