Super Desktop, Inferior Game Running :(

[Mussels]

Niv
Your motherboard has an integrated GPU. Are you sure you have the monitor plugged into the actual video card (8600GT), not into the motherboard?

if that was the case he'd have no video output. Also, note that he mentions high FPS that then dips, he'd be low all around on the onboard. His hitching also occurs in 2D, meaning that the video card is most likely unrelated.


So that it doesnt get lost Niv, can you please check the power option i mentioned. A friend recently had a similar problem, although his was in vista - BIOS and windows have options to turn off HDD's after an idle period, and his system was freezing temporarily due to the drives turning on and off.

 

[Niv]

I can't find the power option in the device manager section, only these ones are listed instead:
Computer
Disk drives
Diplay adapters
DVD/CD-ROM drives
Floppy disk controllrs
flppy disk drives
Human Interface DeicesIDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Keybards
Mice and other pointing devices
Monitors
Network adapters
NVIDIA NtworkBus Enumerator
Ports (COM&LPT)
Processors
Sound, video and game controllers
System devices
Universal Serial Bus controllers

 

[Mussels]

I can't find the power option in the device manager section, only these ones are listed instead:
Computer
Disk drives
Diplay adapters
DVD/CD-ROM drives
Floppy disk controllrs
flppy disk drives
Human Interface DeicesIDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Keybards
Mice and other pointing devices
Monitors
Network adapters
NVIDIA NtworkBus Enumerator
Ports (COM&LPT)
Processors
Sound, video and game controllers
System devices
Universal Serial Bus controllers

its in the control panel, not device manager. thats my bad, i said it wrong in the post.

 

[Darren]

it says "Nvidia Geforce7050PV/nForce 60a Chipset Support CD Rev.407.01", my video card is Nvidia e-GeForce8200 GT

Your spec says you have an 8600 GT not an e-GeForce8200 GT, is the "e-Geforce8200 GT" the integrated card?

perhaps my video card is too much for my mother board to handle?

No such thing either your card is PCI-E compatible or not and it is. The 8200/8600 series aren't exactly the most powerful cards (actually pretty weak) any below average motherboard and PSU should "handle" it well.



I think your PC dealer is making excuses Windows XP Media Center is a good operating system, maybe not the best for gaming but it wouldn't pose you any problems. If your within warranty have your dealer replace the system free of charge.

 

[Niv]

sorry it's a typo not e-GeForce8200 GT but this is what I hav instead for video card e-GeForce8600 GT

checked power contorl. it says "never".

 

[Mussels]

sorry it's a typo not e-GeForce8200 GT but this is what I hav instead for video card e-GeForce8600 GT

checked power contorl. it says "never".

well for once i am going to admit defeat. I seriously have no idea what could be causing this. if you do solve it, please make sure to let us know - its not often i get totally stumped, and i'd really like to know what to do if i run into this again.

 

[Ripper3]

I can't think of any suggestions, that haven't been given already.
This really is confusing, but I would like to say (I might have missed someone else saying it, sorry if I did), SYSTEM and SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS shouldn't worry you, they'll spike up when needed.
http://www.neuber.com/taskmanager/process/system .html
There's nothing to worry about there.

Somke motherboards react differently with on-board and discrete graphics boards, so if the on-board IS enabled, it may be taking precedence over the discrete. Really just double-check the connections to the card, and the BIOS, to make sure it's disabled.
Might be worth checking out GPU-Z as well, give us the clock speeds it's running (who knows, may be underclocked for some reason), and jsut as a double-check it's running off the 8600.
Oh, and it wouldn't necesarilly be running slow off the on-board. Certainly would account for the lagging though, since the 7050 shares system RAM, so maybe it's accessing it, and slowing the computer. Although with 4Gigs, that may not be the case.

Isn't there a way for his RAM to be fully accessible? Thought there were options built-in that would allow the computer to recognise all of the RAM.

 

[Niv]

well thanks for the tons of input. What I will do tomorrow/today (5:00am right now) is I will call the shop keeper to let him know of the problem, and I will send the machine in asking for a better mother board in exchage for the trouble he has caused me and the old piece of crap motherboard (brand new but still crap)

Ripper3, I'm a computer idiot, this is my first Desktop ever owned, used and purchased in my life. I don't know half the things you are talking about there. If you wouldn't mind can you explain those in layman's term so that I can understand or at least know what to do to perform the things you're talking about?

Lastly, can you guys give me some inputs on how good a deal it is for this desktop, if it's priced at 930 and purchased at 850 CDN? (purchased 1 month + 1 week ago) Thanks, any opinions are great, don't worry about making me feel bad for buying crap at ripped off prices.

 

[Mussels]

he's talking about onboard video, fighting the dedicated card for resources. its rare, but its possible. Turning the onboard video off in the bios would fix any issues if that was the problem.

If you bought that for $850 with no screen, i'd say you got ripped. the CPU is great, the rest is only midrange at best.

If you can, next time build your own rig - we'll gladly help you out here.

 

[Niv]

oh yeah forgot to add, that includes a 19" plasma wide screen

 

[Mussels]

oh yeah forgot to add, that includes a 19" plasma wide screen

LCD? plasma and LCD are quite different.

thats not so bad then.

Prices have been dropping steadily here in aus recently, $900 for a tower would get me a core 2 duo system with 4GB ram, a 9600GT, 500GB HDD and a brand-name case and PSU (probably antec)

 

[Ripper3]

Sorry, my posts are normally a bunch of crap mixed together, and replying to different posts at different times.

Your system has discrete and on-board graphics, so it's got the GeForce 7050, which explains the drivers on the disc, and it has the 8600GT as discrete.
If the on-board graphics are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS, and you have the monitor plugged into the motherboard's video output, then the system could be using the on-board instead of the discrete.
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=1841&l1=3&l2=101&l3=567&l4=0
Check the picture near the bottom of that link, labelled Back Panel I/O Ports. If the monitor is plugged into the blue or white connector there, then it's connected to the wrong ports (again, sorry if you've tried this and I missed it).
If it is, then change the connector. The ones for the 8600 will be lower down on the back of the case, since it's a tower.

Linky for GPU-Z
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
Just run it, and see what it shows up. If it displays information about the Geforce 7050, it's running on-board graphics for sure.
Oh and while at it, run a game, it has a temperature readout in the program, and should show the temperature of your graphics card.

 

[Niv]

k, some more infos for you guys:

I have 2 gif files from the GPU.exe:

I also have 4 jpeg files from my task manager labeling what I see before and during the lag.

 

[Ripper3]

That's fine, it's using the 8600GT, and the temperatures are safe.
That is peculiar, when Caesar IV dips in CPU usage.
System Idle process is fine though, it's just showing the amount of CPU time that's not currently in use, so it seems the game just suddenly stops for some reason.

You're not the only person that has trouble with Caesar IV and an Athlon X2: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1BEW3EV40P76Y/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm&tag=tec06d-20
The Athlon patch and installing all MS updates fixed it for him.
I'll check about trouble including 8-series cards.

 

[Niv]

mind you this happens for ALL my other games: Voyage Century Online, Warhammer 40,000 - Dark Crusade.

 

[Ripper3]

True, almost forgot about that, but since you had Caesar IV open, tried to find info about problems involving Caesar.

I almost get the feeling that the OS might be the problem. Can MCE2002 be updated to 2005, or are they too different, and require different licenses?
I'd say, if you take it back to them, ask for a different OS, even if it's just for testing, I'd ask for plain old XP Home/Pro. See if the problems go away.

 

[Mussels]

True, almost forgot about that, but since you had Caesar IV open, tried to find info about problems involving Caesar.

I almost get the feeling that the OS might be the problem. Can MCE2002 be updated to 2005, or are they too different, and require different licenses?
I'd say, if you take it back to them, ask for a different OS, even if it's just for testing, I'd ask for plain old XP Home/Pro. See if the problems go away.

he said earlier he went back to XP SP2, same problem.

 

[Ripper3]

Woops sorry. My mistake, then.

It is peculiar. I guess you should probably just take it back, and see what they tell you. And if they say they can't find a fault, I'd force them to try again, and show them the game performance, since they may sometimes not find anything wrong with it, or do, and try to pass it off as working.

 

[vega22]

my money is its due to the 86gt being a poor card (sry bro but it is) the rest of your setup is ok and should do well in most games if you had more gpu power.

 

[driver66]

Have you tried updating the chipset drivers?

 

[Mussels]

my money is its due to the 86gt being a poor card (sry bro but it is) the rest of your setup is ok and should do well in most games if you had more gpu power.

thats completely irrelevant, and to be honest quite poor thinking. you think an 8600GT isnt enough for civ IV? How does a poor card explain the CPU spiking??

I know that this problem is hard to narrow down, but wild guesses help no one.

The only new thing i can think of, is the BIOS version on the system. tried updating the latest one on the motherboard? (has this already been suggested?)

 

[Ripper3]

The 8600 series isn't THAT poor. My GTS could handle pretty much anything I threw at it, so think before you immediately put something down.
Meanwhile, Caesar IV wouldn't slow it down to that effect, it would be getting a consistently low FPS if that was the case, but it jsut freezes and lags every few seconds, that suggests a completely different problem.

 

[tkpenalty]

Anyone ever thought of a virus which migrates onto removable storage media so that even if you format it comes back? Or even worse a rootkit.

 

[mrhuggles]

get process explorer, and load it

view, select columns, process performance tab, check CPU History.

view, check show new processes

let this run for a while, while your playing things, watch for it to slow down then get outa the game and look in it, in the little graphs, these graphs to the right of each process show each processes cpu useage history, im hopeing you can figure out what to do from here

 

[imperialreign]

just a thought, and not sure if it's been mentioned as I just skimmed over this thread . . .


but have you turned off WIN self-defragging and HDD indexing? Both XP and Vista are set at default to defrag the hard drives, and index the files and folders when the HDDs are at an idle state, and WIN doesn't seem to pay if you're playing a game or using some other application.




Another thought - what kind of FPS are we talking about here, you could use FRAPS program to monitor FPS in-game. I'm kind getting the feeling, though, the slowness you're speaking of is really just loading stutter (seeing as how you say games run fast, then really slow, and then fast again). You could try to reduce in game details just a bit (like lower texture quality or something), and see if improves the slowness issue at all.