Stuttering

[kingtoke]

System Specs;

XP sp2
Athlon Xp 2800 (333fsb)
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
powercolor X800 Pro (Cat 4.9)
2x256 Dual Channel GeIL golden dragon pc3200 (400mhz)
Windows is freshly installed on an 80gb SATA 7200rpm hitatchi deskstar
with 1x Maxtor 80gb SATA 7200 rpm Spare and an 80gb PATA 7200rpm spare
(all drives with 8mb cache)
Audigy 2
480w Antec NeoPower PSU


Ok, i've been having problems now for quite some time, games stutter like crazy when they load up, but after a while they start to become acceptable, sometimes even quite good. Farcry is unplayable when i start alevel for a couple of minutes but if i leave it it becomes smooth, the same happens with doom3, whenever i go soemwhere new it becomes majorly jerky, but if i go back somewhere i've been it becomes sweet, the timedemo benchmark (2nd run) gives me an average fps of 47 on 1280x1024 on high details.
up until now i had been torn between the detail levels being too high (surely ok with my card) or possible my RAM, but i bough the sims2 and its jerky as hell when theres more then 3 people in the playing area. i dont want to fork out for some expensive ram unless i really really have to, but i wanted to know if anyone could think of anything that might be able to solve my problem, or indeed if i'm lookng in the wrong place.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Is this a New fresh install of XP, or have you upgraded your PC and kept the original install?

I'd reccomend a fresh install for a new grahpics card.

_______________________
"In the US and A there are many jobs. For Men: Accountant, Life Guard, and Sportsman. For Women...Prostitute"

 

[kingtoke]

fresh install on brand new hard drive, although the problems were happening on my old install which was on the IDE drive

 

[Ned_Flanders]

do you have antivirus / spyware killer programs installed?

Could be spyware, although it does sound software / hardware related

_______________________
"In the US and A there are many jobs. For Men: Accountant, Life Guard, and Sportsman. For Women...Prostitute"

 

[kingtoke]

usually, but not currently

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by kingtoke on 09/19/04 01:27 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[folken]

I'm not to sure what it could be but here is one random thing to try.
512mb is a little low for games like farcry and doom3 so you comp is probably usin some swapfile. Since swapfile is slow it is probably takin it a few min to figure out how much to use. Try setting your swap at 1024 for both initial and max size. Making both of them the same might help performance a little but it mainly keeps fragmentation down.
You can set the swap(page)file by right clicking on My Computer>properties>advanced>performance settings>advanced>change

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[kingtoke]

nope no difference

 

[4Ryan6]

I've got different hardware than you but had some similar symptoms running Win2K Pro w SP4, so I'm taking a stab here and ignoring software problems, and giving you a couple of suggestions.

I ended up tweaking my RAM's BIOS settings a little more agressive.

Note:[whether more or less agressive in your situation will be a trial and error deal, you may want to consult your RAM manufacturers website for their reccommendations on the best BIOS settings for your RAM]

Unfortunately for me my other situation was the piss poor stock cooling solution on my ATI 9800 Pro, I added Ram Sinks, and a High Performance GPU cooler, and cooling problems disappeared with the ATI.

Note:[Video card overheating however doesn't result in improved performance the longer it stays on, as a matter of fact, the longer it stays on, the worse the problem gets, so I would suggest researching your RAM timings and concentrating in that area, but overall cooling could be a factor, thats why I included it]