does having 2lots of ram slow games down

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 00:40

ive got a Asus A8N-SLI Premium and my ram is GeIL 1GB (2x512MB)
XFX GeForce 6800 GT

im having problems with quake 4 also doom 3 where in certain places im getting hitching (short pauses) doom 3 is the worse, someone told me that 1gb might not be enough for some games and that could be my problem.

another person said also by having two slots of ram (2x512MB) it can slow things down abit when playing memory hungry games, i was told if i wanted to have 1gb i should just have 1 stick of 1gb how true is this would this be the cause of the problem

ive tried everything to stop the hitching (short pauses) im sure the graphics card is not at fault

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 08:26

maybe my GeIL 1GB is not compatable with my mobo i know a lot of people have had no problems with Asus A8N-SLI&GEIL maybe im one of the unlucky ones. ram is the only thing i can think of that would cause hitching. my specs is more than enough to run games

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 14:16

this is what i got playing quake4 doom3

quake 4
commit charge total 7977492
cpu usage 18%
pf usage 786mb

doom 3
commit charge total 821780
cpu usage 100%
pf usage 623mb

to me that means nothing lol

but look at the cpu on doom3

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:25

its very strange when im playing doom 3 where it starts off the cpu usage stays around 43% but if im pointing in the direction where it starts to hitch (short pauses)
the cpu usage goes staright up to 100%

when i move around where it doesn't start to hitch it goes back to 43%

please explain???

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:27

please read my above post as you just posted before i hit the reply button, but ive been taken it while the game is on

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:46

ajgoodfellow said:
What are your peak commit charge usages? That's the crtical value

my peak commit charge usage is 653668 while running the game but also without game running

wigster · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:54

im pretty sure its only started to happen on doom3 but quake 4 is new

but when i was playing quake4 the peak commit charge usage was 791508

it still happens when shutting down everything thats not needed

wigster · 16 Mar 2006 at 14:30

done a format got new drivers nforce+forceware no programs=no spyware did a scan just to make sure, just doom 3 quake 4 on my pc, i cant hear the hard drive running when hitching.

i dont have dualcore

i would say its only on doom 3 engine

these games are fine
republic commando
starwars battlefront 2
gta
fantastic four

when im playing doom 3 i can only play at 640x480 i would have thought that would be to low? it is only stable if i turn off shadows then i stop getting hitching but if i have it on the hitching comes back in certain places of the game

my system
imagequest q995 (monitor)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Western Digital Caviar 250GB
AMD Athlon 64 3700 Skt 939
GeIL 1GB
XFX GeForce 6800 GT

wigster · 16 Mar 2006 at 15:11

when quake is running and i have task manager up

taks manager
quake 4
cpu 14
mem usage 198,200k

system idle process
cpu 84
mem usage 20k

when playing doom 3

doom 3
cpu 86
mem usage 133,532

system idle process
cpu 7
mem usage 20k

there is a lot of difference between the two games

wigster · 17 Mar 2006 at 11:49

my pc is fast enough to run quake/doom at high detail patches do nothing i know someone who has the same spec and it runs ok.

lastnight i ran out of ideas so i thought i would try to overclock the card

i only took it up 1 notch then run a test

the test failed please lower the settings, i thought it was a bit strange but i turned it down still got the message turned it down again still got the same message

something is not right

wigster · 17 Mar 2006 at 13:54

i know my psu has enough power but i will download that program, how do i change the timings to 1T?

wigster · 17 Mar 2006 at 14:30

ok ive just found how to change it, but with the program what does revision mean if it means model its not in the list and i did update the program,changing to t1 has made no difference

wigster · 17 Mar 2006 at 16:20

ill have a look on their website

i thought it could be ram so i left one stick in to see how stable it was, it was stable i swapped them over to make sure one of them was not a bit duff, one of the sticks i stuck in when i came out of the game it froze so i tried the other stick it didn't freeze but it took a bit longer to exit and get back to windows

wigster · 17 Mar 2006 at 16:42

i did that the other day kept it going for about 4hours i had no problems with it

wigster · 20 Mar 2006 at 21:56

over the weekend ive been benchmarking my system and it looks like there is a conflict with opengl and the forceware driver. but i stll dont know how to fix this problem. i downloaded a opengl 3d spinning box screensaver and it happens to that,so i know for sure its something to do with opengl