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Hey guys, i'd like to run this by you and see if you have any insight.
About a year ago my buddy bought an e6850 (3ghz core 2 duo, 4 mb cache) and a Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G along with 6 gig of ddr2 800mhz ram. I put it together for him, but because he lives far away and his wife was bitching at him, we never benchmarked it. Over the last year the machine has been totally stable, running vista 64, but he's never been happy with the performance while gaming. He got a Radeon 4870 512 meg card to upgrade what was in there, and still didn't seem happy. I always thought he was just being obsessive or something, until we started playing the free age of conan trial the other day and he complained that he was getting sub 10fps in dx10 mode. He brought the rig over, and I started up conan and immediately realized that he wasn't exaggerating, the game ran like trash, nowhere near what it should be on a 4870.
I ran some other benchmarks then, and noticed that the cpu seems to be performing at about half its capability. Sandra cpu and memory tests, 3dmark 06 cpu tests, all show the cpu being much slower (quite drastically, by roughly half) than what other people have gotten from their e6850. I've monitored the cpu however, and it shows it running at full speed during the benchmarks, both cores cranking, and the temperature never gets over 65c or so. I even tried disabling the speed step down features in the bios, no difference. oddly, after a fresh reboot, sometimes for a benchmark or two, it will perform near full capacity, but then after that its all half capacity. like the cpu is overheating and powering down right? but none of the monitoring software i have shows it clocking down or overheating (except for realtemp which shows load maxing out at 54%, but task manager and other programs show 100%).
I also put his video card in my machine (i have an i7 920 with 4870x2) and it runs fantastic in there. so it's not the card.
other things i've tried:
- fresh install of vista
- newest mb bios
- tried swapping ram
I don't have another cpu or mb to swap out, so I'm asking here to see if anyone has seen something like this before. Please advise, and thanks in advance.
About a year ago my buddy bought an e6850 (3ghz core 2 duo, 4 mb cache) and a Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G along with 6 gig of ddr2 800mhz ram. I put it together for him, but because he lives far away and his wife was bitching at him, we never benchmarked it. Over the last year the machine has been totally stable, running vista 64, but he's never been happy with the performance while gaming. He got a Radeon 4870 512 meg card to upgrade what was in there, and still didn't seem happy. I always thought he was just being obsessive or something, until we started playing the free age of conan trial the other day and he complained that he was getting sub 10fps in dx10 mode. He brought the rig over, and I started up conan and immediately realized that he wasn't exaggerating, the game ran like trash, nowhere near what it should be on a 4870.
I ran some other benchmarks then, and noticed that the cpu seems to be performing at about half its capability. Sandra cpu and memory tests, 3dmark 06 cpu tests, all show the cpu being much slower (quite drastically, by roughly half) than what other people have gotten from their e6850. I've monitored the cpu however, and it shows it running at full speed during the benchmarks, both cores cranking, and the temperature never gets over 65c or so. I even tried disabling the speed step down features in the bios, no difference. oddly, after a fresh reboot, sometimes for a benchmark or two, it will perform near full capacity, but then after that its all half capacity. like the cpu is overheating and powering down right? but none of the monitoring software i have shows it clocking down or overheating (except for realtemp which shows load maxing out at 54%, but task manager and other programs show 100%).
I also put his video card in my machine (i have an i7 920 with 4870x2) and it runs fantastic in there. so it's not the card.
other things i've tried:
- fresh install of vista
- newest mb bios
- tried swapping ram
I don't have another cpu or mb to swap out, so I'm asking here to see if anyone has seen something like this before. Please advise, and thanks in advance.
