New System Prob..Seeking Help

[Fatness]

I am currently running

- Biostar TFORCE-965PT Socket 775 Motherboard
- Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
- EVGA 640-P2-N821-AR GeForce 8800GTS 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card
- SeaSonic M12 SS-600HM ATX12V / EPS12V 600W Power Supply 100 - 240 V UL, CE, CB, TUV, FCC
- G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz 2M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor

Now my problem is this.

Oblivion Recommended
* 3 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
* 1 GB System RAM
* ATI X800 series, Nvidia GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Recommended
* Intel Core2 Duo E6400 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 42000
* 2GB RAM
* GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1950 graphics card
Titan Quest Recommended
* 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
* 1 GB RAM
* 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or ATI Radeon X800 series

To my knowledge and from what I have been told I should be running these games quite well with my current setup. I have tried all of these games at low-medium-high-ultra high settings and no matter what I do I get constant fps choppiness. In oblivion I occasionally get a spike that freezes for a sec or 2 about every 5-10 minutes. In stalker I get drops to 5-10 fps when Im doing something in a certain spot. Titan quest is the same thing. I have current Drivers and the current version of DX 9 and what not. I am quite disappointed as I just spent quite a bit of money on this setup and all the games I try to play just run terribly. If I could please get some insight on what could be going wrong I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[Fatness]

bumpp

 

[skyguy]

Is this like a "stutter"??? If so, it is REGULAR and occur at CONSISTENT INTERVALS?

Does it happen at certain spots in the game, or at certain times regardless of map or game?

I used to have a consistent stutter......about every 5 seconds. Turned out it was EZ-Tune that was installed with mobo CD that was raping my CPU every 5 seconds. Piece of $H!T. Uninstalled that and everything was fine.

 

[Fatness]

it is indeed a stutter, not really consistent just kind of stutters here and there. I dont have any abnormal programs from what I see.

 

[neo_weapon]

Yea, your system sounds awesome. My initial thought was heat. If your CPU is hot, it might cause this choppiness. Check the temp on your CPU with speedfan and i think Rivatuner should work with your video card. check temp on your video card too. sometimes, manufacturers may do shitty job installing the heat sink on video cards.

 

[Fatness]

umm if Im not mistaken I have it running at 127 C which is pretty damn bad even I know that.

 

[skyguy]

Run NT performance monitor (type perfmon.msc from start menu/run) and identify the bottleneck by any spikes that occur. I recommend adding counters (always use _Total) for:

-Processor\% Interrupt Time (hardware CPU use)
-Memory\Page Faults/sec (amount of times it had to read from page file)
-Memory\Pages/sec (amount of time memory was accessed)
-LogicalDisk\% Disk Time (hard disk access)
-Process\% Privileged Time (driver/kernel CPU use)
-Process\% User Time (program/game CPU use)

This should help you limit it down. Remember, look for any spikes. Also take a screenshot of the results. (And obviously, run the game while you're recording the performance.)

This will help track down if your CPU, hard disk, pagefile, etc is causing the issue. Look for spikes, that indicates a problem. When I did this, I found spikes occuring every 5 seconds. Then I went to CTRL-ALT-DEL and Processes, etc and found that it corresponded to CPU usage jumping around for the EZ-Tune application.

Try that, see if you get spikes.

 

[Fatness]

Im running a ntune stability test to see if that turns anything up. Will put anything else up as I find it really need to get this problem solved.

 

[Fatness]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/Fatness/per.jpg

not sure what much of this means, didnt use counters couldnt figure any of this out.

 

[skyguy]

Try to spread out the horizontal scale so that spikes show up.....stuff will be more "flat". Right now anything looks like a spike. And use those counters I mentioned.

What this will do is that it will: 1) show if a particular process is causing a problem easily identified; 2) show if the problem is occuring regularly because the spacing between spikes will be consistent

Below is a screenshot of my chart that showed what I mean.....the red boxes (I highlighted those myself) are the spikes....notice how they occur at regular spacing/intervals?

http://img403.imageshack.us/my.php?image=perfmonresultstx8.jpg

I also changed the color/thickness of the graph lines so they're more easy to see.......you can do the same. And I also turned on those counters I mentioned.

So my spikes showed page fault under Memory. So I went into the System processes and watched what was chewing up memory usage, and I noticed that one app was jumping up and down.......which just happned to coincide with my stuttering So I got rid of that and the problem was solved.

Try that and see what happens. Not sure if your problem might be found this way, but it's worth a shot. Other common causes of stuttering are high temperatures, graphics settings too high for the card.

 

[neo_weapon]

whoa! that is hot. you better figure out what is burning. actually if i were you, i wouldnt run this anymore since it could be your CPU and a CPU running at that temp is bad and could mean the end of your CPU.

I had a roasted CPU last summer and i cried. Ahaha nah jk but i did have a roasted CPU and its best to find out what's burning before playing another game.

 

[Fatness]

How do I spread that thing out I cant figure it out

 

[Dahak]

Check out my system dude.Believe me when I say I have no issues running oblivion,or any other game for that matter.As for your other problem with the cpu,you might want to check and make saure the heat spreader on the processor is on correctly.Could be it's not even touching the die under it so it's not transfering heat maybe??I have heard of this happpening before.Goodluck.Also check to make sure the surface of the hear spreader and the heatsink are flat from one side to the other.Use a razor for the straight edge.See if you can see any light between the razors edge and the spreader.

Dahak

AMD X2-4400+@2.6 TOLEDO
EVGA NF4 SLI MB
2X EVGA 7950GT KO IN SLI
4X 512MB CRUCIAL BALLISTIX DDR500
WD300GIG HD/SAMSUNG 250GIG HD
ACER 22IN WIDESCREEN LCD 1600X1200
THERMALTAKE TOUGHPOWER 850WATT PSU
COOLERMASTER MINI R120
3DMARK05 13,471

 

[skyguy]

ALRIGHT, EVERYONE HOLD ON FOR A MINUTE.

If you look again, those graphs are NOT temperatures.....they are USAGE graphs. There is no temperature stated. Look at the bottom Legend.....it shows usage, %, etc. The figures along the left are PERCENTAGES of 100, not temperatures.

Secondly, that 127C in SpeedFan is a known bug. It is not the actual temp. If it were, his computer wouldn't even be ON....it would be fried.


OK, now that everyone is back on track, let's calmly move forward.......

Fat, I'm running Vista now and Perfmon is COMPLETELY different than in XP. So I can't quite remember how to stretch it. I *think* you can just grab the window and stretch it wider......???

 

[Fatness]

I cant really figure out how to expand it so here it is again with the new counters.

 

[Fatness]

after removing the heatsink to RMA the motherboard I discovered that through all my removals and installs I bent the pins on the platform the processor sits on. Getting an amazing motherboard this time around hope to solve the problems as well as install the heatsink without destroying the mobo.

 

[skyguy]

When in doubt, check the motherboard eh? I'm willing to bet the problems around here are usually (in order):

-motherboard
-overheating
-RAM

Well, at least you found the problem!! Good luck with the new mobo.