what's limiting my gaming performance?

[wazza300]

i just tested my i3 540 at stock,pulled out 4gb leaving 4gb and used a 5770 1gb gpu

could play mafia2 just fine everything turned up inc apex physics turned on an aa,no stuttering at all

l.a noire being multithreaded stuttered though,not with 8gb of memory

 

[almoststew1990]

i just tested my i3 540 at stock,pulled out 4gb leaving 4gb and used a 5770 1gb gpu

could play mafia2 just fine everything turned up inc apex physics turned on an aa,no stuttering at all

l.a noire being multithreaded stuttered though,not with 8gb of memory

Good to know. It sounds more and more like it is HDD related then.

Also, no anti virus installed and I think I'll do a defrag over night. Will I still need to if the HDD has recently been formatted?

 

[wazza300]

maybe now windows has been installed on it

 

[almoststew1990]

Right, I've been able to spend a bit of time on this!

(2002 wants its stock XP wallpaper back )

The HDD seems to be fine- chkdsk didn't flag anything up. Mem check came out fine. I have now defrag, it said 0% fragmented before (and after). I've cleaned out the registry and I am just about to update the bios. Could any bios setting s (memory remapping or whatever for instance) be causing it? Page file size?

Spoiler

It seems Mafia II is using about 600k mb and the total used is 1.3GB, so the quantity of memory is fine right?

Does anything in the above jump out at you as being the culprit?

 

[wazza300]

nothing looks odd to me?

steam exe is using a lot of memory,i don't have mafia2 on that

is it still stuttering? you should eat that game if I can play it with half a 5870 (5770)

 

[almoststew1990]

I have massively improved the issue- turning Pagefile off! I guess XP can't be tempted to store game files in the Page File now. Anyway it only stutters a tiny barely noticeable bit now which I think is just down to the DDR2 and old CPU. Wehey!