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Wierd "stutter" type problem on my new E6400 build

T

toronado97

Senior member
So I've had nothing but wierd issues with this thing since I put it together Thursday night. System specs as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 stock speed
Gigabyte P965-S3 motherboard
G.Skill 1 gb 800 mhz DDR2 (2 sticks in dual channel mode)
EVGA Nvidia 7600 GT 256 (PCI-E)
480 watt power supply
WD 160 gb SATA hd
Windows XP SP2

Anyway, the latest fun thing it's doing is a stutter type effect in games. Although that's not really a good way to describe it, it's more of a lack of smoothness in animation. It's not so much that it seems like I'm skipping frames, the animations just don't seem smooth. For instance, in Warhammer Mark of Chaos, about every 10 seconds I'll get this wierd frame rate slowdown to about 10 fps. It's not enough to impact gameplay and it only lasts like half a second, but its noticable and it's making me pull my hair out. In World of Warcraft, instead of seeing a mounted person move smoothly, it's like I see them every other frame, almost like they are teleporting. I'd view this as a lag or loss issue in WoW, but that does nothing to explain my issues in single player Warhammer, and I'm sure if I fired up any other games I'd see the same effect.

I really dont know what to check on this. It seems like a CPU or motherboard related problem to me, so if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them. It's not too late to RMA the new parts (cpu/mobo/ram) and the video card and hd both worked absolutely fine 3 days ago in my other build, so I think I can safely discount them in this instance.
 
Check your IDE controllers in Device Manager to make sure that your drives are in DMA mode.

I've got almost the exact same setup and haven't had too many problems, and definitely not a slowdown. I mainly play Simcity4, which stresses the CPU, videocard, and RAM, so I figure I'd definitely see slowdowns. But most of my hard drive activity is channeled through my Promise SX4000 card.
 
I don't see anything in the device manager under properties for my hard disk that has to do with Ultra DMA mode, or any other mode for that matter. It has a little pulldown box that says usage next to it, but it's greyed out, I can't interact with it.


Edit: When I put this together, I did not do a format of my system drive, I merely reinstalled windows over itself in order to get it to recognize my dual core CPU etc. Could this possibly be a conflict with something left over from the previous install? I might try a reformat of C drive tomorrow and see if a clean install of windows from scratch fixes it.
 
Originally posted by: toronado97
I don't see anything in the device manager under properties for my hard disk that has to do with Ultra DMA mode, or any other mode for that matter. It has a little pulldown box that says usage next to it, but it's greyed out, I can't interact with it.


Edit: When I put this together, I did not do a format of my system drive, I merely reinstalled windows over itself in order to get it to recognize my dual core CPU etc. Could this possibly be a conflict with something left over from the previous install? I might try a reformat of C drive tomorrow and see if a clean install of windows from scratch fixes it.
Click to expand...

Ummm, yes, i always recommend a fresh format when you change that much hardware out. That will probably solve your problems. Another thing that may be an issue is your power supply. What brand is that 480watt you listed??


 
Originally posted by: toronado97
I don't see anything in the device manager under properties for my hard disk that has to do with Ultra DMA mode, or any other mode for that matter. It has a little pulldown box that says usage next to it, but it's greyed out, I can't interact with it.


Edit: When I put this together, I did not do a format of my system drive, I merely reinstalled windows over itself in order to get it to recognize my dual core CPU etc. Could this possibly be a conflict with something left over from the previous install? I might try a reformat of C drive tomorrow and see if a clean install of windows from scratch fixes it.
Click to expand...

It isn't under the hard drive properties. It's under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, and it'll be in the properties of the Primary and Secondary IDE Channels, in the Advanced Settings tab. There are drop-down menus there for Device Type (Auto Detection) and Transfer Mode (DMA if available). If the current transfer mode says "Not applicable," then there's nothing on that channel, so check another one. If it says "Ultra DMA Mode" or something to that effect, that's good. If it says "PIO Mode" then you should remove that particular IDE channel from Device Manager. Windows will redetect it on the reboot, and hopefully switch you to DMA mode.


Concerning a reformat, yes, that would probably be a good thing. I don't know how much Windows replaces when it's installed over itself, so you might have ghosts of your old installation wandering around in your registry.
Don't forget to install the various motherboard drivers too.
 
All the motherboard drivers are current from Gigabyte.com, so no worries there.

As to my power supply, it's a Colorsit. Random generic power supply that came with my case, but I would still expect 60% efficiency out of it which would still give me more than enough. My girlfriend has the exact same setup as I do but it's a Dell...it works fine on a 305 watt power supply so I don't think that's the cause.

I will do a fresh install of Windows. Was going to do it today but I had some unexpected things happen.
 
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