Issues with games, video and sound.

[Raslian]

First off, computer specs.

AMD Athlon XP 2700+
Shuttle SN42G2
512MB DDR400 Kingston RAM
80GB Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB cache Hard drive
PowerColor 9600PRO 256MB Video card

A major problem that I have been encountering is when playing games, specifically half-life 2 at the moment, every 15-30 seconds the computer will freeze momentarily, for maybe a second or less and the sound will chop up then return to normal. This repeats itself over and over and over without failure, and is either more apparent when more is happening on screen, or is actually happening more often at those times.

Now, since the life of this computer, it's always run games a bit slowly in my opinion, and now that I have bought Half-life 2 this has become painfully apparent. I have a friend with the exact same system, except he uses a ATI 9600PRO 128MB card instead, and his games always run faster. I have the latests drivers for everything, I defrag my hard-drive on a nightly basis, and I do not have SP2. Our systems are completely identical except for the video card, down to the drivers, hardware, and the settings within games. Has anyone else encountered a problem like this before?

 

[IEC]

Sounds like maybe a sound issue? have you tried disabling sound and see if that works?

 

[Cheetah8799]

I guess my only quick suggestions would be to test with 1gb ram, to see if that's an issue. Pretty much all the newest games run best with a full gig. Also, a 9600 Pro really isn't a high end card anymore. So make sure you have the game video settings turned down. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your Shuttle and video card as well.

good luck.

 

[Fern]

Check your AGP Aperature setting in the BIOS. Make sure it's at least 64MB.

 

[Android8675]

A major problem that I have been encountering is when playing games, specifically half-life 2 at the moment, every 15-30 seconds the computer will freeze momentarily, for maybe a second or less and the sound will chop up then return to normal. This repeats itself over and over and over without failure, and is either more apparent when more is happening on screen, or is actually happening more often at those times.

Does the same thing on my system at work, P4-2.0, Audigy1, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig of rambus ram (old system), HD is slow, probably an old 20gig running at 5400 with 2meg cache.

Problem is when you encouter a sound or a new enemy for the first time (usually when you switch levels) the game is going to your HD for the data, and it's just taking a while to get that data loaded. so the sound stutters for a bit, sometimes for a while. Once it's all cached into ram it smooths out. At 512 though if you max out your ram if HL2 has to load a new texture and your outta space it's gotta swap some of that data to the HD to make room for the data it needs. Just takes time to do it. when your system chugs, look at your HD LED and see if it's flickering like crazy.

Not too much you can do other than lower the game settings so the game has to load less into ram. It's hard I know since HL2 runs amazingly well on high detail, but try dropping some of the advance settings in the game and see if it runs any better. A Gig of ram would also help so it wouldn't have to access the disk as often.

Ram runs with 7ms access, but the HD runs significantly slower, with a gig of ram you might still notice this problem when you load a new area until everything is cached then it should be smooth.

My home system is a amd64 3000+ with a gig, radeon 9700, sblive, and I get the same slowdown from time to time, but it's much less noticeable. games just eat ram now a days, with the exception of Doom 3, if you're gonna be playing games at this level a Gig of ram is nice to have. (doom3 doesn't show much improvement from 512-1gig ram, good coding I think, or something)

Hope I'm helping and not hindering, it could be a different problem I'm overlooking, good luck.
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