Good day to you all! I am currently experiencing problems with my PC, problems that no one I've spoken to seems to quite know the cause of or the solution to. Of all the people I know personally, I have perhaps the highest PC knwledge, and frankly that doesn't say much, so here I am! Simply put, my PC is experiencing some form of bottleneck. This is no minor bottleneck though, this is a bottleneck that makes this machine perform significantly worse than my friend's PC which is supposedly a fair bit weaker. I'll say right now that yes, I have the latest drivers, I've scanned for viri and spyware, and I've defragged my hard drives. First off, here's what my system has going for it. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Clocks in at 2.4 Ghz, socket AM2) Ram: 1 Gig of DDR2 GPU: Geforce 7600GS with 512 megs of Vram (AGP version, alas) And this is performing worse than my friend's PC, which has the following. CPU: AMD Sempron (I believe it clocks in at maybe 2 Ghz, will check this) Ram: 512 megs of DDR GPU: Geforce 6?00 with 512 megs Vram (Also AGP) Something is clearly not right here. But it gets stranger. I gave 3DMark06 a twirl on this machine of mine, and it scored rather poorly. Hoping I could get things to work a little nicer by overclocking, I did so. But it was strange... No amount of overclocking of the CPU or GPU made an iota of difference to my scores and frame rates on 3DMark06. With that overly long part explained, I can get into the question proper. Unless there's something wildly obvious I'm missing, I suspect it may well be my motherboard. I required a motherboard that could take a socket AM2 processor, as well as an AGP graphics card. The only one I could find that did that here in England was this one: ASRock Motherboard - Product - AM2NF3-VSTA - Overview So I must ask... Is this Motherboard the culprit? Or could it possibly be something else? What would you people of greater PC knowledge recommend? ...Hmm, this post was somewhat long... I certainly do like to waffle sometimes... Many thanks, Yalecsa
Welcome to HWF Yalecsa :beer: Check what are the processes running in the background and see if that makes sense hah:
welcome Yalecsa..... have u tried re-installing ur Operating System?? n yea what karanislove said...check ur processes in task manager. there may be a memory leak.. There is a background program or process running on your computer that has a memory leak. After running your computer for half an hour, hit CTRL+ALT+DEL. Click on the Processes tab and click the column header 'Mem Usage' twice to sort it by memory usage in descending order. See if anything is using a massive amount of memory (more than 100mb). Make sure you dont have any programs running. Also sort by CPU column and see if something is using a lot of CPU % (Except system idle process, that is part of windows and is usually running at 99 - 100%) If you see another program occupying a lot of CPU, then that program might be the cause of the crash. Make sure you have closed anything running in the sytem tray also (Yahoo/MSN/AOL Messenger, etc) Try to run a full chkdsk at the command prompt - Click Start - Run Type: cmd Press enter at the command window, type: chkdsk /f press enter. (This will take a while) hope this helps .....
how long has your OS being installed ? you may require a clean reinstall[ot]i assume you OS is XP[/ot]
Ah, I meant to reply sooner, but the Uni work rather piled up unexpectedly... Now then! I've checked my background processes, and the highest memory usage is from my browser, Opera, at 34 megs. No problem with the CPU usage either; that's staying at 99& or 98% in system idle. I attempted to run chkdsk, but it refused to run without restarting my PC first. So I did that, and it ran... I assume by the name that this is a tool for checking to make sure my hard disks are running okay? Well it didn't appear to detect any errors. This is actually a fairly recent install of my OS, which is indeed Windows XP. Perhaps only one or two months old. And besides, these issues have been present since the very beginning. Hmm... I suppose it's looking more and more likely that this is indeed a somewhat poor motherboard...
hmmm....maybe its ur RAM...try using 512mb or maybe increase it further(i no 1gig of RAM is more than enough)..but experiment wit it... maybe it is your video card..try using a lower version agp card..not the latest ones. n it can also be your hard disk.. n finally...it can ALSO be your motherboard...try to find ''reviews'' of your motherboard model..google search for it...reading reviews helps a whole lot of trouble ...
If it is my ram, then I'm afraid I don't really have a way in which to check it. The stick I'm using is the only DDR2 one I have, and none of my friends run DDR2 ram. Pity... I doubt it's my video card, to be honest. I mean, certain games I try will run just the same regardless of what video settings I run. One particular game rarely goes above 30fps at 640x480. Just as a test, I jumped it up to 1280x1024. Amazingly it performed just the same. Even so, I will borrow an old card of a friend and see how it performs. I checked for reviews of my motherboard, and... it seems to be quite liked. I only found three, but all three were very positive indeed. I suppose maybe there's a chance that my specific individual motherboard is at fault even though the model is just fine? My AGP transfer rate is set to 8 speed, and my CPU temperature (according to Speedfan) is 33C. Speedfan also displays a blue arrow alongside this, which I'm told means it's running quite happily. Hmm... This is quite confusing. Everyone I speak to is confused by this issue. A friend told me to run a CPU test known as Super Pi. Apparently it causes one's PC to calculate Pi to a certain number of decimal places... Well anyway. When calculating to one million decimal places, I'm told my processor should finish the calculation in about 38 seconds. In actual fact, mine took 45 seconds. I'm actually being led to believe that the fault may lie with my processor. Perhaps there's something minorly faulty with it...? Many thanks, Yalecsa
yes, you have get memtest86+ download either the floppy version or the .ISO (to burn to CD) allow it to run for at least 12 hours (preferably overnight) if the RAM is faulty, over 200 errors will be displayed (i think) that's not a problem, 7 seconds is nothing to worry about IMO
Have you gotten the latest drivers for the nForce 3 250 chipset that your motherboard uses? I should've thought of this before, but that would really throw a wrench in the works.
