Tearing my hair out - any advice greatly appreciated!

[Bolgard]

Hey everyone, I'm having a frustrating experience here and was hoping if maybe the collective wisdom of the forums could help me tip toe through the minefields of figuring out how to solve my problem (how's that for an esoteric metaphor?).

I built a system for myself two years ago - the specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
2 gigs of DDR 333 RAM
LanParty NF4 Series Mobo
Windows XP Home
Antec Neopower 480 RTL PSU

It was a great gaming rig when I got it, but lately it's been showing some signs of age, or so I thought. I'd been thinking about doing a complete overhaul, and talked to a few people in various forums here about ideas, and the consensus was that this system should have another year or so of life left in it. I was skeptical, because I'd been noticing a drop-off in performance over time, but that was mostly conjecture and feeling with no hard testing.

I figured that maybe I just hadn't kept up on maintenance, so this past weekend I did a complete service of the machine; deep virus scan, adware scan, registry cleaner, uninstalled old programs I never use anymore, cleaned old shortcuts etc., installed the latest video card drivers, and topped it all off with an overnight defrag. I even went so far as to create a separate gaming profile with all the unnecessary services turned off, nothing but essentials starting in the system tray, and with all the themes turned off and a plain blue background.

Windows runs a lot smoother, but no real change in gaming peformance.



On a lark I picked up a copy of the new Command and Conquer RTS that just came out today - installed it and fired it up, and the frame rate was awful. What confused me though was by default it put all the settings on maxium - I had to tone them down to medium just to get it to be halfway playable.

So then I did a little more research, sifted through a lot of forums, and found out people with systems comperable to mine were having silky smooth gameplay (or so they say).

This stuck in my craw, but it was still just "people talking" and nothing empirical; I wanted peer reviewed research, dammit! So I downloaded the latest version of 3dMark and ran it, and was absolutely stunned by the results.

I scored a total of 3178.
According to their analysis among 501 similar systems I was almost at the bottom of the barrel with the lowest score being 3017 and the highest being 8227. Of all systems (well over a million) two-thirds of them scored higher than I did, with the fastest topping out at a whopping 23850.

Now, for all I know 3dMark doesn't like dual core systems and maybe I needed to disable the second core, but I don't think so.

So I come before you all with a plea... what the hell is wrong with my machine? Especially considering I just did a full service on it.

Any thoughts at all?

Much thanks - I'm tearing my hair out here!


-Bolgard

 

[chungdokwan]

what PSU do you have ?

 

[Bolgard]

Antec Neopower 480.

 

[Zorg]

I'm no expert on gaming, but I would pull everything you need off the HD, reformat and maybe a zero write from the HD manufacturer tools, if you want to waste some time. Then do a full clean install of XP. XP gets cobbed up over time and the clean up that you did is no substitute for a nice clean load. On the other hand it might not help at all, the only way to know for sure is to do it.

Edit: you might download Sisoft Sandra (free edition) and get your CPU and RAM benches and compare them against the ones stored in the program. It might give you some ideas. It's a lot easier also.

 

[chungdokwan]

ah heck was hoping you had a bit of a dodgy PSU that was slowly dieing sometime that causes problems like this, that PSU should be strong enough though.

Other then that all I can suggest is either reformat and reload windows or get a another hard drive and load windows onto it at least you will know wether windows has just gotten bloated and slow like it does or if you have a hardware error.

That system really should be ok though.

*EDIT* sorry Zorg beat me to it

 

[Zorg]

I'm quick on the draw, 8) unfortunately very rarely.

 

[Gh0stDrag0n]

Shave your head! :lol:

 

[Bolgard]

I appreciate the advice - yeah, I'm guessing windows is just getting all junky and globbed up. One question I have - let's say there may be a virus or something nefarious on one of my other hard drives (have 3 total) that my software can't detect for some reason -- if that's the case, will it still mess me up even if I do a clean install on a new drive?

 

[chungdokwan]

LOL i think your solution right too.

 

[randomizer]

Generally viruses will be on the drive where windows is (whatever HDD has drive c: usually) coz thats where they do damage. I cant see how putting them anywhere else is going to do much. I guess a virus could access your registry remotely without being a part of it tho. The safest thing to do is format all of your HDDs, but the most important thing to do is format drive c:

EDIT: When I said safest I was referring to making sure all viruses are removed. Sorry but that post was badly worded.

 

[Zorg]

I'm not a virus expert, but I would imagine it's possible. That is why I suggested doing a zero write. If you have a boot sector virus formating won't clear it. If you had a virus you probably would have seen other problems by now, but like I said I'm no expert.
Edit: You don't need to pull a Brittany Spears, as was suggested. :lol:

 

[randomizer]

Boot Sector viruses are rare now.

I even went so far as to create a separate gaming profile with all the unnecessary services turned off, nothing but essentials starting in the system tray, and with all the themes turned off and a plain blue background.

Never thought of doing that... you mean a windows profile I guess.

 

[ZozZoz]

Well, virii or not, any windows system needs a clean reinstall every once in a while.

Also, remember to disable active on-access virus scanning engines.

I assume you used 3dmark06 ? Then the score is not that much below the one you should get with your system, considering the CPU and the slow ram that you have.

 

[alcattle]

I will always run 2-3 spyware checkers and 2 virus scanners. You should have the one on your system and then go to Panda software and do their on-line scan. It is free, so they only tell you what is there but not repair it. ONce you have the name of the file, Google it and find the fix.

 

[pseudopeon]

I notice you're using DDR333? You're native FSB should be 400MHz so your losing memory bandwidth, but I wouldn't expect that to impact the FPS too much... :?

 

[proof]

Do a low-level format and re-intall Window$. Problem solved.