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Severely Underperforming PC

Overslop

Overslop

Overslop

Soldato
Joined
22 Oct 2005
Posts
4,013
Location
Thailand
I've been having troubles with my PC for some time now...


LOW FPS IN GAMES


Call of Duty 2 - Often 30-40 FPS when there's fighting taking place.

Maximum in-game and Control Panel settings - 1920x1080 res.



Warhammer 40k: DoW: WA - 30-40FPS when there's a lot of enemies on screen or constantly on some levels.

Maximum in-game and Control Panel settings - 1280x1024 res.

(Original DoW ran rock solid 60FPS on my 8800GTX)


Age of Empires III - 20-25 FPS when there's a lot happening on screen (I'm not sure any cards can handle this game yet though)

Maximum in-game and Control Panel settings - 1920x1080 res.




BSODS


Quite often get BSoDs at random times - usually browsing web. Though only have 1 since reinstall of Windows, which happened a week ago.

The ones I used to get were (exact names unknown):

nvlddmkm stopped responding

Bad Pool Caller

Page File Error



RANDOM CHOPPY PERFORMANCE


DreamScene fails - either stopping completely or splitting Desktop into 4 sections

System becomes very unresponsive

Mouse pointer animations cease

Keyboard input lag



POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS ATTEMPTED


Reformatting hard drive

Using 1 stick of RAM

Resetting BIOS settings

Updating BIOS

Trying other graphics card (ATi Radeon HD4870)



What could be causing my issues? Bad PSU? Dodgy motherboard? Ditch Vista 64 for XP?

If someone could help me sort this out I would be very grateful. :)
 
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GingerNinja1989 said:
You say nvlddmkm stopped responding... sounds like dodgy graphics drivers.
Click to expand...

I've tried several sets, including the latest ones.

I'm currently using the latest ones on a fresh Vista install.

I've Google'd a lot about that specific BsoD and it seems a significant number of people get it. There is no known cause or fix, but many workaround solutions.


EDIT: Since reinstalling Vista I haven't had this BSoD anyway. Perhaps in my case it was a driver issue.
 
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checked the one stick of ram is working ok with memtest? friend of mine had a similar problem turned out both sticks he was using were faulty.
 
Checked all 4 but only a couple of tests.

Also ran a Prime 95 memory stress test for a couple of hours and they came up fine.
 
Something else I should mention is that I have both hard drives as well as my optical drive all powered off of 1 cable to the PSU. Could this be causing the issues?
 
nvlddmkm errors are rarely actually a driver issue even tho thats what would seem obvious... more often its a sign of unstable RAM or NorthBridge...

To the OP do you have a creative X-Fi in that system? as some of the symptoms are consistant to issues related to that.
 
Try the program in my sig.

It should generate lots of stats for you to look at, low voltages etc.

To my eye, I would say RAM or Motherboard. Especially the instability running certain apps in windows.
 
Rroff said:
nvlddmkm errors are rarely actually a driver issue even tho thats what would seem obvious... more often its a sign of unstable RAM or NorthBridge...

To the OP do you have a creative X-Fi in that system? as some of the symptoms are consistant to issues related to that.
Click to expand...

Nope, my sound card is a Asus Xonar DX.
 
eiko_magami said:
im assuming its running at stock settings after the bios reset and if ram passes memtest it should be stable.
Click to expand...

How long do you need to run memtest to be sure?

I've let it run 2 full tests before and it came up clean. That was with all 4 sticks plugged in at once.
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
Try the program in my sig.

It should generate lots of stats for you to look at, low voltages etc.

To my eye, I would say RAM or Motherboard. Especially the instability running certain apps in windows.
Click to expand...

OK, I've installed OCCT - what should I be looking for exactly?

Based on your hypothesis, what should I do to sort my problem?
 
Was just browsing this site and it BSoD again.

This time a big range of numbers was all I could see before the comp rebooted. Where can I find what the BSoD records?
 
I have a GTX280 and dawn of war Soul storm (same engine as WA) i have a 3.16 GHZ dual core (wolfdale) while SS is normally around the 60FPS mark, in larger player multiplay maps, when there's loads of units onscreen i do get around 30 to 40 FPS aswell, although it's still very playable to be honest, i too was a little surprised at this (although i am using the widescreen camera mod which does up the system requirements) as it is still an old game, overclocking the cpu to 3.8 and the card had little noticable effects

I don't have call of duty so can't comment but i will say that while reviews may show FPS as being 70 or 80, that is an average and in game FPS can vary, you can easily get 200+ walking down a feature less corridor and then drop to around 40 in a high detailed enviroment with lot's being rendered on screen

Have you overlocked your CPU if it's below 3 GHZ some game's will show a nice improvement by clocking up to 3G, after 3 GHZ further overclocking gains seem marginal at least on current game's
 
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Peter450 said:
I have a GTX280 and dawn of war Soul storm (same engine as WA) i have a 3.16 GHZ dual core (wolfdale) while SS is normally around the 60FPS mark, in larger player multiplay maps, when there's loads of units onscreen i do get around 30 to 40 FPS aswell, although it's still very playable to be honest, i too was a little surprised at this (although i am using the widescreen camera mod which does up the system requirements) as it is still an old game, overclocking the cpu to 3.8 and the card had little noticable effects

I don't have call of duty so can't comment but i will say that while reviews may show FPS as being 70 or 80, that is an average and in game FPS can vary, you can easily get 200+ walking down a feature less corridor and then drop to around 40 in a high detailed enviroment with lot's being rendered on screen
Click to expand...

Thanks for a detailed and lengthy post. I agree with what you say and know about average versus minimum FPS.

But this is just from my single player experience and it could be just 10 units causing low FPS. Aside from being 30FPS it's very chuggy.
 
It could well be your PSU is dying I'm afraid. It certainly sounds like your components are not receiving a stable power supply.
 
You can't really unless you have a spare psu. Unless you have specialised testing equipment, testing a PSU is very hit and miss.

Try and run the pc with the absolute minimum of components. Motherboard, CPU (stock), 1 stick of ram, basic GPU and single hard drive. This is to put the minimum of stress on the PSU. Perform a clean install to eradicate the possibility of driver/OS issues. Only install the drivers for the hardware you have installed then perform a few basic tasks.

It's basicly a process of elimination I'm afraid when troubleshooting. Start off with the basics then add one component at a time to see if you can pinpoint the problem. In your case I had similar issues which was indeed a PSU problem.
 
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