Sluggish performence

[kpamir]

Hey,

I finally set up my core 2 system and everything is great except for when my HDD or disk drives are being put to use. The whole system starts stuttering, its pretty annoying, my mouse movements jitter around like im taxing my system but im not.

It too 10 friggin minutes to burn a 600mb CDR......... my previous system took oh maybe 3-4 minutes, and i didnt experience any stuttering about.

Previous system was a 2600+ sempron....... so im not too thrilled about the performence im getting here, definetly not what i was expecting.


System specs are as follows.

E6600
p5w dh
2gigs OCZ Gold XTC 5 - 5 - 5 - 12 @ 2.1v ddr2 800mhz
seagate 320 gb 7200.10 (jumper is set to 3g sata or w/e its called)
lite on dvd rw
LG dvd drive
BFG 7600GT

The only things i changed in the bios are the voltage for the ram and its timings to match those suggested by OCZ, as well as setting the ram to ddr2 - 800mhz.

I have installed the chipset drivers as well, and flashed to the latest bios from Asus.

My temps are also good (idling at 28 and max with both cores under load 38-39)

I am stumped here.

Thanks.

 

[zsdersw]

Well, whatever it is.. I highly doubt it's the CPU. Did you try leaving the RAM at the speed, timing, and voltage at which the Bios detects it?

 

[kpamir]

i shall give it a try.

 

[LittleNemoNES]

you have 2 DVD drives? Are they configured correctly? Make sure your power lines are evenly stretched. I had a similar problem when I added a 2nd DVD drive. Turned out I hooked it up with too many fans and other peripherals on the same line.
If windows suddenly doesn't recognize one of them when its sluggish that may be it. Another thing, what PSU are you using?

 

[LumbergTech]

sounds like a potential PSU problem to me...what psu are you using?

 

[kpamir]

hmmm well i was having PSU problems before, i had a liberty 500 w but that wasnt good, turn on and then off right away, and with it took all my power from my room.

I went out and got ma a OCZ 450w modstream, i have 3 case fans and 2 of them are on their own line and the third has its own line aswell, the cd drives are linked up together, and my hdd has its own sata power connector.

Setting it to default ram settings didnt work, still the same thing, soon as the HDD starts to really work or a CD drive starts spooling up, mouse gets jittery etc. etc.

 

[kpamir]

I dunno if this may have anything to do with...... anything but it says my memory is in dual channel mode but interleaved.

 

[Cali]

try setting your mobo back to default settings, run everything on stock speeds

 

[kpamir]

back to stock settings and still the same thing, soon as the cd drive spools up mouse gets all crazy and choppy.

I dont think my system is too power hungry so 450 watts should be more then enough imo atleast.

 

[Some1ne]

seagate 320 gb 7200.10 (jumper is set to 3g sata or w/e its called)

The jumper on the 7200.10's controls whether SATA-I or SATA-II is used? That's good to know, seeing as how I have 4 of them in RAID-5, and have been wondering why the peak bandwidth appears to be limited to 1.5 gbps.

Not too much I can say about why your system is behaving badly, other than that I very much doubt it was the PSU (unless the unit itself is defective). I use the Enermax Liberty in my E6600 system, and I have 6 HDD's, an optical, and a Radeon X1900XT (with the E6600 overclocked, as well), and it's never given me any problems. In fact, after booting it up the first time, I was very impressed to see voltages reported on all rails falling within 1% of their specced voltages, with virtually no wobble. No PSU I've used previously has performed like that.

You might try giving the RAM some more voltage, and maybe lowering the timings to 4-4-4, if it is stable at that setting. Other than that don't really see a reason why it would be slow.

 

[kpamir]

AHhhhhhhhhhhhh man i hate this lol, problem after problem after problem.

How and why would an optical drive / hdd going to do its job have such an adverse affect on performence. I mean come on..... it took this damn thing 10 minutes to BURN a CDR!!!

Im going crazy here guys.

 

[serializable]

I am having a similar problem. When I try to rip a cd to my harddrive my system slows down. I'll be ripping a cd and then try to open internet explorer and its all choppy. My specs are similar to yours. E6600, MSI 975x, 2gb ddr-800 corsair, 320gb seagate 7.10, sony dvd, evga 7900gt, antec 500w. I have xp pro with all the patches. My temps are 33C and Im not overclocking at all. I thought dual core meant I could multitask. The only thing I could think of is that on my motherboard for the power plug to the cpu is 8 pins but my powersupply is 4 pins. I don't know if that means its underpowered or something. Just an idea but I could be completely wrong. I wish I knew what was going on.

 

[kpamir]

Serial, u atleast got an idea, that atx connection could be it, but im stuck with nothing here, im gonna try to format again.......... maybe it gets fixed.

 

[Mogadon]

Make sure your optical drives are running in IDE mode and not PIO mode. No reason why they should but doesn't hurt to check.

 

[kpamir]

where would i check for that? device manager? bios?

 

[Jonesboy21]

I have that same seagate hard drive. I noticed the jumpers, so I looked at seagate's website. It says those jumpers don't need to be moved for correct operation, and that they are for factory use only

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/ref/sata_jumpers.html

 

[Mogadon]

Originally posted by: kpamir
where would i check for that? device manager? bios?

Yeh, it'll tell you in device manager and there may be a setting in the BIOS which allows you to specify what mode it's in.

As to the seagate 7200.10 matter, read the label on top of the drive which shows the different jumper settings. With the jumper 'in' your drive is limited to 1.5Gb/s, with the jumper 'out' it's set at 3Gb/s

 

[lopri]

There is a NEW dual-core patch from MS. I forgot the link or a thread discussing the issue but you should be able to find it via search. It's NOT the X2 dual-core fix, but reportedly meant for C2Ds.

 

[gramboh]

I've also read there is a problem on some boards (I think it was the P5B or P5W) with the PATA controller causing bad performance with optical drives? This was over at rage3d.com forums if I remember correctly.

Something like the optical drive shows up as a SCSI device in device manager and brutal performance. Just a thought.

 

[zsdersw]

The IDE cable you're using for those drives isn't abnormally bent or kinked in any way is it? Did you try hooking up the optical drives to separate IDE controllers, i.e., they're both masters? You have the P5W DH, which is the 975 chipset that features the standard Primary and Secondary IDE controllers (unlike the 965 chipset, that only has one IDE).

 

[RichUK]

Did you install all the drivers off the driver CD that comes with the motherboard?

I would recommend that you go into device manager and remove the driver for the IDE controller. Then reboot and let windows install the normal default IDE driver which is embedded in the windows kernel. There could be a problem with the driver that is used for the onboard IDE controller. In fact I am pretty sure that is the issue. You only need this driver if you are looking to run IDE raid. Other than that the windows IDE driver is absolutley fine

Also make sure that you are in DMA mode and not PIO mode within the BIOS.

Right click on my computer > select properties > click the hardware tab > click on device manager.

Once in Device manager, expand (click on the plus sign) ?ATA/ATAPI Controllers?.

You should now be able to see the IDE controller, first and secondary IDE bus. Just to make sure right click on all objects in this section one by one and uninstall the driver.

Reboot and hopefully ??? VIOLA.

Give it a go it wont hurt anything. You can always reinstall the driver if you really wish. Although I wouldn?t unless you intend to run IDE raid. IMO its just another unnecessary driver.

I think you can also check the bit rate of your optical drives through Nero too, just to make sure your drives are performing on par. Your drives should be transferring around 26Mb/s. Its one of the tools installed when you install Nero, located in the programs menu I forget what t is called now.

You can also check the performance of the hard drive through a freeware prog called HDtech. HDtech will allow you to compare the performace of your HDD against a database of other drives including the one that you are using. Just to check it is operating to its full potential.

Just another note. Make sure within the BIOS both IDE channels are operating under DMA mode.

GOOD LUCK!

 

[NoStateofMind]

If those suggetsions above don't work, try this one to satisfy my stupidity. You mentioned that both your DVD drives were on the same line. Remove ONE of the power connectors and see if that helps.

 

[kpamir]

Ok i checked out my device manager, and well here is a pic.

LINK


I uninstalled everything as well and reboot, and im gonna go dl that hdtach program as well.

In my bios for my cd drives and hdd, there are a bunch of options, for PIO its auto , 0 , 1 , 2, 3 etc

and for DMA there are like 6 options, sdma, udma1, udma2 etc etc.

Should i set pio to 0 because its on Auto right now, and so is DMA .

I checked my device manager and as far as i can tell my drives are in IDE mode.

 

[kpamir]

Ok so my HDD seems to be running ok, atleast i think so.

260mb/s Burst speed

3% cpu utilization......... +/-2%

So its just my damn disk drives........ i currently only have one of them connected so im gonna test that out now.

 

[zodiak]

I had the same problem with my P5B Deluxe MOBO. It's the Jmicron SATA Controller. For some reason it recognizes the IDE drives as SCSI, causing a freeze for a few seconds every time the drive is accessed. To fix it:

1. Uninstall the Jmicron software (should be found in Add/Remove programs if you updated through Windows Update)
2. Reboot and let XP install the generic drivers for the controller.

I've had no problems since this, and my SATA drives still run at full speed. Hope it helps.