Ok, this is a bit of a saga, and my first post, but what the heck.
After running my old dog of a system for the last three years I decided an upgrade was due. Spent over £1000 on new bits, was advised to go with an EVGA 780i board, despite my gut instinct telling me to stick with MSI (old dog had a fan-wire chopped in half in a RAM slot and the board still functioned ).
The EVGA came at a primo price with POS budget components (electrolytic caps, fisher-price heatsink assembly etc). Not impressed. It's going back to Overclockers.co.uk for a refund, and in the meantime I went down the road and bought this MSI. Great little board, OC's very nicely to my modest level (Q6600 from 2.4 to 3.0).
Here's the problem. My brother has an 18-month old Asus Intel mobo, two gig of Corsair XMS (cost him over £200 for that, now available for £32) and a Core-Duo 2.4. There's this one particular game that is known to have serious stuttering issues (Stalker), apparently caused by texture-loading. He, however, has the game running smooth as silk. I get the stutters. Not massively, but it's irritating...running around on the map, the graphics will stagger for a few steps while textures are loaded on the fly. This also happened on the EVGA board.
My question is why? I've had my rig OC's stable at 3.0ghz, The RAM (Corsair Dominator 8500) linked and the timings upped from 5 5 5 18 to 4 4 4 12 (voltage at 2.2v). Mobo voltages all increased to max-safe BIOS levels. Prime95 passed with no problems. I'm also running twin 8800GTX in SLI mode, but have also tried the cards singly.
My system should be stomping his into the ground. I do get slightly higher FPS, but don't think Stalker is particularly well optimised for SLI. No biggie, but it's the stuttering we can't understand. So...is it down to the 750i's NForce chipset vs his Intel chipset? Is the memory-controller on the 750i crap?
He's running XP on
Asus P5B Deluxe
Core-Duo 2.4ghx
2Gb Corsair XMS PC6400 at 4.4.4.12
8800GTX
I'm running XP on
MSI P7N Platinum
Q6600 at 3.0ghz
Corsair Dominator 8500 at 4.4.4.12
x2 8800GTX in SLI
Any clues to this issue would be gratefully received as it's doing my head in. TIA.
Edit: Have also tried everything at stock, RAM timings only, CPU OC only, pretty much every combination I can think of. Nothing stops the stuttering. Yet his system, stock only, is fine.
Update:
I've been to my brother's over the weekend. Both our PCs set to same Windows config vis-a-vis games. Tried both Stalker, Armed Assault (ArmA) and CoD4. All three games exhibit the same stuttering and mouse-freeze on my rig whereas on his there are zero such issues. In ArmA, in the Helicopter Convoy Assault mission, where he gets around 20FPS but reasonably smooth I was getting stuttering so bad the game was practically stopping for seconds at a time with 1 and 2FPS. In CoD4 I get higher FPS than him but stuttering and mouse lock-ups (as if the mouse has gone to standby-mode for a second or two).
All things being reasonably equal, I should not be seeing worse game performance than him, where my system is more powerful than his and set up much the same way. If anything his XP install is now 18 months old, and has various issues, whereas mine is a fresh install.
Stalker is playable, but the stuttering is irritating.
ArmA is totally unplayable.
CoD4 becomes unplayable after time as the stuttering and mouse lock-ups become progrssively worse the longer I play.
Any insight would be appreciated. I've tried a few things, including disabling my Audigy and running on-board sound, to get the Audigy off the shared IRQ (shared with IDE bus and both graphics cards), made not a jot of difference.
After running my old dog of a system for the last three years I decided an upgrade was due. Spent over £1000 on new bits, was advised to go with an EVGA 780i board, despite my gut instinct telling me to stick with MSI (old dog had a fan-wire chopped in half in a RAM slot and the board still functioned ).
The EVGA came at a primo price with POS budget components (electrolytic caps, fisher-price heatsink assembly etc). Not impressed. It's going back to Overclockers.co.uk for a refund, and in the meantime I went down the road and bought this MSI. Great little board, OC's very nicely to my modest level (Q6600 from 2.4 to 3.0).
Here's the problem. My brother has an 18-month old Asus Intel mobo, two gig of Corsair XMS (cost him over £200 for that, now available for £32) and a Core-Duo 2.4. There's this one particular game that is known to have serious stuttering issues (Stalker), apparently caused by texture-loading. He, however, has the game running smooth as silk. I get the stutters. Not massively, but it's irritating...running around on the map, the graphics will stagger for a few steps while textures are loaded on the fly. This also happened on the EVGA board.
My question is why? I've had my rig OC's stable at 3.0ghz, The RAM (Corsair Dominator 8500) linked and the timings upped from 5 5 5 18 to 4 4 4 12 (voltage at 2.2v). Mobo voltages all increased to max-safe BIOS levels. Prime95 passed with no problems. I'm also running twin 8800GTX in SLI mode, but have also tried the cards singly.
My system should be stomping his into the ground. I do get slightly higher FPS, but don't think Stalker is particularly well optimised for SLI. No biggie, but it's the stuttering we can't understand. So...is it down to the 750i's NForce chipset vs his Intel chipset? Is the memory-controller on the 750i crap?
He's running XP on
Asus P5B Deluxe
Core-Duo 2.4ghx
2Gb Corsair XMS PC6400 at 4.4.4.12
8800GTX
I'm running XP on
MSI P7N Platinum
Q6600 at 3.0ghz
Corsair Dominator 8500 at 4.4.4.12
x2 8800GTX in SLI
Any clues to this issue would be gratefully received as it's doing my head in. TIA.
Edit: Have also tried everything at stock, RAM timings only, CPU OC only, pretty much every combination I can think of. Nothing stops the stuttering. Yet his system, stock only, is fine.
Update:
I've been to my brother's over the weekend. Both our PCs set to same Windows config vis-a-vis games. Tried both Stalker, Armed Assault (ArmA) and CoD4. All three games exhibit the same stuttering and mouse-freeze on my rig whereas on his there are zero such issues. In ArmA, in the Helicopter Convoy Assault mission, where he gets around 20FPS but reasonably smooth I was getting stuttering so bad the game was practically stopping for seconds at a time with 1 and 2FPS. In CoD4 I get higher FPS than him but stuttering and mouse lock-ups (as if the mouse has gone to standby-mode for a second or two).
All things being reasonably equal, I should not be seeing worse game performance than him, where my system is more powerful than his and set up much the same way. If anything his XP install is now 18 months old, and has various issues, whereas mine is a fresh install.
Stalker is playable, but the stuttering is irritating.
ArmA is totally unplayable.
CoD4 becomes unplayable after time as the stuttering and mouse lock-ups become progrssively worse the longer I play.
Any insight would be appreciated. I've tried a few things, including disabling my Audigy and running on-board sound, to get the Audigy off the shared IRQ (shared with IDE bus and both graphics cards), made not a jot of difference.
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