eliminating 'pauses'

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 12:16

I recently upgraded to a pretty good gaming rig; Pentium 940 dual core, 7800gtx, 1gb 533mhx DDR2 RAM, 2x160gb HDD (raid) and it does play games very well - however I have noticed annoying 'pauses' on most of my games. I dont think these are frame rate issues, as pretty much every game plays well in high detail (exept ultra detail on quake 4, but I believe you really need a 512mb card for that) but it seems to happen when new data is loaded in, like when a movie is released in The Movies, or when you turn a corner in NFS:MW, or open up a new area in Half-Life 2, or Doom 3 in ultra mode. These dont ruin games for me, but they are a little annoying so I was wondering what uopgrade path would get rid of them. Am I best of upgrading my RAM to 2gb? Or is it my hard drive slowing things down? Would I be better off getting a raptor HD just for my games installation? Any help would be appreciated.

AWPC · 19 Feb 2006 at 12:26

U really need 2GB.

Lot of games run slower with Intel Dual Core CPUs due to the architecture & poor programming. You may actually get better FPS if you disable one of the cores in the bios (not sure if this is possible) or set affinity for the games .exe to run on 1 CPU only.

2GB should eliminate the pauses though.

Explicit · 19 Feb 2006 at 12:53

Yeah, 2GB ram might help you out, but ultimately, that CPU is not the best for gaming.

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 13:03

Cheers guys. I will get 2gb. I'm not too bothered about the pentium thing, as I cant change that anyway (and I think I've got one of the best pentiums for gaming) but I will get an extra 1gb RAM pretty soon if that will eliminate most of my problems. Any suggestions which to get? I think my mobo is a Dell one, DXP051?

Explicit · 19 Feb 2006 at 13:23

Not sure what your budget is, but here's some options to consider:

Corsair 2GB DDR2 Value Select PC5300 Dual Channel Kit (2x1GB) (VS2GBKIT667D2) (MY-097-CS) £146.82

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB5300DC) (MY-034-GL) £164.44

OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC5300 Dual Channel Gold GX XTC Series EL-DDR2 (OCZ26672048ELGEGXT-K) (MY-064-OC) £199.69

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-5400 TwinX (2x1GB) (MY-095-CS) £199.69

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400 TwinX (2x1GB) (MY-092-CS) £223.19

Phemo · 19 Feb 2006 at 13:48

Your CPU is fine, nothing wrong with it at all and it's certainly not the cause of the stutters. Just want to reiterate what everyone has already said - going to 2GB of RAM will help quite a lot with those games so I would recommend it.

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 13:56

Explicit said:
Not sure what your budget is, but here's some options to consider:

Corsair 2GB DDR2 Value Select PC5300 Dual Channel Kit (2x1GB) (VS2GBKIT667D2) (MY-097-CS) £146.82

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB5300DC) (MY-034-GL) £164.44

OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC5300 Dual Channel Gold GX XTC Series EL-DDR2 (OCZ26672048ELGEGXT-K) (MY-064-OC) £199.69

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-5400 TwinX (2x1GB) (MY-095-CS) £199.69

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400 TwinX (2x1GB) (MY-092-CS) £223.19

Thanks - I only need 1 GB though - preferably 2x512mb

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 13:56

Phemo said:
Your CPU is fine, nothing wrong with it at all and it's certainly not the cause of the stutters. Just want to reiterate what everyone has already said - going to 2GB of RAM will help quite a lot with those games so I would recommend it.

Excellent - many thanks

Amps · 19 Feb 2006 at 15:42

times_champion said:
I recently upgraded to a pretty good gaming rig; Pentium 940 dual core, 7800gtx, 1gb 533mhx DDR2 RAM, 2x160gb HDD (raid) and it does play games very well - however I have noticed annoying 'pauses' on most of my games. I dont think these are frame rate issues, as pretty much every game plays well in high detail (exept ultra detail on quake 4, but I believe you really need a 512mb card for that) but it seems to happen when new data is loaded in, like when a movie is released in The Movies, or when you turn a corner in NFS:MW, or open up a new area in Half-Life 2, or Doom 3 in ultra mode. These dont ruin games for me, but they are a little annoying so I was wondering what uopgrade path would get rid of them. Am I best of upgrading my RAM to 2gb? Or is it my hard drive slowing things down? Would I be better off getting a raptor HD just for my games installation? Any help would be appreciated.

2 Gb does not solve the need for speed most wanted pauses as i get them to.

I ran 2Gb for 2 days and it did not help matters over 1gb.

I think the issue is either software related... i have to get round to doing a reinstall of windows or an issue with the graphics card as yours is very similer to mine.

Anyway Ram didnt solve the pausing problem for me.

Phemo · 19 Feb 2006 at 15:59

Amps said:
Anyway Ram didnt solve the pausing problem for me.

I see you have a dual core processor also. Presumably you tried manually setting the affinity so it only runs on one processor? I also had to do that - but others don't. Worth a try if you haven't already.

Amps · 19 Feb 2006 at 16:05

No i have a single core opteron.. running at faster than FX-57 speeds , so i presume thats not the limiting part in my machine.

Phemo · 19 Feb 2006 at 16:12

Amps said:
No i have a single core opteron.. running at faster than FX-57 speeds , so i presume thats not the limiting part in my machine.

Sorry, I'm blind, read it as 165 for some reason

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 16:34

Phemo said:
I see you have a dual core processor also. Presumably you tried manually setting the affinity so it only runs on one processor? I also had to do that - but others don't. Worth a try if you haven't already.

I dont know how to do that - do you have any tips?

Phemo · 19 Feb 2006 at 16:40

There are a few ways. You can get a few programs that will do it for you, but the easiest way to try it is to start the game up, hit ctrl+alt+del and get to the task manager. On the processes tab, find the game in question - for NFS Most Wanted it's obviously going to be speed.exe - right click it, then choose Set Affinity. You'll see that CPU0 and CPU1 are ticked - just untick one of the boxes and see if that helps.

It might well help NFS out (did in my experience), but the other games shouldn't need it. Still worth trying though.

Deckard · 19 Feb 2006 at 17:15

I've only got 1Gb of ram in my machine, and I don't get any pauses/stuttering in any of my games. What's running in the background in windows ? (av, firewall, etc)

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 18:24

Could be bittorrent - I'll try switching that off after Ive tried the single core thing.

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 18:44

I tried only checking 1 CPU, then also stopping bittorrent, but i cant say either made much of a difference. I opened task manager and had around 50 ongoing processes - is that normal? I guess it must be a RAM issue then. Those that are playing it with no pauses - do you have max detail + aa on 1280x1024?

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 18:50

BTW - when I say pauses I dont mean anything more than a quarter second - it is just a slight frame drop then back to normal a very short time later - apart from the Movies, which does pause for a second or two sometimes.

Amps · 19 Feb 2006 at 20:15

times_champion said:
BTW - when I say pauses I dont mean anything more than a quarter second - it is just a slight frame drop then back to normal a very short time later - apart from the Movies, which does pause for a second or two sometimes.

My computer does EXACTLY the same.

This pausing forced me to buy 2 Gb of ram that didnt help , a multi meter to check psu.. that isnt a problem and also make sure everything is super duper stable.

In my opinion the problem lies with the Nvidia Geforce 7800 card and that game as i have read 2 or 3 other people with identical problems.

I will try a reinstall of windows when i get round to it and ill tell you if that works if it doesnt.. ill try and get hold of an ATI card to see if that gets rid of the problem. But as need for speed most wanted goes its definetly not the ram.. if you run a program called memwatcher while playing the game you will see that the game doesnt use more than 600Mb.

barnettgs · 19 Feb 2006 at 20:49

times_champion said:
I recently upgraded to a pretty good gaming rig; Pentium 940 dual core, 7800gtx, 1gb 533mhx DDR2 RAM, 2x160gb HDD (raid) and it does play games very well - however I have noticed annoying 'pauses' on most of my games. I dont think these are frame rate issues, as pretty much every game plays well in high detail (exept ultra detail on quake 4, but I believe you really need a 512mb card for that) but it seems to happen when new data is loaded in, like when a movie is released in The Movies, or when you turn a corner in NFS:MW, or open up a new area in Half-Life 2, or Doom 3 in ultra mode. These dont ruin games for me, but they are a little annoying so I was wondering what uopgrade path would get rid of them. Am I best of upgrading my RAM to 2gb? Or is it my hard drive slowing things down? Would I be better off getting a raptor HD just for my games installation? Any help would be appreciated.

You didn't say what motherboard you have but try changing the speed of your ram from 533mhz to 400mhz and see how it goes.