Help!

[Gagh]

Right, i just built this new pc not a few weeks ago, and all was well that i noticed. It booted and shutdown quickly, and seemed to be getting the performance i would think to expect from this hardware. But for some reason now, whenever i go to do something pc intensive (gaming) after comming out of something as intensive, i get much lower performance, then if i just went to do it after a fresh boot. Namely, the games stutter and get choppy. I was watching the fps counter in eve online jump from 230fps to less then 50 every other second.. counters graph was starting to resemble a saw blade. Ontop of that, lately the system doesnt seem to want to shutdown or restart. After giving the shutdown command it would wait several minutes before actually doing anything, and even then once it got to the shutdown screen for windows, it would sometimes hang, forcing manual shutdown. And then when trying to reboot, it would take several times as long as it used to to post.. the system would be on, i can hear the fans running.. but it wouldnt do anything, till all of a sudden id hear the hds surge and it would boot. As of late it also seems to have a hard time with FMV in games, with them either stuttering , or outright hardlocking the pc (i-war2 for exampe), in the case of the hard locks, it was like the dvd drive just wasnt paying attention and didnt spin up fast enough. I dont know.

Heres the specs..

AMD a64x2 4800+
MSI K8N NEO4 platinum/SLI
2gb ocz ddr (twin 1 gig sticks)
2x evga geforce 7800gtx running sli
audigy 4 platinum
74gig western digital raptor sata hd (primary drive)
400 gig seagate barracuda sata hd
sony 16x dvd drive
plextor dual layer dvd+-rw i forget the model atm
600 watt OCZ powerstream psu

Everything is running stock speeds, using the 3.3 bios for the mobo, and uptodate nforce, forceware and audio drivers. Running winxp pro sp2 fully up to date. Tested it with prime95 for 8 hours with no hiccups, could have ran longer but i needed the use of the pc. AMD cool and quiet is disabled... I really am at a loss as to wtf is wrong with this machine.

 

[mechBgon]

1) assuming you have broadband, do you have a router to provide firewall protection

2) if you have a router, is it wireless, and if so, is its WPA encryption enabled

3) if you have a router, does anyone else share it

4) does your system run a software firewall, or no software firewall

5) what antivirus program do you use

6) do you have what we will call "risk fact0rz", or do you stay away from that stuff

7) do you have AMD's processor driver installed

8) how good is your case cooling? specifics? tried aiming a house fan into your open case to see if cooling has anything to do with it?

9) bonus item: what voltage did you set the RAM to?

 

[Gagh]

1) Yes i have broadband, and yes i use a firewall. Zonealarm. No router.
2) No router
3) No router
4) Yes, zonealarm
5) Norton Anti Virus 2005, scanning as i type this, with nothing found.
6) buh?
7) What processor driver? Is that not taken care of with the nvidia nforce drivers?
8) Heat is not a problem.
9) Whatever the board defaults to, as i said in my initial post, the entire system is running on defaults, and stock speeds.

 

[mechBgon]

1) I suggest getting a router anyway, after spending that much on the rest of the system 😎

2) good (no wireless)

3) good (no other computers sharing)

4) good insofar as it goes. Internet Zone is set to High, right?

5) In NAV, ensure that compressed-file scanning is enabled for the real-time protection and the manual scan, and that heuristics are set to maximum

6) this refers to porn, warez and P2P downloading/file-sharing. Or anything else that could be relevant in the way of security, like "oh, well there was that one strange email attachment that I executed..." or whatnot. If someone borrows your computer, that's another risk factor too.

7) if you have 32-bit Windows, get the 1.2.2.2 driver from this page and install it, even if you don't use Cool 'n Quiet.

8) I'll take your word for that, then

9) Your RAM is OCZ and you did not specify the exact model, but it's a safe bet that your board is defaulting to 2.6 volts whereas the RAM may be designed for 2.8 volts. If you can give me the precise model of your RAM, I'll look into that.

Additional stuff relating to your motherboard: it may need... "re-energizing"??? 😕 Check that page to see if yours is energy-deficient.

 

[Gagh]

The ram is ocz platinum, afaik theres only one version of it with twin 1 gig sticks. ill have to check and see what the bios actually has it set to. On that topic, im not sure what the timings should be set to either. Been going from default sofar.

 

[mechBgon]

Default timings are usually not an issue, if anything they might be a little more forgiving than what the RAM's capable of (usually). But voltage can be a simple little thing that helps. OCZ Platinum 2 x 1GB DDR400 kit... lessee here... the Platinum is nominally rated for 2.6 volts. Although they do say there that up to 2.8V is ok 😉

Since changing the memory voltage is extremely easy and sometimes is the answer to weird behavior or lockups/BSOD's, try cranking it to 2.8 volts anyway, along with installing the AMD processor driver.

And seriously, I'd get a router too. Why make ZoneAlarm use your CPU cycles to process all the junk packets being sent to your IP address by script kiddies and worms? Let the lil' ARM processor in the router deal with that stuff, you use your CPU cycles for what YOU want to use them for 😉 additional router info including hard lockdown of unneeded ports. Not saying it's the cause of your slowdowns, but it won't hurt.

 

[Gagh]

Right, i installed that amd driver for the dual core cpu.. and its made things worse. Much worse. Jumping between 350fps and 50 fps now in eve online, right off the bat from a fresh reboot.

As for the memory, i checked bios, and its set to a vague "Auto" setting, so i havent a clue what its actually set at.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Gagh
Right, i installed that amd driver for the dual core cpu.. and its made things worse. Much worse. Jumping between 350fps and 50 fps now in eve online, right off the bat from a fresh reboot.

As for the memory, i checked bios, and its set to a vague "Auto" setting, so i havent a clue what its actually set at.

Ok, now change the AUTO to 2.8 and let's see if that has any effect. This sounds like a very repeatable problem you're having, so it should take very little time to find out whether that helped.



Here's another tangent. When you installed the nVidia motherboard drivers, did you answer Yes to this prompt? That installs the nVidia SW IDE driver, which can be fine for some people and troublesome for others.

If you did not install the SW IDE drivers, then check something for me... go to Device Manager, expand the IDE/ATAPI Controllers, double-click the Primary and Secondary IDE Channels, go to the Advanced tab, and make sure your drives are not in PIO mode. If they are, let me know.

If you did install the SW IDE drivers, then it might be worth trying the standard Microsoft IDE drivers instead, and then check your Primary and Secondary to ensure that they're not using PIO mode.

The reason I went into all of that is that you mentioned FMV being choppy. If your drives are in PIO mode, there's a heavy load on your CPU when accessing them, possibly including for video or audio in your games. The SW IDE driver could have unwanted effects too.

 

[Gagh]

Upping the memory voltage to 2.8v (which the bios kept trying to warn me was a bad idea) had no effect whatsoever, fps is still jumping, right off of a fresh reboot.

As for that drive, afaik i installed it, and none of my drives are in PIO mode. As for using the windows driver, how would i do this?

 

[mechBgon]

As for that driver, afaik i installed it, and none of my drives are in PIO mode. As for using the windows driver, how would i do this?

You see the ATA controllers listed in Device Manager there? If you go into their listing and find the Driver tab, there will be a Roll back driver button. You could roll it back to the Microsoft Standard Dual-Channel PCI IDE Controller driver, or you could simply click Update driver and manually specify Microsoft's driver.

By the way, does my theory hold true? Do your games access your optical drives for video or audio? My next fact-finding step would be to remove the Audigy 4 and see if that changes anything. If it did, then I'd start trying it in different PCI slots next.

Sorry for the shotgun approach here. I got to get to bed :moon: but good luck and I'll check in the morning to see if the Fates smiled upon you 🙂

 

[Gagh]

Changing the ide driver did nothing, ended up doing a system restore to clear all of these recent changes. Getting rid of the AMD driver stopped the fps jumping right after reboot, and getting rid of a recent audio driver update solved the problem of the pc not wanting to shut down.

Which led me to believe that the sound drivers probably had something to do with the weirdness, so i go to uninstall, and after much fighting with the system try to reinstall the original drivers from the cd. Which it does, but then all of the audio controls (eax constole, speaker settings etc) refused to work, stating that the device supported by this software wasnt present. I know the hardware works, as i WAS getting audio again at this point.

Feh, doing a format and reinstall as i type this. At this point all i can figure to do, is reinstall windows and only the essential drivers and see what happens. Maybe all the driver updates and reinstall and whatnot were causing conflicts.. i dunno. Going to be majorly pissed if the problem with the audigy software still happens after this.

 

[Gagh]

Ok, i managed to get ROPE working to automatically set affinity to eve-online for the first cpu core and it works ok. But in the span of 5 or so hours i got 3 BSOD, talking about what i think is a memory dump, right before it auto-reboots. Not sure whats causing this.. only thing i can think of would be the mem voltage being too high at 2.8 (lowered it now to 2.65), the audio drivers not being up to date (didnt upgrade past the cd version to try and avoid a shutdown issue i had with them), the affinity thing causing problems in the long run.. or the amd drivers just flat out causing instability. Gonna run prime for the rest of the night and see what happens.

Anyone have any ideas?