Weird performance issues with X2 4400

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EmbraceThePenguin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
185
Ok, I just put together a really kick butt PC. It is an AMD X2 4400+ with the Epox 9NPA+Sli and 2 gigs of OCZ Ram with an ASUS GeForce 7800 GTX. Now typically I run in the Linux environment, but I wanted to see how Windows XP handled the new machine.

So, I installed XP with SP2, all the patches and latest drivers for my MB, Video Card, and various other hardware. I then installed Steam for HL2, CS Source, etc., Doom3, and UT 2004. Now, I thought I would have an extreamly fast system, and the window manager appears to be fairly quick and I can move around windows without much damage overlay. However, when I play games, the FPS are not too bad, however, I expected higher in my games with the 7800, but the games are rather choppy when I play.

In Linux, for example, I can run Doom3 and UT2004 (Native) on 1280x1024 32bbp with the highest game settings and its smooth as butter. But with those same games in Windows, the game play is not smooth at all; rather jerky; but the FPS seems fine.

Is this due to motherboard or video drivers, or maybe that Windows doesnt have that good of support for Dual Core processors yet?

Any insight would be appreceated.

Thanks!!!

Joe
 
Nice choice in motherboards.

What drivers are you using for your GTX?
 
whoami said:
Nice choice in motherboards.

What drivers are you using for your GTX?
Click to expand...
Thanks, I got the advice on the board from here :)

I am using the latest from the nvidia site. Its the 78.01

Thanks for the reply!!!

Joe
 
Is the GTX running at 16x?

What kind of 3dMark 05 scores are you getting?

---mark scores would be nice to average your score to make sure that along the lines of synthetic benchmarkings you're within average :)
 
whoami said:
Is the GTX running at 16x?

What kind of 3dMark 05 scores are you getting?

---mark scores would be nice to average your score to make sure that along the lines of synthetic benchmarkings you're within average :)
Click to expand...
Thats the strange thing. Benchmarks appear to be ok. 3DMark05 score was 7420 (about). Also, the little benchmark in CS Source was 144 FPS.

According to the display proporties, the card in running at 16x.

All the numbers appear to be ok, but game play is laggy... I cant explain it other than laggy; not network laggy, but choppy laggy during online games and single player or bot games.

Joe
 
Try ALT+Tabbing out of a game, hitting CTRL+ALT+DELETE, going into task manager, going into Processes, right clicking on the EXE for the game, choosing "Set Affinity", unchecking CPU 1, hitting okay, and going back into the game.

You may just be having that affinity glitch that we all would love to be resolved :p
 
My 3800+ is doing the same crap. At first it was where very now and then WOW would get twitchy (With good frames) till I alt tabbed and came back in. Now its pretty much all the time but then all of a sudden it will go away and I dont notice it till I think about the fact im not twitchy any more. All thats happened in the mean time was my graphic drivers got corrupted so uninstalled / reinstalled them.
 
Zinn said:
Try ALT+Tabbing out of a game, hitting CTRL+ALT+DELETE, going into task manager, going into Processes, right clicking on the EXE for the game, choosing "Set Affinity", unchecking CPU 1, hitting okay, and going back into the game.

You may just be having that affinity glitch that we all would love to be resolved :p
Click to expand...
WOW... Now that is interesting. That seemed to have worked with my .
Steam games...

I would never have expected the OS to behave like that. Is it an issue with the Windows scheduler or the video driver., or something else? As I mentioned, I don't suffer from this issue in Linux.

Thanks for showing me this. I will play around with it more extensively with other games later on.

Joe
 
Zinn said:
I think this is a problem with windows. I'm hoping the AMD Athlon X2 windows driver can help. (Downloading right now) I'll install it later and let you know how it goes

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

super fast edit -

This appears to have solved my problem, at least in GTA: San Andreas, where it was most noticeable. Let me know how it works for you!
Click to expand...
Ok, I will give that a try a little later on and see what happens. Thanks for locating this!!!

Joe
 
Some games and some other software is designed to work on single core PC's.

Specialy games that are depending on Internet conections want to have all proceses on one core. Like Steam and Condition Zero. When playing it without setting affinity it will work superfast then chocke every 5 seconds. Setting affinity to CPU 1 will cause affter few hours that network driver crashes PC. Setting affinity to CPU 0 will be stable. So all processes that are game related must be on single CPU and processes that are runing in background like MSN or Team Talk or what ever can go on second core.

Affinity can be sett in task menager when You list processes and right click on game executable.

Nex to it BIOS version and XP CPU drivers and patched Windows is a must.



MD
 
Zinn said:
I think this is a problem with windows. I'm hoping the AMD Athlon X2 windows driver can help. (Downloading right now) I'll install it later and let you know how it goes

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

super fast edit -

This appears to have solved my problem, at least in GTA: San Andreas, where it was most noticeable. Let me know how it works for you!
Click to expand...
Well, that did it. My games are liquid fast now. I did notice, however, that some benchmarks are a little lower now, but the in game experiance is 100% better.

Thanks again for helping with this!!!


Joe
 
Zinn said:
I think this is a problem with windows. I'm hoping the AMD Athlon X2 windows driver can help. (Downloading right now) I'll install it later and let you know how it goes

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

super fast edit -

This appears to have solved my problem, at least in GTA: San Andreas, where it was most noticeable. Let me know how it works for you!
Click to expand...

I installed my X2 3800 with 7800gtx and had absolutely no problems with any of my games, including HL2, Doom3, WoW, and the F.E.A.R. demo. But, the one game that did give me problems was the Chronicles of Riddick game that came free with my vid card. It kept getting extremely choppy when moving the mouse to look around. Was too unbearable that I couldn't play the game. This driver solved that problem flawlessly. Thank you very much.
Wasn't able to change my affinity for some games, like WoW, so I'm not sure how that would have worked. It wouldn't give me access to change it's affinity.
 
^^ I would like to know how to set affinity for cs:s before steam launches it.
If I set steam's affinity(just the program) it has no effect when a game opens as it originally uses both cores. I generally uncheck cpu 0 for cs:s, once the game has loaded, so it only uses the 2nd core.

(I have yet to install the X2 driver, as my games all bench out pefectly)
 
I will tell you how to fix this.

You have to put /usepmtimer switch in your boot.ini file.

the xp scheduler is nice and the server2003/xp64 scheduler is even better... but it tries to be too smart sometimes.

This switch fixes that. you should not have to set affinity anymore it should "just work".
 
Yashu said:
I will tell you how to fix this.

You have to put /usepmtimer switch in your boot.ini file.

the xp scheduler is nice and the server2003/xp64 scheduler is even better... but it tries to be too smart sometimes.

This switch fixes that. you should not have to set affinity anymore it should "just work".
Click to expand...


Good Tip!!

Here is some discussion on this at another board,

http://forums.amd.com/lofiversion/index.php/t55641.html

http://www.planetamd64.com/lofiversion/index.php/t12002.html
 
I used to have similar problems with Tribes 2 and Audigys making weird noises during games and this ended up being a hyperthreading problem. The solution was taken from a fix for System Shock 2, details below...

Download imagecfg.

I've hosted it here


Unzip it to your Windows\system32 dir.

Backup your exe file for whatever game/app.

Open a new txt and type the following where game.exe is the executable name for the game

imagecfg -u game.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 game.exe
pause

e.g. for Tribes 2

imagecfg -u tribes2.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 tribes2.exe
pause

Save the file as "processor.bat" including the "" in the same directory as the games/app exe.

Then run "processor.bat"

You'll get a text box saying "Image can only run in uni-processor mode on multi-processor systems" and prompted to press any key

Thats it, from then on the game/app with run as if it was a single cpu.

Big thanks to the guys on the original System Shock forum for giving me the idea to fix my Tribes sound problem. I know this worked for every app but as I'm on a single core a64 I can't verify it works on an x2 but I see no reason why not.....

[edit] this is for win2k/xp 32 bit only
 
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