Where is my bottleneck?

[chihlidog]

Hey guys, hoping you can provide some insight as to where my bottleneck is. I notice some slight choppiness here and there on games I should be able to run flawlessly. Oddly enough, I ran Doom 3 on the highest settings without even a hiccup, but a lot of other games I notice a very small one from time to time and it's annoying, I built this system to run whatever I threw at it perfectly.

I never run at more than 1024x768 (I know, lame) and I only have one monitor. All the latest drivers are installed. Here are my specs:

AMD Athlon x2 6000+

2 gigs of GSkill DDR2 800

Radeon X1950 pro GPU

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive


Any reason why I should ever have even a bitof stutter on this machine? Thanks!

 

[atreyu]

Do a stress test of your RAM.

Another issue could be some antivirus programs or similar programs that constantly monitor running programs and files being accessed. to test this disconnect form the network, disable all antivirus and antispyware programs (ensure that their services are also shutdown) and then run the game and see if you are facing the same problem.

 

[mrmez]

Ur bottle neck is in ur neck.
Hence its called a bottle neck

Bad ram wont cause any chop. It will just crash. Other apps as suggested can slowthings down too.

H/ware wise, the cpu should be fine, but for games the biggest boost will come from a new gfx card.

Other probs include:
Old drivers
Psu not supplying enuf pwr
cpu throttling due to over heat
OS needs formal/reinstall (if installed for 2 years+)

 

[johnnyq1233]

What are the games that are choppy?
ATI does run DOOM III better anyways!
Also, what resolutions are you running these games that chop at?