Is there a way to ISOLATE and TEST Disk Thrashing Performance Problems..?

[DarkFudge2000]

Folks, I have an older P4 2.6ghz OC'd to 3.1Ghz PC and I just recently replaced my GeForce 4 6800GS card with a newer ATI 3850 AGP card and I noticed that the performance seemed a little wierd....I am getting Disk Thrashing and poor framerates in games such as Battlefield 2 and NBA 2K9 and such.

I want to troubleshoot and isolate the problem because I have heard that the ATI 3850 cards are prone to some performance issues but I really think it could lie within the confines of an improperly prepped system so, I am asking you all what steps should I start looking at first?....here is my system:

P4 2.6 OC to 3.1ghz
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard
Antec Smart Power Supply 500W
1 GB Buffalo 3700 RAM
1 Sound Blaster Audigy
Sapphire ATI 3850 AGP 512 Video card (latest Catalyst drivers)
2 Hard drives ( 1 Sata Maxtor and 1 Western Digital Ultra IDE)
1 CD ROM writable Liteon Drive
1 DVD Writeable Liteon Drive
3 internal case fans

Windows XP SP2

My first couple of guesses ....

-Is Power supply adequate?...How do I test?...is there a software tool to test?

-Are there old driver conflicts left behind from RivaTuner 2.0 and NVidia driver uninstalls?...How can I completely check and remove?

-Does my system have enough RAM?...should I add another 1GB or thats not gonna help anything?

-What kind of tweaks and/or ConfigSYS options can I turn off and on for better performance?....I see alot of resources running but this was like this with the Geforce 6800GS and I didnt have the Disk Thrashing problems like I have now in games

What do you think guys?

DO I need to provide more info?

thanks for your help in advance!

 

[mooseracing]

If you want to check the HD use HDtach or something similar and look at the graphs. There me some slight dips if it is your OS drive. Depending on the age of the drive I would expect to see it about 50MB/s throughput.

Too small of a PSU would cause the system to be unstable, freezes, locks, power off.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

typically thrashing means low system RAM.

1 gig is pretty low nowadays with XP SP 2 or 3. my system idles at about 700 megs in use, although theres a lot of junk loaded. go with 2 gigs. I have 3 and barely ever hit the swap file.

PSU should be fine.

there used to be a driver patch for AGP 38xx cards (they are PCIe based hybrids) but Im not sure if thats needed now.

 

[DarkFudge2000]

Interesting points...thanks guys.

So other than the HDtach software, is there anything else I can run to test any other isolation problems that may be relating to the disk thrashing?.....If you really think its the RAM, Can I go out and buy 1 or 2 more gigs of RAM at different ratings and put them in the other 2 banks or do ALL the RAM chips need to be the same 3700 or 3200 rating?...I'd hate to lose a full GB of RAM just to add 2 more chips

Also, to touch on what someone else said, if it was indeed my Power Supply not being sufficient to handle all the load, the system would always demonstrate freezes, locks and power offs?.....it wouldnt be just HD thrashing?


Finally, what 3850 Drivers are the best to use?....is one better than the other for stability and performance? Im using whatever were ATI's Latest Catalyst drivers and the HYPERDRIVE feature that allows you to overclock the chip recommends 692core and like 937cpu as the overclock (this is after I ran the embedded Hyperdrive Test built into the Catalyst driver )

Also someone mentioned to disable Catalyst AI?....I didnt notice any difference

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

you can mix speeds but they all will run at the lowest. so if you get add a gig or two of 3200 your 3700 will run at 3200 speed. just make sure you match capacities in the right slots to keep dual channel.

ie I run all 3200, 2x512 mb and 2x1 gig in dual channel mode. at one point I ran a 2x512 mb, one was a 3500 (I think) one was 3200. both ran at 3200. just use the right slots.

as for drivers, the latest are almost always the best. if your card is running in 3d mode at all with regular ATI drivers the patch must not be needed anymore.

underpowered PSU would not cause a HD to thrash at all. your system would just reboot/freeze under load.

process explorer will give you more info about your memory and swapfile usage than you can shake a stick at. it can tell you if your thrashing is low memory related.

 

[nineball9]

One possibility - when you install an ATI card, you may have installed Microsoft's .Net framework software for the 1st time. If you already had .Net on your system and the install didn't update it, then this is not applicable. Otherwise, you may have the .Net runtime optimizer running; it should run some stuff when installed, and only run the rest when your system is idle. But it doesn't always work as advertised.

If the compiler is running, you'll find it running as a Process (use Task Manager to look for mscorsvw.exe.) If you have it running, there is a command to have it finish its queued items and end.

Unlikely this is your problem, but it's easy to check.

Good luck!

 

[jamesbond007]

I can pretty much put the pin on the fact it's due to your low amount of system RAM. A few years ago when I first got BF2, I had 1.5GB of RAM (2x512+2x256) and it ran so-so, but I was also running an OS that was installed for ~2 years prior. I had a P4 3.4GHz at the time that used DDR2 memory. When I went to (replaced the 2x256 modules with 2x1GB) 3GB and adjusted my page file manually, my slow-downs went away. I believe it was due to the system trying to load all the textures for the game and when you run out of RAM, it has to use the hard disk, which is very very slow compared to RAM.

Long story short, upgrade the RAM to at least 2GB and you will notice a *HUGE* difference. When I was low on RAM, the first ~30 seconds of a BF2 map were probably sub-10fps. You may want to also clean up your hard disk if you have little free space. A good defrag may help on an OS that's been installed for a long time, too.

Good luck!