Slow boot drive benchmarks with nforce3 mobo's

rch4001

Platinum Member
May 30, 2001
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Building a budget system with Sempron 3100 and ASUS k8n-e nforce 3 mobo. Works fine, but boot drive (hitachi 80g sata 8mg cache) benchmark in Sandra and HDTach are

as boot drive 16 MB with 98% cpu utilization.
twin drive as secondary drive 49 w/ 2% cpu utilization.
boot drive as secondary drive on a nforce4 machine are at the 49 level w/ low cpu use.

drive passes all hitachi diagnostics and doesn't seem slow in actual use. tried swithing to other sata port but no help. tried another nforce3 (ECS Nforce3-a) mobo with same results. have loaded latest nvidia chipset drivers.

almost looks like boot drive speed is limited by cpu.
any thoughts??