PC w high specs running slow: Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe/ 32Gb / i7-3770

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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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Hi!

I put this computer together about 10 months ago and I still cannot figure out why is that it won't run to it's specs. I have put together many systems before but always focused on budget more than performance, this is the first one I tried to make it powerful as it's meant to be a video workstation, rendering animations etc.

I have tested and ruled out faulty RAM, faulty MB, faulty HDD. Somehow it seems that some of the components here just don't go together well or maybe I am missing something I should adjust in the BIOS to make use of the full potential?

I have set the motherboard to the "performance" option in the BIOS (as opposed to "balanced" or "energy saving" options) with little improvement.

MaxxMEM gives me a memory score of 18Gb/s and latency at 150ns.

The computer is not running slow per say but I am sure much slower then computers with similar specs. For example, it took me 11min to render a 2min movie file which my laptop (i7 2.4GHz and 8Gb RAM) did in 8 min. During render I noticed using task manager that memory usage was at 40-60% peak, CPU was getting to the 90% mark and disk usage at 20% or so.

Any ideas of what could be causing the problem?

Thanks!!!

Spec:
Windows 8 PRO (it was even slower with Windows 7)

MB: Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe
INTEL CORE I7 3770 - 3.4 GHZ - 4 CORE - 8 THREADS
CORSAIR RAM DDR3 32GB / 1600 CL10

3,5" SATA3 SEAGATE 2TB
OCZ SSD HARD DISK 120 GB 2,5 HD AGILITY 3 SATA 3 6Gb/s

VideoCards (3 total):
2x Sapphire HD5450 HD 5450 ATI Radeon 1GB
AMD Radeon HD 7850 - 2 GB GDDR5 - PCI-Express 3.0

Power: COOLER MASTER PC Silent Pro Gold 800 W



 
Solution
Tradesman1
Slow DRAM may have something to do with it, yours is 1600/CL10, and while you have a lot, for 1600 sticks I'd use CL 7 or 8, Cl9 is basically middle of the road, 10 is slow, about like running mid level 1333...Is your SSD optimized?
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Tradesman1

Tradesman1

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Jun 5, 2013
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Slow DRAM may have something to do with it, yours is 1600/CL10, and while you have a lot, for 1600 sticks I'd use CL 7 or 8, Cl9 is basically middle of the road, 10 is slow, about like running mid level 1333...Is your SSD optimized?
 
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Solution
MEC-777

MEC-777

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Jun 27, 2013
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I could be totally off the mark here, just throwing this on the table.... I've never seen a GPU setup like that before. 2x hd5450's in crossfire and 1 hd7850? Why this setup? Multiple monitors I assume, carrying out different tasks?

Forgive me, but I'm just trying to learn something new and help figure out what could be slowing your system. ;)
 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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Hi, thanks for the reply, I will look into this, but shouldn't it still run significantly faster than a laptop running 8Gb?

The SSD is optimized, but from monitoring the processes and how they are demanding the resources it seems the hard drives are not the bottleneck. And I may be completely wrong here but when I think about it, when rendering a video, the read/writing speed of any HDD (not to mention a SSD) would more then suffice compared to the load on the RAM and CPU?

 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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Hi there! I too suspected it could have something to do with the GPUs but I cannot understand how could it slow down the system... I am not sure really, but there is no off the mark here :) I am puzzled, it's not simple to figure this out and I appreciate the discussion, that's the only way get some new insight into what could be the cause of the problem!

As to why this GPU set up... I needed the 6 monitors running for work, it's my trading desk if you like, and also works great when editing video footage. The original idea was to have 3 hd5450, they were just a lot cheaper then getting a fancier 1 card to run 6 monitors (which on the other hand would have allowed for eyefinity set up having all 6 monitors working as one big gaming screen etc) because on a trading desk the demand on the GPU is very low, and I ended up getting the one hd7850 as the third card because the price was not so bad and I thought if I ever needed a better card for gaming or even the video applications it could come in handy. Looking back now I would have gone a different route. Out of all systems I've built this is the first one to disappoint, somehow the pieces don't seem to work well together but hard to pinpoint the culprit...
 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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I see your point. And this (please correct me if I am wrong) would also explain why in task manager I can see I have a lot of memory left, the problem being not the amount of memory available but the speed of read/write.

Is there any way of testing this before replacing the RAM with CL7/8/9 memory?
 
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Tradesman1

Tradesman1

Legenda in Aeternum
Jun 5, 2013
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There coud be a number of things, DRAM caught my attention because it is slow, what you might do is see if you could borrow some faster sticks, even 2x4GB and see if it helps, even faster sticks that could be underclocked i.e. 1866/9 could be set as 1600/8, 2133/9 could run at 1600/7
 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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After a lot more trial and error and doing some more research into video editing hardware I think I have found what is causing the problem, it's the AMD Radeon HD 7850 - 2 GB GDDR5 videocard. Actually it's not causing the problem, it's just not helping the system at all and added to instability overall. In the bios I tried changing the computer's profile from 'balanced' to 'performance' and I saw an improvement in performance. However, when set up to performance, after the computer goes idle for a while it crashes and reboots. Examining the minidump what is causing the crash is the video drivers. I tried re-installing but nothing changes. When I configured back to 'balanced' it doesn't crash anymore but it sometimes won't wake back up (only the two monitors connected to the HD 7850, the other 4 work normal) and only by disconnecting the two monitors and connecting them back it comes back to life. So what I did is I removed the HD 7850 and tried set to 'performance' again and no problems, no crashes, all works as it should.

As I mentioned in the first post, I have built a few workstations in the past and never had problems but never needed to care much about videocards as it wasn't for gaming or video editing etc so no wonder that's where I failed, poor videocard choice, poor combination, and wasting this workstation potential as a good video editing machine.

Anyone here know if this is likely to be a faulty video card, problems with having multiple, different models GPUs and the driver not handling or something else? I guess now that I know the problem is the videocard I should start a new thread in the appropriate section, or if a moderator could please change this to the graphics and display category, thanks!!

 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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Hi Tradesman 1

The HD 7850 is in PCIX16_1 the other two cards on the remaining 2 PCI slots. I didn't set up Xfire on the two HD5450's I didn't think it was advisable to do so. I can try switch them around, you think it could help?
 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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Ok, so taking out the 7850 and leaving the other two it works fine but of course no improvement in performance with the two weak cards, taking out the other two cards and leaving only the 7850 it works great and performance on video rendering INCREASED BY 6X!!! That's great, it shows how slow it was before. The problem is I need the 6 monitors working, the 7850 can only connect the 2 monitors... I don't graphic performance on the other monitors but they need to be on.
 
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Rhavi Marques

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May 26, 2013
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i could be totally wrong here, but i was under the impression that SLI/xfire runs on ALL cards equally, as in, that 7850 is running at the same clock as the other ones, or rather, given the same workload as the other ones, this is why people say you need 2 of the same card to xfire or sli....

this is a very weird setup.

 
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MEC-777

MEC-777

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Jun 27, 2013
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Rosig mentioned earlier that he wasn't running any of the cards in cross fire.

The whole setup, to me, seemed strange, but after realizing how many monitors they need, I understand why they did this.

Rosig, Does the 7850 not have two DVI and or a display port as well? If you add a second 7850 (not crossfired), that might give you enough display outs to run all the monitors you require... Just thinking out loud...
 
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rosig

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Jul 3, 2013
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[/quotemsg]

Rosig mentioned earlier that he wasn't running any of the cards in cross fire.

The whole setup, to me, seemed strange, but after realizing how many monitors they need, I understand why they did this.

Rosig, Does the 7850 not have two DVI and or a display port as well? If you add a second 7850 (not crossfired), that might give you enough display outs to run all the monitors you require... Just thinking out loud... [/quotemsg]

Hi

Yes, correct, not crossfired. I thought about this set up you mentioned, actually that was the plan when I started, I thought I could use the 4 outputs from the 7850 (it has 2 display ports + 1 HDMI + 1 DVI) together with the built in graphics of the motherboard which has 2 outputs, but only two monitors can be active at a time with the 7850, or at least I couldn't get any other monitors working with the same card, and the built in card in the motherboard when used together with a PCI-e GPU was causing system instability, that's when I went out looking for a not so expensive videocard only to allow for the other monitors to be connected. The the 5450's card cost 9 to 10 times less then the 7850, or about 30EUR at the time of purchase, and I thought it would do the job.
 
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