So why would an old computer load faster than a new one?

eyetrip

eyetrip

eyetrip

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8 Nov 2006
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So, there are two computers.

One is an old X2 3800 running at stock with 2GB DDR400, Seagate 7200.10 250gb drive and a 4870.

The other is an I3 530 OCed to 4.2GHz, Samsung F3 500 GB drive, 4GB ddr3 and same 4870.

Now I have noticed when we are playing Star Trek Online together, that the X2 3800 is loading levels a fair bit faster than the I3 system. It's probably not twice as fast, but that computer always seems to get a map loaded a good 5 to 10 seconds faster.

Needless to say, this is annoying me. There is no reason the I3 should take longer to load. Any ideas?
 
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Longer seek time on the 500GB drive? More junk on the 500GB drive? Need to defragment 500GB drive? More background processes running on i3 rig stealing HDD cycles?
 
had a reeeaaallllly old system out the attic a couple of months ago. ie, win98 850mhz athlon and 128mb ram.

just outta curiosity, i formatted and stuck xp on it.
i know it would be a clean os, but after the initial config startup, it would boot from power on to desktop in <10 secs ... wierd.
 
It's a new install of windows 7 on the I3 (Xp on the X2 3800), and has been defragged. The drive is nowhere near full either.

The F3's are supposed to be one of the fastest normal drives available. So there is absolutely no reason why this should be happening.

The game itself does run better on my machine, but the slower load times make me think something is wrong.
 
Well XP is a lot more lightwight than Win7 so it is perhaps to be expected. In particular if you have a lot of background apps taking memory that could explain it with only 3GB system RAM.

Using the same in-game settings? For example if the game uses auto-detect settings or similar it may well use higher settings on the I3 system. In particular if texture size is increased, this would inflate startup time.
 
As HangTime said, same ingame settings? Is it possible that the systems are using different texture qualities? Also, have you other programs running in the background of the Win7 install which could be hogging resources?

As for the quick boot time of the clean XP install thingemajib, that's down to the fact that you had no devices or services installed on it hence it had very little to load.
 
Have already tried setting my ingame settings to defaults where the XP machine has some extra settings enabled. Didn't make a diff.

Apart from both machines running an AV and steam, neither really has much running in background.

Is this really likely just a windows 7 "feature"? If anything, it should be far more able to take advantage of improved hard drives and their features?
 
Theoretically if played regularly it should load faster on the Win7 machine due to superfetch. However, with only 3GB RAM the benefits would be minimal.

May be worth checking you have the latest chipset drivers installed for your mobo.
 
chaparral said:
Think i read somewhere that 32bit limits 2GB per EXE
Click to expand...

32-bit processes are in general limited to 2GB in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. Dunno if STO is 64-bit native, or if it was compiled with /largeaddressaware..
 
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