Stuttering

MikeHiow · 18 Jan 2011 at 01:36

So I've built my new SB PC with the following;

2500K
Asus P67P8
2x2GB XMS3
ATI 4890 OC
120GB Kingston SSD V-Series (Old 100MB/s one)
Generic, old and crap 250GB HD for larger stuff (Movies, Steam etc.)

It is currently overclocked to 4.6GHz with CPU at 1.35V, PLL Overvolt on, Mem at 1.55V and PLL at 1.8V - everything else is auto.

Occasionally things just seem to stall - be it inside a game, typing, or even installing something. It isn't that often, and it isn't really that bad - just a moment but noticable.

Any suggestions on where I should start looking? This setup Prime'd for 7 hours OK, so I'm not sure if it would be the overclock?

MikeHiow · 18 Jan 2011 at 02:04

Well, overclock gone and if anything, the stuttering seems worse.

MikeHiow · 18 Jan 2011 at 02:25

I've noticed no audio stuttering - only in operation. It is much worse on start-up (Chrome will freeze completely whilst trying to open 8 tabs, start menu becomes unresponsive), but appears to get better as time goes on.

MikeHiow · 18 Jan 2011 at 02:38

Aha, that may have improved things a little. Chrome started up without freezing this time, but I've had 3-4 stutters while typing this.

I'll try disconnecting the 250GB tomorrow.

MikeHiow · 18 Jan 2011 at 02:46

Some old Maxtor thing. It is quiet and makes no noise, but you know its ancient when its bigger than my F1.

I wonder, could the SSD be responsible? It seemed OK in my Macbook before (apart from some weird sleep-related crashes resulting in a need to reinstall, which could have been attributed to the HD I guess). The SSD was second hand and cheap, so I've no idea of its history.

Is there any way to test a hard drive's health? I was quite surprised the SSD only managed '5.9' on Windows performance index.

MikeHiow · 19 Jan 2011 at 22:32

I think I found the problem - The Marvell SATA controller.

HD Tune on this is up and down like a Yo-yo, between 100MB/s and 0MB/s. Now it suddenly struck me that someone was complaining about the fact that a lot of these P67 boards were including these Marvell controllers, but I cannot remember his reasoning. With that in mind, I thought I'd move the drive over to the Intel 6Gb/s ports, and low and behold - straight away boot is faster, system is more responsive at boot and HD Tune shows it bouncing between 104 and 80MB/s with a graph that looks far more stable and consistent.

It is early days yet, but this seems to have fixed the problem. I just wish I had figured this out before doing a reinstall and installing SP1.