My New System Crawls

[kamau911]

I hope someone can help me with a question I have. I recently built a computer and I thought I did pretty well but the computer's performance sucks. These are my specs:

K8N Neo4 Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800XL All in Wonder Video Card
2 x SATA 100 Gig Hard Drives
2 x 512 PNY PC3200 DDR in a dual channel configuration
Creative Audigy ZX Gamer Sound Card
AMD Athalon 64 3500

It seems as though my previous system (Athalon XP 3000+) was faster. Most of the games I play sputter. Is there a way I can tweek my system to get better performance. Or do I need to change my MB, Processor, or what. By the way, is all PC3200 DDR dual channel capable or does it have to be labled dual channel to have that feature.

Thread is old and locked - MidiMoto

[syphus]

That system should be purring. You obviously have a performance problem.

Dual channel is not a feature of memory modules itself, it is a feature of memory controller logic and circuitry. To put it more simply, in your case, it is the processor that decides when to enable dual channel. As long as you have matched DIMMs (Dual Inline Memory Modules), dual channel will be enabled.

For reference, Pentium 4 and later systems support dual channel through the Northbridge chipset component, from Springdale (i865) onwards. Athlon 64 socket 754 did not support dual channel, but all socket 939 do. Newer Venice core Athlon 64s, and later, have improve memory controllers that can run in an asynchronous DIMMs of miss matched size. In your case, dual channel should be functioning correctly. Note though, that the performance difference between single and dual channel isn’t that noticeable, and only really shows up in benchmarks or very careful observation of high load operations.


Something is obviously wrong if you feel the performance is less than or equal to an Athlon XP 3000+. The first thing that comes to mind, is that Cool’n’Quiet is jammed on. Cool’n’Quiet is an AMD feature that automatically reduces the CPU clock speed, when idle, to save power and cut heat production. To function properly, Cool’n’Quiet requires a special driver to be installed, that polls CPU usage in Windows, and signals the processor when to speed up and when to clock down. Sometimes, for some reason or another, Cool’n’Quiet gets jammed on and your processor ambles along at 800 MHz, or something stupid. The best way to solve this is to simply reboot into your BIOS and disable it.

You can check this theory by opening the System Properties dialog (Start, Control Panel. Make sure you're in Classic View. Open System) and checking the General tab; under Computer, your processor and current clock speed is reported. If it's less than 2.2 GHz, then we may be on the right track.

If my assumption doesn’t pan out, post back.

[kamau911]

Thanks for the suggestions Syphus.

My processor was running at 2.211 Ghz and Quiet-n-Cool was disabled. I think the problem might have been that the system was set in BIOS for stability not performance. I went into the BIOS setting and changed the configuration to the performance defaults. I see a noticable boost in performance but I still think that I can tweek my system a little more. Although I am only using the stock cooling solution, I have a case with adequate airflow and heat is currently not an issue. I am wondering if I can get a little more out of my video card (ATI All-In-Wonder PCIE X800 XL) and my FSB.

Again thanks for the help. I am open to any suggestions that may improve the performance of my system. It seems very stable with the new settings.

[syphus]

BIOS tweaking (unless seriously misconfigured to run hardware bellow specification, not what you describe) gets you a little here and a little there, it doesn't account for what you have observed as a serious performance deficit.

There is a world of difference between an Athlon XP 3000+ and Athlon 64 3500+ that should never be noted as “seems slower” and “stutters in games”.

I’d like to make it perfectly clear, that if a system seems to have a weakness, discussing a solution of over-clocking it is the short road to the inevitable “my system won’t boot anymore!” post you may well end up making. It seems likely that you could have a software issue, but it would be incredibly unenlightened of you to start running the system out of specification when it’s not even running to your satisfaction in specification.

Run a Memtest86 (wont help performance, but should be performed on any new build), update the BIOS, reinstall Windows with the latest graphics and chipset drivers, secure your system before connecting it to the internet. Use a program like SiSoft Sandra and make all the components of your system are running to their specifications and benchmark the sub-systems against equivalents to check for any weaknesses.

Do this before you start pushing up the FSB.