Hello all, thanks for stopping by!

I built a computer earlier this Summer; the intent was to make a helluva game/multi-tasking platform.

For some odd reason, if I try and watch a DVD (In Media Player) AND Play a game (Eve Online) the CPU & Memory Widgets max out and the computer freezes up. Running either one or the other (Either Media Player or the game) keeps those meters at roughly 30%. So I'm not sure exactly what's going on here and/or how to make up for this (as part of my intent was to be able to play an MMO and watch a movie while doing so).

The pertinent nuts and bolts of what I'm running:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Processor
Corsair Dual Channel TWINX PC6400 DDR2 800MHz [4 x 1024MB]
Two Seagate 320GB Hard Drives (RAID-0)
8800 GTS Superclocked 640MB GDDR3 (Intending to SLI in a second one for Christmas)
EVGA nForce 680i SLI NVIDIA Socket 775 ATX Motherboard (New A1 Version)
Vista Ultimate 64bit

Other bits that shouldn't really matter:
MATROX TRIPLEHEAD2GO ANALOG VIDEO EXTENDER
Three 19' Acer LCD's
DVDROM & a DVDRW


Is what I'm doing really THAT resource intensive?! Or might something odd be going on here? I've cleared out background applications (Security Suites and what not) without noticing anything difference.

Might this be a Threading issue? I know it's possible to dictate what runs on each core, but it's not something I've really looked into as yet (as in I'd need to learn how before I could)

Heh... well thats quite a problem.

Not that it would help me understand any better, but perhaps someone else, can you tell everyone how you run things? I see you have 3 19' LCD's, so how are they hooked up, and how you view the movie and game at the same time?

I kinda think it might be a driver thing, or how your running your apps perhaps with its current settings, which I wouldn't know how to advise.

Try XP.

Sure.

The Three monitors go through the TRIPLEHEAD2GO (Basically feeds all three monitors into one video out~ Treats them like one big widescreen as far as the Video Card is concerned). In essence, it's no different than having a single 57" Wide screen (just not as tall, and much cheaper)

Then I run a game in windowed mode (which is basically full screen on one monitor), toss up Media Player on another monitor... and still have the third free for use (Or where I monitor my widgets for now ;-) )


As for the XP "Suggestion". I've got XP on my laptop... but thanks for the loyalty promotion! I'm not interested in going back to XP on this new machine.

I highly doubt his is a Vista issue, it's more likely a hardware driver or threading assignment thing I would think. I'd hate to think it was a RAM inadequacy or something like that.

Admittedly, I could be increadoubly wrong though. which is why I'm here!

One thought with the monitors have one port on your gfx car go to your main monitor while the other 2 use that splitting port and only have the movies going on the splitting port. you may need to run the game in windowed mode too; donno

That's kinda interesting to know. Though what confuses me, is how windows or Vista interprets it (the 3 monitors), though I guess it doesn't.

What I mean by that, for example, my Video card is the 8800, which has 2 dvi ports. So I can hook up 2 monitors, and XP will tell me the primary, and secondary, or I can switch and make the orientation correct.

So I suppose Vista just thinks there's a 57" screen hooked up?

It's just really hard to say if it's driver or hardware issue to start.

interesting...
I have simmilar problems when i try to play a game in windowed mode and watch a movie at the same time.
with windows media player, i get wierd artifacts in my game.
with a dvd movie running.. the PC will bluescreen at some random interval. the bluescreen message usually says something about my sound card.

My solution? .. "dont do that" and it works flawlessly

This is with XP x64, 2gig ram, a SB Audigy2 and 6800 Ultra video card, powering 2 19" lcd monitors.

Right right, it's the same idea~ Just tunneling all three screens into one port (analog sadly, as the digital TH2G box wasn't yet released when I built... I should check to see if it's been released since). Theoretically if I were a rich man I could have just bought another video card and ran all three (two on one card, third on the other) or three cards... but, well~ I'm just a lowly E4 in the military!


Anyhow~ Vista believes I have one screen running 3072 x 768 pixels. Not the highest setting mind you (One away from though)

LoL but I really, REALLY want to do that. It was a big motivation behind me buying three screens :-P Of course if doing so got me some nifty artifacts in my game, I might do it more often ;-)

The overlapping sound was quite annoying, so I turned off sound in the game... didn't really prevent the issue though so I think mine may not be quite the same.

So... this has evolved somehow.

For weeks I've just been doing either the game, or watching a movie and haven't had any discernable issues. So, I was content to not try dualing up again until I get a second GTS.

However, tonight Office 2007 scragged out on me, and locked up my system. Now, whenever I start windows normally I have about 1 minute before my Physical Memory spikes to 99% and everything becomes EXTREMELY sluggish before it eventually just goes unresponsive. The odd thing is my CPU usage is chillin at a meager 1%-25% when this is happening.

I went into safe mode, ran a virus scan (just in case)~ Nothing there.

Running a ScanDisk now, again just in case.

But really~ 4gb of RAM... this should NOT be happening. Not even close.

Anyone have any thoughts? The only things I'm finding via google aren't really related in so far as I can tell.

Turns out, this is only happening on one user account (the one I primarily use), which is currently set up as a Power User permissions wise. If I log onto the Admin account, the spike isn't happening. Not even close (physical memory is sitting at a happy 26%)

Seeing as am at work for the next 4 hours ill give ya some help if I can..

Heres what I need.. log onto that primary.. pull up the task manager, find out what process is sucking all the memory..

I have a feeling the Search Indexer and possiblt the Trustedblah... cant remember the process may be sucking you down hard..

When your in the process list, click on the memory tab at the top and put them in order of memory consumption.. let me know what the top 5 are..

I'm curious - will what you're trying to do work if you take triplehead2go out of the picture? Just run two screens right off the video card and see if you can play a game and watch a movie at the same time. One more thing to check...someone else hinted at this. Test if its a sound issue by disabling your sound drivers in the device manager and trying the game and movie again.
Everything you eliminate from being the problem brings you once step closer to finding the root cause.

Sorry, I posted before I went to bed last night..

Anyhow:

Top 5 Processes currently showing:


svchost.exe SYSTEM 97,980k-114775k [Host Process for Windows Service]
dwm.exe PrimUserAct 14380k [desktop window manager?]
svchost.exe SYSTEM 17720k [Host Process for Windows Service]
TrustedInstaller.exe SYSTEM 13208k [Windows Modules Installer]
avgcc.exe *32 200-1024k [AVG controller]
svchost.exe SYSTEM 5444k [Host Process for Windows Service]

aven't tried pulling the TripleHead2Go. Maybe I'll give that a whirl this weekend (Lots of school work to do this week, and the three screens REALLY makes online research papers easier!). I did try disabling the sound actually in the game, and found no difference.

Don't know if there's a setting like this in Vista:

Might be worth just backing up certain stuff on that profile, and create a new one.

Sounds like something is loading up on your current one, but yet the admin doesn't.