Does this system seem I/O bound?

C

Captain Kirk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 22, 2002
Messages
288
I love this system. It plays almost all of my games at the max settings without a hitch. My problem is every once in awhile I'll see a bit of lag which feels like HD I/O lag. I know the Caviar in there is no Raptor, but does it make a huge difference? The one game that runs horribly is Oblivion, but I suspect that's because of the nForce+X-Fi compatibility problems everyone tells me about. Will replacing the HD with a faster unit do the trick? Or is there something I'm missing?

Thoughts?

  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo
  • 2x BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB in SLi
  • OCz 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel
  • Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS 7.1
  • Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2
 
Defrag your hard drive, get a trial of PerfectDisk here. Also make sure your HDD is set to maximum transfer rate in BIOS (UDMA6). Make sure Native Command Queuing is OFF. nForce + NCQ = BAD!

Where did you hear about this "nForce + Xfi compatibility problem?" Never heard about this... Usually the X-Fi makes farting/cracking sounds because of PCI bandwidth issues. I think Oblivion just doesn't run as well on nVidia cards, that's an established fact. What res do you game at? What levels of AA/AF do you use?
 
Sovereign said:
Defrag your hard drive, get a trial of PerfectDisk here. Also make sure your HDD is set to maximum transfer rate in BIOS (UDMA6). Make sure Native Command Queuing is OFF. nForce + NCQ = BAD!

Where did you hear about this "nForce + Xfi compatibility problem?" Never heard about this... Usually the X-Fi makes farting/cracking sounds because of PCI bandwidth issues. I think Oblivion just doesn't run as well on nVidia cards, that's an established fact. What res do you game at? What levels of AA/AF do you use?
Click to expand...
I de-fragged the disk, and went over the BIOS settings. There was a little improvement. I honestly wonder if it's my monitor's refresh rate (Viewsonic VX2025WM). It's locked at 60 hertz. It's either that or the disk. F.E.A.R. reports a minimum FPS of 36, 90% of the time the FPS is >40.

Any other ideas?
 
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