Ok I have put together a new pc and had it up and running for a little while. To me it doesnt appear too speedy and windows isnt amazingly stable (ok, so no surprise there...) I dont know if i am expecting too much or there is something i have over looked, Spec: AMD 3500+ ASUS A8V Deluxe Mobo 1G Kinston Paired RAM 2 SATA 170G Deskstar HDD (RAID 0+2) (Stripe) Linksys Wifi 430w Asus PSU Aopen DVD rom IDE Toshiba DVD rom IDE Thats about it... I have turned off all the automatic temp adjusting stuff (cool&quiet by AMD) i have set overclock to auto and left pretty much everything else to factory settings. I have partitioned the HDD into about 4 drives keeping C for windows and others for docs and stuff. It just doesnt appear to be happy when it is under a heavy load. It has hiccups/ problems running easy games such as Red Alert 2. Havent even tried it with the likes of Doom 3 yet. Most of all it has a tendency to crash explorer lots... Is this because of the Mobo or just crappy windows...? Any help would be appreciated, and i know this isnt a support forum, but you guys almost always have a good answer, so i thought i would run it by you. Oh, and does anyone out there know of a good free partitioning program? Just a little note, when i am copying something from a CD/DVD to the HDD and trying to play music for example, there does not appear to be enought proc power to do the two at the same time, so i get crazy slow glitchy music. I know this might be the hdd, but it should be able to do two things at once no?
It might be running hot, but do you defrag and disc clean up? and when you mean crash,, how would it crash explorer?
diskeeper lite 9 its an excelence defrag program and really fast!!. check your sata config,and the hard drive.. that system should be fliying it really can.. and ddp is right theres a lack of power there..
When you are doing your stuff and it looks like it is glitching, have you pressed CTRL+DEL and displayed the performance tab to see if you CPU is running at max, I know windows is not very accurate here but would be a guide. Also what graphics card are you running aswell? Also, can you run any of the apps in safe mode at all, and if so do you get the same result. Also Partition Magic is another good partitioning program.
Ok, the graphics card in there is an Radeon 9800pro. In windows, you know when the task bar hangs and stops responding, thats explorer crashing. It does that alot. So you would recommend me getting a new PSU? I would have thought that 430w would be enough... Any suggestions as to what i should be going for. The Sata set up appears fine, i have run a diagnostic on it and the HDD's are perfect. All my drives are defraged once a week. Over kill perhaps but i transfer a lot of data. My CPU core temp is always around 32 degree's C and Mobo is about 28. So i dont think i am burning it out. I have 5 fans basting air round all the time. When i hit crt-alt-del windows tells me that my CPU peaks only now and again, and i have an asus prog that is seriously accurate and i have only maxed it out twice. But that is only using 2d progs like photoshop CS. Nothing massively draining. Thanks for the help so far all, does the extra info help?
The RAID setup is 'technology for technology's sake' - you are running it only because you can. You would achieve similar speed (and more stability) simply controlling 2 SATA drives. Do you also have a small IDE ATA drive C: for startup (system drive)? The benefit of 2 separate drives is, one can read while the other writes :^) Yours are both reading & both writing, at the same time. The sole benefit is that both volumes are 'spanned' into one giant space for you - but then you want to partition it smaller! RAID is beneficial for several dedicated operations, such as web host file-serving, or capturing live video to MPEG2 in real time, but the benefits of two individual drives might seem to be more attractive to you. If you had a C: (system partition, containing boot files) and a D: (boot partion, containing system files) and an E: (swapfile partition) I'm sure your absolute transfer speed would be fast enough w/o RAID, and you would achieve benefits in other areas. Hopefully stability would be one of those... It would seem that the 'overhead' of running RAID is more detrimental to your rig than any payback you might be realizing. Is your RAID in Software or in Hardware? I would consider ditching the RAID to see if the whole personality of your rig is transformed... (I know, easier said than done, LoL :^) BTW there is no RAID 0+2 Here is a link for those who don't know WTF we're talkin' about: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html Your PC should be FAST and stable Dkarn - it's better than mine and mine's not slow... Consider getting an inexpensive 40GB IDE, formatted FAT32 as a C: drive, if you are currently starting-up with your SATA array. Many small drives, each on their own controller (important) offer many significant advantages over 1 large drive. I can't see anywhere else you could be going wrong here... your PS should be okay. Why do you have 2 DVDs? Run 1 DVD burner! If you need a CD-Rom like a Plextor 3-sheep or whatever, that's different - but you could slave that to your burner no probs since they would rarely be working at the same time. Anyway good luck, Regards
I have to agree with The_OGS. The fact that your CPU is only peeking sometimes suggests there is a bottleneck somewhere, and more than likely could actually point to you RAID setup, regarding swapfiles etc..... One thing I have discovered is that when you build a new PC, it sometimes has an effect if you install drivers in a different way. Mainly the video drivers and sound drivers. I have encountered many problems where I have installed the sound drivers before the video (agp) drivers, the result is glitchy sound etc. I now install windows and the video drivers first before motherboard and other peripherals to avoid this problem occuring. I don't think you have a hardware issue as such, just a configuration issue regarding your PC architecture or a possible software conflict here.
Thank you all for your help. I will attempt to re distrebute my drives and HDD's soon. One last question though, How do i go about moving things like swapfile... How do i achive this setup after i have installed my HDDs. As i now have 3. 1 'C:/' 80gig IDE and 2 170gig Sata drives.
If you go My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory > Change, you can put your swapfile on a drive that does not contain WinXP - not just a different partition, but a different drive on its own controller. You don't really get a 'faster' swapfile per se; rather your OS disk has one LESS thing to do and can therefore concentrate on other things... L8R
