New Build Seems So Very Sloooooooooooow!

[Mighty Boosh]

Hi all,

I recently built a new system which had its teething troubles.

*See Here - http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=147992*

Anyway, irs all up and running now but when I think about it, compared to my previous system this should go like a stabbed rat but it seems to be even slower than my old system.

To summarize, my old system was powered by an old AMD Athlon CPU with 2GB of RAM. My new system is powered by an AMD Phenom 2 4 core 3.1 Ghz CPU with 8GB of RAM. Surely I should see an improvement in speed, performance and handling of multiple apps?

My question is, where to look first? have not got a clue as to what to look for, maybe you guys might know some tell tale signs of what to look for and what could be the cause.

Anyhoo, all suggestions welcome, clean ones that is

Cheers, Chris

 

[phanbuey]

i had a problem like this on a build... it was super slow for no reason.

A motherboard swap fixed the issues. Ended up being a cheap that mobo wasn't playing nice with something.

 

[BarbaricSoul]

first thing I'm gonna ask is for you to look towards the top of this page and click the User CP link, look on the left side of the screen, and fill-in your system specs so we know exactly what you have.

 

[erixx]

Don't know your OS, but did you update/verify ALL your systems drivers? Looked into Device Manager (Windows)? Mobo drivers CD? Etc.

Mobo's BIOS settings are on AUTO or maybe on the lowest possible? Did you activate the "more than 4 Gig of RAM" option?

Many things to check.

 

[Melvis]

We need more info, OS, and full system specs please?

And ,ore details on where it seems to be "slow"

Then we can give you some more ideas to test out etc.

1 i can think of is your HDD running in IDE or Sata mode?

 

[Mighty Boosh]

i had a problem like this on a build... it was super slow for no reason.

A motherboard swap fixed the issues. Ended up being a cheap that mobo wasn't playing nice with something.

Thanks for that, have emailed th supplier to see what they have to say.

first thing I'm gonna ask is for you to look towards the top of this page and click the User CP link, look on the left side of the screen, and fill-in your system specs so we know exactly what you have.

Apologies, should have done that the other week when joining. Anyway, now done.

Don't know your OS, but did you update/verify ALL your systems drivers? Looked into Device Manager (Windows)? Mobo drivers CD? Etc.

Mobo's BIOS settings are on AUTO or maybe on the lowest possible? Did you activate the "more than 4 Gig of RAM" option?

Many things to check.

Hi there, OS is XP Home, all new mobo drivers installed and up to date to the best of my knowledge. According to the suppliers, as it was a bundle the mobo and BIOS come pre set up and tested prior to dispatch. Not sure where to check the RAM's capacity options in BIOS. Spent most of the other week browsing thru BIOS and never saw any options like that.

We need more info, OS, and full system specs please?

And ,ore details on where it seems to be "slow"

Then we can give you some more ideas to test out etc.

1 i can think of is your HDD running in IDE or Sata mode?

OS and specs now supplied

Examples of slowness.........

Tranfering files from old system. Had some movie files on my old hard drive I wanted to keep. Anyway, 4.4GB DVD files that used to take on my old system around 5/6 minutes to move are now taking anything upto 28 minutes to move via an external USB caddy.

Opening multiple apps. Lets say I am using Firefox to browse the web, if I open another program this would be really slow to open. As a test case I now have Firefox running and i'll open up Microsoft Word and time it. BRB

OK, took around 25 seconds to load. Much slower than my old system I'm pretty sure.

 

[Beertintedgoggles]

Do you have any antivirus programs running? If so, try disabling it and see if the responsiveness of your pc improves. Some of those can be so invasive and inefficient that they can bring even a pretty powerful system to its knees.

 

[Hayder_Master]

What about you HDD it's new one or you still hold old one?

 

[Mighty Boosh]

Do you have any antivirus programs running? If so, try disabling it and see if the responsiveness of your pc improves. Some of those can be so invasive and inefficient that they can bring even a pretty powerful system to its knees.

Hi there,

First off, I want some of those goggles

Anyway, I'm currently running AVG free right now. Have done so for many years now and its always done OK for me and not caused any problems s'far. I'll try disabling it and see what the out come is.

One thing I forgot to mention was the fact that this system is also very slow to boot, much much slower than my old system. I have turned on quick boot in BIOS but this has made little if any difference.

Cheers, Chris

 

[Mighty Boosh]

What about you HDD it's new one or you still hold old one?

Oops, forgot this as well. HDD is a new never before used HDD. Its deicated with a 40GB partition for the OS and the other partition is for small program files. Any large programs I run from an external disk via a hot swap bay. The main HDD though is connected via IDE as I have used the four SATA inputs for 2 optical drives and the hot swap drive bay and a 5.25" multi media bay.

 

[Jetster]

I read this whole thing and didn't see anywhere were you were running a 64 bit OS? Don't want to make an assumption just cause you have 8Gb ram.

But anyway I would get Windows 7 64. Its going to make a big difference. But truly you need some benches to see where you are. Not just "it feels the same" But hard data then we will see. But seriously get 7 64 bit

 

[Steve-007UK]

Try disconecting the IDE drive as i have seen some AMD systems have problems when using IDE and Sata at the same time although things might be diffrent with newer stuff but its still worth checking. Or is the IDE drive the one with the OS on?

 

[Mighty Boosh]

Try disconecting the IDE drive as i have seen some AMD systems have problems when using IDE and Sata at the same time although things might be diffrent with newer stuff but its still worth checking. Or is the IDE drive the one with the OS on?

Hello mate,

The IDE is the one with the OS on so thats not an option right now.

On the subject of some firm figures, courtesy of Novabench..........

07/07/2011 13:06:56
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
AMD Athlon II X4 645 @ 3114 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a

3040 MB System RAM (Score: 90)
- RAM Speed: 2690 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 300)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 74430384
- Integer Operations/Second: 257092620
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 678130

Graphics Tests (Score: 7)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 29

Hardware Tests (Score: 3)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 39 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 6 MB/s

For an 8GB system, should that RAM result not be a lot better?

 

[phanbuey]

what it sounds like is the drive controller / USB controller on the mobo is having issues in windows... the motherboard vendor will always deny anything and everything.

Have you tried updating the BIOS?

 

[Splodge]

Looking at your results, you are only running a 32bit version of XP, so your system will only address a max of about 3.5GB of you ram, as was mentioned earlier you would be allot better off getting a 64bit version on Win7 (XP 64bit was very experimental and had limited driver support!) I do realise that this might be a budget issue as well though!

You HDD is most likely the issue, you are running your primary system drive on your slowest port, IDE specification is allot slower than even SATA1, and hence your drive write speed is reporting 6MB/s only, even IDE should be running allot better than that. if it is only running at 6MB a second it is going to take a while to shift a 4.4GB file....

Does your old system you are comparing it with have it's main drive on a Sata connection? Have you checked what sort of IDE cable you are using for your main drive as well, as there were a number of different types and is sounds like you might not have a 40wire cable.

Good practice for performance would mean you would be allot better off with one of your DVD drives being on the IDE and you main (and hence most used) drive on the first SATA channel, with a SATA2 drive on it (or even 3 sorry not checked if you mobo is compatible with 3)

I hope some of this might help, I am not normally much for writing on forums (hence I needed to sign up to reply!)

Cheers Splodge

 

[newtekie1]

I was just going to say it was the hard drive causing the problem. If the one in your specs is correct, it is likely an old 160GB drive that just has terrible read/write speeds. And the benchmark numbers that were posted confirm that.

I'm not going to say the IDE port is the issue, as really even the highest end SATA3 HDDs barely use all the bandwidth provided by IDE, however old IDE drives are slow, it wouldn't matter what interface they are on, the physical drives are slow.

Also, your OS is crippling your system. It is only allowing 3GB of your RAM to be used, wasting the other 5GB. You need to upgrade to an 64-bit system.


So you need to put a new SATA hard drive in that machine, simply for the fact that SATA drives are so much faster than IDE, and the nVidia chipset on the board you are using likely has extremely poor IDE support. It is there, and works, but just barely. I would avoid using the IDE port at all costs. Even if you have to buy an add on SATA controller for one of your optical drives to use.

 

[CJCerny]

I guess another mystery would be why the OP stated that his new system was built around a Phenom 2 and Novabench shows it as an Athlon 2. Those aren't the same CPU at all. OP must have misspoken or they sold him something other than he thought he was buying.

 

[freaksavior]

I was just going to say it was the hard drive causing the problem. If the one in your specs is correct, it is likely an old 160GB drive that just has terrible read/write speeds. And the benchmark numbers that were posted confirm that.

I'm not going to say the IDE port is the issue, as really even the highest end SATA3 HDDs barely use all the bandwidth provided by IDE, however old IDE drives are slow, it wouldn't matter what interface they are on, the physical drives are slow.

Also, your OS is crippling your system. It is only allowing 3GB of your RAM to be used, wasting the other 5GB. You need to upgrade to an 64-bit system.


So you need to put a new SATA hard drive in that machine, simply for the fact that SATA drives are so much faster than IDE, and the nVidia chipset on the board you are using likely has extremely poor IDE support. It is there, and works, but just barely. I would avoid using the IDE port at all costs. Even if you have to buy an add on SATA controller for one of your optical drives to use.

I have to agree with newtekie1 on this one. New system with outdated os and hard drive is just asking for trouble. Upgrade the hard drive to something more mordern and jump on the windows 7 bandwagon. You'll see a good bit of speed difference.

 

[TC-man]

Hello mate,

The IDE is the one with the OS on so thats not an option right now.

On the subject of some firm figures, courtesy of Novabench..........

07/07/2011 13:06:56
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
AMD Athlon II X4 645 @ 3114 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a

3040 MB System RAM (Score: 90)
- RAM Speed: 2690 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 300)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 74430384
- Integer Operations/Second: 257092620
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 678130

Graphics Tests (Score: 7)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 29

Hardware Tests (Score: 3)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 39 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 6 MB/s

For an 8GB system, should that RAM result not be a lot better?

Hi,

There's your problem, do not use more than 4 GB ram on a Windows XP 32bit OS since it will give you problems such as e.g. poor performance and programs begin to say you do not have enough memory and so on. Try to run the system with 2GB and see if the performance is better than before with 8 GB.

And seriously, upgrade to Windows 7 x64 (Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate edition) and you will see the performance increase, expecially with 8 GB system memory.


Good luck!

 

[newtekie1]

I guess another mystery would be why the OP stated that his new system was built around a Phenom 2 and Novabench shows it as an Athlon 2. Those aren't the same CPU at all. OP must have misspoken or they sold him something other than he thought he was buying.

A lot of people just don't recognize the difference between a Phenom 2 and Athlon 2, they assume they are interchangable. An AMD Quad is an AMD Quad it would seem...

I have to agree with newtekie1 on this one. New system with outdated os and hard drive is just asking for trouble. Upgrade the hard drive to something more mordern and jump on the windows 7 bandwagon. You'll see a good bit of speed difference.

Yeah, I just did the Novatech benchmark on the server I'm working on with a 2.5" 5400RPM laptop hard drive as the OS drive, and it gets write speeds of 55MB/s. So if he is only getting 6MB/s, I can guarantee the hard drive is the issue.

 

[theeldest]

Yeah, I just did the Novatech benchmark on the server I'm working on with a 2.5" 5400RPM laptop hard drive as the OS drive, and it gets write speeds of 55MB/s. So if he is only getting 6MB/s, I can guarantee the hard drive is the issue.

+1

I had a server where I dropped in an older drive for the OS. Took forever to bootup and was generally slow. Benchmarked the drive and had 5MB/s sequential read speeds.

Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 ...

Single platter drive. Do it.

 

[TC-man]

A lot of people just don't recognize the difference between a Phenom 2 and Athlon 2, they assume they are interchangable. An AMD Quad is an AMD Quad it would seem...

Well, AMD didn't help bij renaming their newer Athlon II X4 into e.g. the Phenom II X4 840.

Yeah, I just did the Novatech benchmark on the server I'm working on with a 2.5" 5400RPM laptop hard drive as the OS drive, and it gets write speeds of 55MB/s. So if he is only getting 6MB/s, I can guarantee the hard drive is the issue.

Perhaps he needs to install some ide/motherboard drivers (if there's one), since it feels like the harddrive is running in PIO mode, and that's really slow.

 

[erixx]

I was going to add, but it is pretty much solved: Windows XP is not for over 4 Gig of RAM (just doesn't see it, will never, you need a 64bit O.S., like Vista, 7 in their 64bit version. I do not recommend Win XP 64, a rarity)

Anyways, the BIOS setting is on the page where the Northbridge settings are, iirc. Next time I restart I will look at the naming (althout each mobo brand use their own obscurities)

 

[Completely Bonkers]

I've got a pentium 4 IDE system here. I'll go and download Novabench so you have some comparative performance statistics. This might help pinpoint the problem.

I do agree with others that the HDD "system" might be the issue. But it might not be the drive, per se, but the chipset or the cable. Performance of IDE and 160GB should be fine for your build. People often think "older" is "legacy" is "dinosaur" is "terrible performance". IMO, there is something else wrong. Either the HDD is suffering due to hardware failure, or the controller, or the cable, or possibly do you also have an IDE CD Drive, which could cause incompatibility. Put it on a separate channel.

Do you have another IDE cable you can try? I remember terrible problems with a system once... and no amount of diagnosing got to the problem until I swapped the cable. It was the IDE cable that was to blame. The "error checking/correction" of the drive and chipset resulted in poor performance rather than failure... and this meant it was harder to discover.

It is a quick and easy fix to try. Get a different IDE cable, plug it into the OTHER channel and dont plug in any CD drives.

***EDIT*** Results of Novabench, hope it helps

NovaBench Score: 204

07/07/2011 23:59:23
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz @ 2992 MHz
Graphics Card: RADEON X800 XT

1023 MB System RAM (Score: 78)
- RAM Speed: 1621 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 98)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 30946454
- Integer Operations/Second: 39488704
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 366227

Graphics Tests (Score: 23)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 80

Hardware Tests (Score: 5)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 30 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 29 MB/s

 

[yogurt_21]

I've got a pentium 4 IDE system here. I'll go and download Novabench so you have some comparative performance statistics. This might help pinpoint the problem.

I do agree with others that the HDD "system" might be the issue. But it might not be the drive, per se, but the chipset or the cable. Performance of IDE and 160GB should be fine for your build. People often think "older" is "legacy" is "dinosaur" is "terrible performance". IMO, there is something else wrong. Either the HDD is suffering due to hardware failure, or the controller, or the cable, or possibly do you also have an IDE CD Drive, which could cause incompatibility. Put it on a separate channel.

Do you have another IDE cable you can try? I remember terrible problems with a system once... and no amount of diagnosing got to the problem until I swapped the cable. It was the IDE cable that was to blame. The "error checking/correction" of the drive and chipset resulted in poor performance rather than failure... and this meant it was harder to discover.

It is a quick and easy fix to try. Get a different IDE cable, plug it into the OTHER channel and dont plug in any CD drives.

***EDIT*** Results of Novabench, hope it helps

you're still talking 29MB/s vs a modern SATA drives 120MB/s. Still way slower even if the ide drive is working.



edit: added the novabench scores from my work pc as a reference, this is a 160GB sata drive, 8GB of 1333 memory with an e7500 cpu, this should be around the same or less performance as the op's rig should put out properly configured.

7/7/2011 3:23:45 PM
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Intel Core2 Duo E7500 2.93GHz @ 2926 MHz
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 3450 - Dell Optiplex

8062 MB System RAM (Score: 156)
- RAM Speed: 4218 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 249)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 51080584
- Integer Operations/Second: 165349878
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 875637

Graphics Tests (Score: 25)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 87

Hardware Tests (Score: 22)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 148 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 108 MB/s