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horrible ATAPI performance

P

posten

n00b
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
Messages
16
ok, I've got a problem with ATAPI / IDE / optical drive performance on my second build.

It's a s939 Athlon64 (1.8ghz) system build on an MSI RS480M2 motherboard (that's MSI's m-atx board built on ATI's radeon xpress 200 chipset).

Windows 2000 Pro SP4, 1gig Dual-Channel RAM. no other cards in the system...just using the everything onboard.

2HDDs, 1DVD-RW, 1CD-RW. Primary master is (PATA) WD 80GB SE (W2K Pro), prim. slave is WD 20gig disk with XP Pro 64 RC2 (just for trying x64 out...haven't installed anything on it). Secondary master is a Optorite DVD-RW, sec. slave is an HP OEM cd-rw.

I can vouch for the HDDs and optical drives. I used them in my last system, soyo KT333 with a 1.53ghz AXP chip, 512mb PC 2100.

problem is this: when simply displaying the contents on either optical drive, or just copying small files from a CD or DVD, CPU usage is hammered. it would cause my mouse to be all jerky on screen (simple PS/2 MS mouse), winamp 2.9 would skip while playing an mp3...cpu usage should never be that high for simply displaying the contents of a disc in windows explorer or copying some small files.

same goes with ripping from or burning to either a CD or DVD. insanely high CPU usage. I'm confident in the drives as well as the IDE cables, as I used them in my previous system flawlessly at normal speeds and low CPU usage...

I don't have the chipset driver or BIOS versions on me, but they're fairly current.

any help would be greatly appreciated. last night on a whim i swapped the jumper on the DVD-RW from master to cable select...no difference. the rest of the system is pretty tight and fast. but using either optical drive simply pegs the CPU usage.

thanks for any help or ideas guys.

Posten
 
^^ That's probably it. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at comps and the optical drives are running in PIO mode. Almost every board I've had does that by default and it takes "convincing" to make them use DMA. Usually it's just as simple as explicitly telling it to use dma instead.
 
yea that was definitely it. Primary IDE channel (HDDs) was already DMA, but secondary channel was PIO. I did think of that earlier a potential cause of the problem, but I've never had to change it in all my windows 2000 installs, so I rationalized it as not being the problem. strange.

either way, thanks guys.

posten
 
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