System Spikes?

[Mikey52]

A very annoying problem just popped up in my machine.

Not too long ago I built a very nice, fast machine and up until yesterday it has been running great. However yesterday I noticed a problem that I used to have constantly with my p2 450(integrated video, wheee).

While playing Counter-Strike, my FPS go from 50(have them limited) and they spike down to 10 or so fps for a second then bounce back up to 50. It does this every 5-10 seconds and makes it very hard to play. Ive also noticed this slow down in Serious Sam and at the desktop although it is tougher to see because I dont have the handy tool that shows FPS.

At first I thought it was because I switched my HD from ATA100 to IDE(I wanted to speed up my boot time) but I switched it back today and I continue to have this problem.

Other than that change my system has been untouched and so I am confused as to why this suddenly started.

Any help would be appreciated, you can check out my system specs on my little page below(the Athlon) and see that my system is no slouch and really shouldnt be doing this.

 

[w74656]

what's version are your drivers?? are you running any kind of programs in the background? anti-virus, personal firewall, distributed computing, etc...

 

[ledzepp98]

maybe it's caused by your massive overclock:
<< AMD Athlon ThunderBird 1333MHz @ 1334MHz >> j/k

what do you mean you switched fron ata100 to ide? ata100 is ide. maybe dma was somehow disabled? check that first.

 

[Mikey52]

Well for some reason SiSoft Sandra tells me Im running at 1334 Ghz even though everything is set for 1333 Ghz but that's okay.

I meant I switched my HD cable from the plug labeled ATA100 to the one labeled Primary IDE so I could disable my ATA bios so it wouldnt have to load and my system would boot faster. However, I have moved it back and reenabled the bios so that isnt the problem.

I'll just list the names of everything that is running at the moment when I do ctrl-alt-del:

Explorer
Icq
DirectCD
Rnaapp*
Plxstart
Cooling*
Memturbo
Wscript*
Wf2k*
Point32
Systray
Asusprobe

Anything with a * I have no idea what it is.

Im not sure how to check whether DMA is on or not. I checked the BIOS and couldnt find anything.

My problem is that this slow down has seemed to just appear from nowhere and it happens all the time, no matter how hard Im using the system it seems to lag. It is only actually recordable in Counter-Strike where it shows the spikes through the FPS indicator.

This is really agrivating because up until yesterday my system was running beautifully and very fast. And I dont know of anything that I changed that may have caused this.

 

[ledzepp98]

this is a shot in the dark here, but here goes... did these problems start after you installed memturbo? if so, maybe it is trying to free up ram while you are playing the game?

 

[Mikey52]

Nope, I didnt install anything between 2 days ago and yesterday, that's why it baffles me.

It just kinda appeared and it's driving me nuts. I downloaded the latest motherboard drivers and BIOS so Ill install those after I reboot(my desktop just vanished).

That's another thing. Whenever I right click on my cd drives in &quot;My Computer&quot;, whether there's a disk in them or not, it freezes the window then makes the desktop vanish when I terminate the window with ctrl-alt-del. *sigh*

 

[Mikey52]

Well, I installed the latest drivers and flashed my bios with the latest version and it still seems to be spiking.

It's like the computer just decides to &quot;work&quot; for no apparent reason every 5-10 seconds. I hear the thing grind like it's &quot;working&quot; and I see my system slow. I really hope I dont have to reformat, I just built the darn thing.