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.

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?

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

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?

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.

times_champion · 19 Feb 2006 at 23:52

Amps said:
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.

Cheers - looks like it could be that then. The only other racing game I play is TOCA Race Driver 2, and that runs without any pauses at all. Let me know how you get on.

times_champion · 20 Feb 2006 at 00:45

I tried with no AA at all, but no difference whatsoever. I did notice that the pauses happen at the same place on every lap, so I'm guessing it is something to do with loading new data? The pauses in The Movies annoy me mopre though - does anyone else get those, when a new movie is ready for release amongst other times? The whole game pauses and slows for a second or two.

times_champion · 20 Feb 2006 at 10:57

n3x said:
i recently upgraded to 2gb of ram and now nfs is super smooth! it helped me so not sure why it didnt do anything for u amps

Did you have a similar problem with it then? You have a similar gfx card, so it COULD be just memory I need...... Is anyone having the problems I mentioned with The Movies as well?