Major slowdown occurring in some games. advice needed.

I am currently running an old socket 939 system with an AMD Athlon X2 3800 and 2GB of low latency RAM, and for the most part it serves me well. I get 60fps in games like Mass Effect and Unreal Tournament 3, yet my framerate absolutely blows in games like World of Warcraft even though I am running these games from a Western Digital Raptor drive, which has significantly boosted my loading times and even gave me a framerate improvement.

When the framerate tanks on me, I hear my hard drive go nuts, like its trying to cache as much data as quickly as possible, which I think is causing my system to freeze up and sometimes BSOD. And upon observing the system conditions via monitoring software while running problem games like WoW, I find that while the system temperatures are well within the normal operating conditions, the CPU seems to have a tremendous load on it when the framerate drops hit and the ram goes above 80% used.

What I want to know is this: Is it prudent to throw out $300 on a socket AM2+ upgrade ( AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4GB RAM, AM2+ mobo), or would a solution to the issue be found elsewhere?
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81
Originally posted by: AzureNightmareX1
What I want to know is this: Is it prudent to throw out $300 on a socket AM2+ upgrade ( AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4GB RAM, AM2+ mobo), or would a solution to the issue be found elsewhere?
Elsewhere... Say a Core 2 Duo combo based on an E5200 ($83) or E7300 ($120) and P35 or P45 ($88 after rebate) MB, running 4GBs of Corsair DDR2-800 @ 1.9v (Today $25 after rebate).

You'd even have enough to toss in a 610W PS ($60 after rebate), to freshen things up.
I know DSF will say you don't need that much. But I'm a firm believer in having a good "power buffer", to allow for "aging" as well as maxing out the system in the PS "efficiency sweet spot" (usually about 50%).


 
Originally posted by: Blain
Originally posted by: AzureNightmareX1
What I want to know is this: Is it prudent to throw out $300 on a socket AM2+ upgrade ( AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4GB RAM, AM2+ mobo), or would a solution to the issue be found elsewhere?
Elsewhere... Say a Core 2 Duo combo based on an E5200 ($83) or E7300 ($120) and P35 or P45 ($88 after rebate) MB, running 4GBs of Corsair DDR2-800 @ 1.9v (Today $25 after rebate).

You'd even have enough to toss in a 610W PS ($60 after rebate), to freshen things up.
I know DSF will say you don't need that much. But I'm a firm believer in having a good "power buffer", to allow for "aging" as well as maxing out the system in the PS "efficiency sweet spot" (usually about 50%).

I'm sorry, but I don't buy Intel at all. So let me rephrase my question. Does the performance and stability issue lay in my aging CPU, Mobo, and RAM combo, or is it something else?
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81
Originally posted by: AzureNightmareX1
I'm sorry, but I don't buy Intel at all.
I wouldn't either if they kicked my grandmother off her farm, in order to build their fancy new plant.

 
Here's the deal, I think I know what is wrong, but I dont want to spend $300 on hardware that I didn't need. I want to make sure that my troubleshooting is correct so I can absolutely certain that a new processor, new motherboard, and new RAM will solve my problem.
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81

Your low latency G.Skill requires up to around 2.75v... correct?
Have you run any monitoring apps that report correct system voltages?
Is your G.Skill LL getting enough voltage?
 

dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
8,558
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Programs can't determine voltages with any degree of accuracy. You need to use a multimeter.
 

Slappy00

Golden Member
Jun 17, 2002
1,820
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I would ask if you upgraded your drivers recently? WHQL?

Also check your sound and video setting in wow.. Drop em to the most minimal and software (for sound) then slowly start increasing your video properties until you get a hangup. If not then do the sound. that should help isolate the problem by lowering the stress on your components to see if any are suspect under increasing stress.

CPU and memory do very low-level stuff so the problem would not be limited to just ONE game if they ahd some sort of defect. Drivers on the other hand can have problems that are application specific.


 
Aside from your driver concerns that I had already checked into and confirmed wasn't the root cause I handed my computer's records over to a programming student and he confirmed my fears. He said the system failures were due to illegal/unknown processor instruction, which was caused by an invalid memory/access violation. What that basically means is the error is more than likely caused by one of two things: a faulty driver, or a failing piece of hardware. My new hardware is due to arrive tomorrow so I will find out then once and for all if I bought a solution to my problem, or if I just bought an upgrade.

Edit: As I was writing this post. explorer.exe crashed.

Also what I find peculiar is the one BSOD in particular I described occurred while I was reencoding a video file.
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81
Originally posted by: AzureNightmareX1
Update: New system build is up and running, and it works perfectly.
This is about a million times faster than my old 939 build.
We're going to have to see some benchmarks backing that up. :p