Pausing problems while gaming

[GoldenHornet]

I have built my first homebuild pc and everything seems to be running great except when I play City of Villains/Heroes (although I haven't tried any other games). Whilst playing, the game seems to hesitate frequently and randomly.

The build is as follows:

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
2x512MB Crucial Ballistix PC3200
MSI GeForce 6800GS 256MB PCIE
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB
580W HiperPower Type-R
KCorp Wireless LAN PCI
Lite-On LTD163 DVD-ROM


I have installed the latest AMD Drivers (1.2.2.0) and the MS Hotfix for dual core processors. I also tried setting the affinity of the game to a single core without any improvement. I tried upgrading the BIOS to 1011-006 (beta) and updating the graphics drivers to Forceware 84.2 (also beta) to try and solve the problem, again with no results. In fact the only change seems to be the ASUS PC Probe software now reports much higher CPU temps than the BIOS does (47 degrees in PC Probe to 34 degrees in the BIOS) .

I have run PerfMon while gaming and the pauses seem to coincide with spikes in the Memory: Pages/sec and Physical Disk: Avg Disk Queue Length. I don't know if this is the problem or merely a symptom. Could it be having problems paging the game? The game runs with about 670MB in physical memory and about 680MB paging, but runs like this on my old Dell Dimension 8200 (1GB Rambus) without any hesitations at all.

Memory timings in the BIOS are on auto and are 2.5/3/3/8 at 2T. The Crucial site indicates this memory should be running at 2/2/2/6? Will changing this help me?

I ran MemTest86+ for two cycles without any errors and get a 3DMark 2006 score of 2826.

I have uninstalled the NVidia firewall (running behind a router) and CnQ is disabled in BIOS.

Are there any other diagnostics I can run to trace the cause of this? Does anyone have any thoughts as to the root cause? Please help, I really enjoyed building my own machine but it was specifically to play this game and I can't get it to run smoothly

Thanks in advance,
Nick

 

[GoldenHornet]

Thanks for the reply. I have tried a couple of different drivers but with no success. How far back do you think I should try? The latest drivers (84.21) are WHQL certified for my 6800GS.

Also would the graphics drivers affect the paging speed?

Cheers,
Nick

 

[GoldenHornet]

Yea, the game patches itself when needed as you log on. The reason I didn't think it was the game is that the same game runs smoothly on my Dimension 8200 (P4 2.0 - 1GB RAMBUS - Geforce3 ti500) but not here.

Collegues think it could be a setup issue as the machine seems to hesitate as it pages stuff in memory. Could it be HDD related? I only have a single disk in the first SATA port on the primary (NVidia) controller. What sort of speeds should I be getting from the harddrive if I run HD Tach?

The graphics card is working harder as the details are set up a bit and it's driving a widescreen monitor at 1440x900 but even so......when it runs smoothly it looks like it is easily handling the graphics.

Cheers for the help by the way.

Nick