PC Performance

[Xuttah]

My system seems to grind and grind whenever I do much of anything (open IE, play UT, etc...) I thought I had enough resources for average use, but I wanted to check on the board here to see if I'm underestimating required resources.

Here are my specs:

Asus P3V4X (1005 BIOS)
PIII 550E (733@133)
128 MB HSDRAM
Maxtor UDMA-66 10GB 7200RPM
Diamond V770 Ultra (stock)
Creative SB Live
D-Link NIC
Kingston NIC
--running Windows 2000 Pro.

I ran the UTBench demo (D3D), and it's running an average of 17fps. I never had numbers to quantify my concerns until now. Any ideas what I can do? I've thought about more memory, but wanted to see if others had better ideas.

Thanks for the help.

 

[BoberFett]

When you say "grind and grind" do you mean the hard drive thrashes? If so, check your File System settings under the System Properties window. Make sure your Read-ahead is set to full. 128 is plenty of memory for average usage.

Or by grind do you mean runs slow? What else do you have running? Do you have tons of programs that run at startup?

 

[Xuttah]

Yep. The hard drive just chugs and chugs. Normally I would think this indicates lack of memory, since it probably is writing to the page file. But with 128MB, I think it's more likely a setting than lack of memory.

When I ran UT, I had no other programs running. Maybe W2K is the cause, but I read several reports that W2K runs UT just fine.

 

[BoberFett]

Have you installed any tweaking utilities and changed hard drive cache size settings or anything like that? What about changes to your system.ini, done anything like that?

One place to start would be to use the System Monitor and look at some of the numbers like Allocated Memory, Disk cache size, Maximum/Mid/Minimum disk cache size, Swapfile In use, Unused physical memory, etc.

 

[RSI]

The Cyrix w/96MB of ram and a Banshee plays UT perfectly. I think you

1) Need to defrag
2) Need to ditch the V770 and get a glide compatible card (if UT is really important to you)
3) Need to verify the hard drive cache size (you have a very good hard drive, it should be fast)
3) Need to check if all 128MB of that ram is being used
4) Could check if Windows 98 runs UT better, if so, it is possible that Win2K is causing problems.

-RSI

 

[obeseotron]

1. Restart
2. Ajust VM settings
3. Defrag
4. Reinstall (do not install on top of the old one) windows
5. Complete Reformat

 

[John P]

You can also check Windows 98 and vid card settings over at www.tweak3d.net.

 

[Rankor]

Pssst...I think I hear a RAM stick of 128 MB calling you 🙂.

128 MB might seem fine in Win98, but you're running Win2k.

Grab another 128 while they're still reasonably-priced.

 

[HellRaven]

Set your virtual memory (page file) to 385mb of space (both min and max). I learned that little tip about a year ago and it increased my performance by a decent bit whereas before I had windows dynamically managing it for me. but ~18 fps in UT sounds like some compativility or driver problem between the vid card and UT/win2k. Shouldn't score that low assuming you are not at a super high res (like 1280+)