EXTREMELY slow system performance

[oOLimesOo]

Hello 'n' stuff.... I REALLY need a hand here...

Specs :
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton @ 2.2ghz (200x11) 1.75vCore w/ fairly cheap cooler - runs at 50 degrees idle 60-63 at load
1GB Crucial PC2700 Value ram @ 2.5-3-3-7- 333mhz (stock)
MSI K6 Delta LSR Mobo
ATI Radeon 9800pro 256mb (ATI Reference) w/Arctic cooling VGA Silencer @ default clocks
550W Q-TEC PSU
160GB Seagate Barracuda HDD (Master)
120GB Maxtor HDD (Slave)
Creative SB Live! Value
USR Wireless Network Card
Windows XP Professional w/SP2
Basic case w/3 80mm fans modded to 7V
CD/RW & DvD Drive

System has recently (2 days ago) undergone a full remake from other PCs and reformat.

CPU-Z / SuperPi


Ok, as you can probably see I'm getting TERRIBLE superpi times (the only other system I've found on the web getting 3 second 16k times is a 400mhz pentium), as well as horrible general system performance/startup (3 FPS in Guild Wars, I used to get 30 with an Intel Pentium 4 2.0ghz and the same GPU) but the system seems perfectly stable. I've ran a 3 hour memtest85 , and around 6 hours of SP2004 with no errors (yes, that isn't that long). The problems aren't due to the pretty-small o/c, or the temps, as I get EXACTLY the same problem of slowness at stock. I haven't got a clue what's causing this and it's really getting on my nerves now...

Thanks

[streetster]

according to cpu-z your ram is running at 33mhz? and have you installed all that via 4-in-1 business (ie motherboard drivers etc) ?

[oOLimesOo]

RAM's running at 333mhz,(DDR), Auto in bios settings, posts as 333. CPU-Z listing is FSB-33, not 33mhz - so 166x2. I don't get what you mean by 4-in-1 really but all drivers are up to date, as is the bios.

Downloading 4 in 1 chipset drivers now, didn't have them beforehand.

No increase in performance after getting the chipset drivers.

[jamiecockrill]

really, when starting from scratch you should install your chipset drivers first, then your GPU drivers, then everything else in whatever order.

your HDD's and CD/DVD drives aren't running in PIO mode are they? I heard somewhere that if an IDE device throws up more than a certain number of errors (regardless of how inconsequential they are) then windows can force the device back into PIO mode (very very slow).

To check this out, go to device manager, look for the IDE/Atapi device controllers. open that up and in there should be Primary and Secondary controllers. Look at the properties for both of these and check in 'Advanced Settings' that they are all on something like 'DMA if available'. If it says PIO then change it, the system should revert back to PIO if it's not supported. Incidentally, if windows has forced the issue (which it can do sometimes) then you might not be able to change it back and the only way round that is to reinstall the device (I think). In that case, Google is your friend...

[davidstone28]

Crikey! That is slow.

Here are my results:-
1.3ghz Celeron laptop does 1M in 1m 6s.
2.5ghz Athlon64 desktop does 1M in 34s.

Not sure if this would apply to your motherboard, but some don't apply Auto settings properly. For example, on my Asus A8N if I select Auto for ram options, it doesn't detect the ram modules (Crucial) accurately and sticks in some ridiculously slow settings.

Have you tried setting everything manually in the BIOS? I do suspect you have the wrong setting somewhere, or maybe some sort of BIOS glitch is throttling everything back?

[Xaar]

as streetster pointed out, the problem most likely resides in the quoted 33 mhz memory speed.. i'd suggest going into the bios and manually setting timings.. even try underclocking the ram a bit to see if it rectifies the problem

[davidstone28]

Your CPU-Z should also look something like this:



whereas your one has frequency blanked out, FSBRAM ratio all wrong etc

[oOLimesOo]

Well, one stick of ram has now gone ka'put and died on me, so I'm left with 512mb, only settings in bios for RAM frequency are 200mhz, 266mhz, 333mhz, 400mhz and Auto - I've tried all of them, none give better performance. All of the IDE controllers are on DMA if available also... Could this possibly be a hardware error? (None of the components are exactly "New" )

Also, RAM in CPU-Z now shows as 167 mhz (Think RAM WASN'T on auto before - but was on 333mhz instead) Still no differnece in performance though... Thanks for the help so far anyways

Now tested various other things, including removing all fans except CPU fan and using a Geforce MX 400 to test if PSU is under too much load or if GPU is giving off some freaky-deaky errors, which it appears it isn't...

OK! This is weird. The problem appears to have fixed itself.. And I don't really know how. I went into the bios, decided to instead of reset it, set it to high performance defaults then downgrade anything my components can't support or I don't like... THEN, Windows booted into scandisk, did a check on my boot disk, found nothing wrong with it, restarted my PC and now everythings beautiful. Well, I'm not complaining anyway =D Thanks everyone!

[ash_rm]

First thing i'd do m8 is get rid of that Q-Tec PSU!

[streetster]

maybe a mixture of motherboard drivers and some bios settings fixed it all

[Max Tractor]

you really need to run 1:1 with bartons, but it would not hit enough to cause 10+min spi

[Zak33]

please could you try this.

Start> Run> msconfig

go to the tab on the far right that's called Startup

Count the items in it, and take us a screen shot

Cheers