New Computer Quite Sluggish

[cubby1223]

I expect computer upgrades to be worthwhile, but having a hard time justifying the money put into this. Had a KM266a board with an XP 2000+, 512meg ram. Upgraded to the MSI ATi chipset s939 board with an A64 3000+, 512meg dual channel ram. Both using integrated graphics.

But now opening programs is very sluggish, and don't know why. The system is rock solid stable. But heck, even the several s754 Sempron 2600+ K8M800 systems I've put together for people feel much speedier.

What could give? Could the ATi chipset be just flat-out inferior? Is this the reason why only a couple boards use the ATi chipsets?

 

[svi]

Did you reinstall Windows? Which drivers have you installed / updated, and where did you download the drivers for each part from?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I had the same thing happen to me. Make sure you have updated chipset drivers installed...
Tas.

 

[cubby1223]

Was a fresh install of Windows. I believe I grabbed the drivers from MSI's website, they keep them fairly up to date. This was ~1.5 months ago. I'll go check them again for newer drivers.

Would really like to hear from anyone with this MSI board if WinXP feels speedy or not, if I should continue to try and tweak it, or sell it off and start with a different board.

 

[VigilanteCS]

My friends got the MSI Micro ATX pci-e motherboard with the ATi chipset. Don't know if it's the same, but his is running very well.

2 gigs of ram, x850xt pe, a64 4000+...

I'd suggest a driver update as well.

 

[boomerang]

I built a system for a friend using this board. Very zippy it is, and he is quite happy.

We went with a PCI-E card for video however. SATA HD if that matters.

I would suggest a flash to the latest BIOS if yours is not at the most recent. If it is, I would suggest a clear CMOS. Please follow the directions as stated in the manual to do this properly. Just moving a jumper will not always get the job done these days.

I believe one of these will take care of your problem.

 

[imported_Kensai]

The computer I have that is built on that motherboard is nice a speedy.

 

[cubby1223]

Updated the BIOS & drivers, only time will give me an answer.

The system is speedy at times, like encoding videos in Video Vegas is so much much quicker than with the old XP 2000+ system. But when Video Vegas is encoding, for instance, trying to open Mozilla can take such a long time, a lot longer than on the old system.

Not too much else I can do now, I know there is no virus/trojan/spyware/etc. on the machine.

Is there any software to check the memory settings? I've got the Patriot 2x256 memory that's CL2 2-3-2-5 1T, the bios in this board only gives options to manually set the frequency & CL. Other people have stated that the Patriot memory doesn't always run at specified timings when BIOS is set to auto detect.

 

[boomerang]

Can't help you with the timings, but if funds are available, for video encoding, you would benefit greatly from more RAM.

 

[Trizik]

i have the same board, and i did not experience that kind of sluggishness during the two days that i got to use it before my PSU died.

it was running with a X800XL, 1GB RAM, and a Raptor 10K 74GB.

didn't try the onboard video. experiencing delays when opening Mozilla while encoding with 512MB memory makes sense. i bet if you had more memeory the problem would go away.

 

[FreshFish]

Do you have a lot of different ANTI- spyware/trojan/virus apps installed? Sometimes that slows performance as well.

Also: was the computer acting this way right when you built it or has there been a gradual decline after installing apps?

 

[CreativeTom]

try mem test