What's causing my FPS to die? HD? AGP?

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Bigdady92

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 20, 2001
Messages
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Ok, I've got the following:

MB:MSI 875P
CPU: 2.4G P4 800FSB
RAM:1GB Crucial 400
VGA:radeon 9800pro 256mb
HD: Pair of Samsung 160GB SATA in a raid 1
OS: Windows XP SP2

Now I installed this thing as a RAID1 in the SATA bios that comes with the board. I updated the bios to get it to work, it sees it, after I install the OS I installed the RAID drivers from Intel's site and it works just fine.

Now Iplay world of warcraft and other games and I've noticed that once I do anything that causes the screen to repaint/refresh at a heavy rate (Molten Core, Ogrimmar, etc) like a big populated area or a instance i drop down to 3.4fps. When I'm in an open area it's fine and shoots upto 60fps.

Now I know this is normal, but I ALSO play the game and run apps on my laptop with a 9600xt/128 and it runs smooth as batshit, no problems at all with a slower CPU and not as powerful video card.

All drivers are the latest release from ATI and I even tried the omega drivers too. Nothing. Still bogs down when I experience even the slightest bit of performance demand on it.

I've tested this in front of the firewall, behind the firewall, all drivers are up2date on both laptop and desktop, nothing seems to click except for the fact that the computer is pulling from the RAID 1 and it's taking it's time. It starts off choppy then BAM! fast as hell with 30-40fps after a slowdown.

Any ideas?
 
I'm going to go a completely different direction with my idea.

Do you have a discreet sound card? My board had horrible slow down problems related to the Realtek onboard sound. Once I updated the drivers things got better (but not perfect) so if you're using the onboard sound maybe that's the culprit.

Or, to rule out the RAID, do you have a single HD you can test with without the RAID just to rule it out?

I could be completely off base on these suggestions though so take them for what they are, guesses.
 
the P4 is not that great a cpu, make sure the cache is enabled, just check for grins sake. Other than that I agree with the above post, could be sound device using cpu cycles, or it may be the RAID config reading too slow, what read write stats are you getting ? you should also clean up system tray before playing, defrag, disable apps running in background etc.
 
well your running in raid 1..mirrored.. so everything needs to be written twice. = cpu cycles/hdd lag .... if you dont need backup raid 0 is what I think your looking for
 
good idea about the sound card. I have a SBLIVE Audigy Platinum that is dedicated to playing it. I have onboard sound but it's disabled.

I disable EVERYTHING in my system tray, and I mean EVERYTHING. I have only the speaker and the time that appears in my right hand corner. That's it.


I updated to the latest RAID drivers from intel so those are fresh. How could I test read/write performance on the RAID as this is the first time I've used SATA raid on this as usually we have some utility at work to test our RAID arrays but that's for SCSI and for *NIX not winderz.

I will check the cache to be enabled. Would that be an option in the bios?
 
Do you notice the HD light on the computer come on during MC or at a city? That would indicate that there's I/O activity and can cause the computer to lag, but shouldn't bring the computer down to its knees. Run Task Manager and minimize it and go back to the same place where you experience FPS drop, then switch back to Task Manager and see if the CPU usage was running near 100%. Also, check the in-game settings to see if the game automatically enabled image-enhancing features which can also cause the computer to lag.

Bigdady92 said:
it runs smooth as batshit
Click to expand...
I'm sorry but wtf?!
 
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