Hello,
in winter of 2009 I bought what I conceived to be a powerhouse desktop. 3.4 ghz quad core AMD Phenom X2, 8gb of 1333 ddr3 ram, and a 1 GB AMD Radeon HD 5850 series card. And it was sweet! It vastly outperformed all of my expectations on games... for a while.
Computers have a way of aging, and I've always tried hard to avoid it but it just happens. The first thing I noticed was a strange 'coil whine'. Usually occurred in 3d gaming apps. Then I started to get a weird sort of chop that I hadn't seen before that I believe is micro-stuttering. Again it occurred in 3d gaming applications (heroes of newerth was the primary game of choice, happened in starcraft2 as well though). It wouldn't severely chop, but it seemed like every second there would be maybe 1/5 of a second of slight chop. Instead of moving fluidly, units would stutter their way across the screen. At first it wasn't that noticeable, but I feel like it got worse as time went on.
Fast forward a little - I dealt with that but then other things started to slow. Load times on games and internet browsers went up, and I started to see more significant frame rate issues and chop in addition to the micro stutter. Eventually, 6 months ago, I decided to replace my video card with another amd card - this time an AMD Radeon HD 6850. This fixed 1 thing - the coil whine. As far as I could tell everything else remained the same.
I recently got into diablo 3 and wooo boy does it evidence the computer issues. It's slow to load areas, I get micro stutter, and generally die a lot due to computer problems.
Here's my question - is there any good way to tell what is bottlenecking me here / causing my issues? I was so sure it was the video card, but it fixed nothing. I've done memory checks (the windows one which is mediocre from what I understand), virus scans, reformatted my computer, all sorts of things all to no avail. Perhaps it is just time to retire my computer... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
-Scott
in winter of 2009 I bought what I conceived to be a powerhouse desktop. 3.4 ghz quad core AMD Phenom X2, 8gb of 1333 ddr3 ram, and a 1 GB AMD Radeon HD 5850 series card. And it was sweet! It vastly outperformed all of my expectations on games... for a while.
Computers have a way of aging, and I've always tried hard to avoid it but it just happens. The first thing I noticed was a strange 'coil whine'. Usually occurred in 3d gaming apps. Then I started to get a weird sort of chop that I hadn't seen before that I believe is micro-stuttering. Again it occurred in 3d gaming applications (heroes of newerth was the primary game of choice, happened in starcraft2 as well though). It wouldn't severely chop, but it seemed like every second there would be maybe 1/5 of a second of slight chop. Instead of moving fluidly, units would stutter their way across the screen. At first it wasn't that noticeable, but I feel like it got worse as time went on.
Fast forward a little - I dealt with that but then other things started to slow. Load times on games and internet browsers went up, and I started to see more significant frame rate issues and chop in addition to the micro stutter. Eventually, 6 months ago, I decided to replace my video card with another amd card - this time an AMD Radeon HD 6850. This fixed 1 thing - the coil whine. As far as I could tell everything else remained the same.
I recently got into diablo 3 and wooo boy does it evidence the computer issues. It's slow to load areas, I get micro stutter, and generally die a lot due to computer problems.
Here's my question - is there any good way to tell what is bottlenecking me here / causing my issues? I was so sure it was the video card, but it fixed nothing. I've done memory checks (the windows one which is mediocre from what I understand), virus scans, reformatted my computer, all sorts of things all to no avail. Perhaps it is just time to retire my computer... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
-Scott