[MrPinkos]

Hi all

Sorry for my english

I ve a TBIRD 1.2 on an ABITKT7a
After installing the SP1 for winxp, i ve seen many lags when playing games. I ve 256 Mo sdram 133 and the problem come when the program use virtual memory on the HDD.

I ve dl HDTACH 2.61 and tested my HD :



Over 50 % of the cpu utilisation !!!!!!!
The problem appear only on chipset via i think, no problems on P3 or P4 platforms.

When installing winxp without the sp1 I've a normal cpu utilisation but after a windows upgrade or installing the sp1 .....

I ve installed win2k with the Sp3




10 % cpu utilisation !

In games, when the virtual memory is used, i have micros lags every minutes

In a french forum some people have done the test and it s not an isolate problem

http://www.nvchips-fr.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=23336&pagenumber=1&perpage=30#bas

I dont understand, i ve also tried to not install the via 4.1 drivers, but it s the same think ...

Help ? or feedback

Thx

[Christianb]

Hola Amigo,
While it certainly could be XP Sp1 are you sure you haven't just gotten to a higher level in your games. Higher levels typically have more characters, and larger levels this means more Polygons and more textures, both will consume more CPU time and RAM hence your hard disk swapping.

It sounds to me like your game uses more than 256MB Ram. Rather than worrying about your HD performance and CPU usage, why not buy some physical RAM (~1,000 times faster than your HD) so that you don't have to experience swap file lag.

I recommend Micron memory www.Crucial.com they make excellent memory and sell it at reasonable prices. However you'd probably be better off at this point buying the exact same type of ram you already have however If I were you I'd get a 512MB module.

I could be completely wrong on this issue, but it's definetly worth trying and I know one things for sure having more than 256MB RAM won't slow your system down. Sure maybe your top speed will be slightly less (more ram to allocate), but your bottom speed will improve dramatically.
Good Luck,
Christian

[MrPinkos]

May be it is a ram problem, may be my settings are too high in games but HDTACH don t care of that.
With the sp1 or the just xp with some upgrade my hdd take more than 50 % of the cpu time to do a burn test !!!!!

This is the problem and i don t know why !

With a new installation of XP the hdd take less than 10 % of the cpu, if i put the the sp1 ----> >50 %
Games like Halflife (cs, dod) with lower textures have the same problem after some minutes of playing !

All the tests we have done in the other forums are the same !
---> chipset via + atlhon processor + winxp sp1 have 40% --> 60% cpu utilisation
Not with win2k sp3, not with winxpsp0 , not with win98, just the sp1 of winxp or the upgrade of winxp by the windows update !

[Champion_R]

Try the latest 4 in 1s

[MrPinkos]

I tried everything !!
All the last via 4 in 1 !

But i think the problem is a the default driver of via master bus miniport of the sp1

I wil test a fresh install with sp1 and the lastest miniport bus master 3014 from via

At this time, 23 guys with xp sp1, via chipset and atlhon processor have this problem !!!!

[MrPinkos]

Not the via bus master miniport
I think i tried all the solutions ://////

[tylau]

What BIOS of KT7A you are using? Try to use an older BIOS if you have no clue on what is going on

[MrPinkos]

ABIT KT7A REV A9 Bios ... The lastest !

But i don t think it s the bios, i said that 100 % of the guys with the sp1 and via and atlhon have the problem ! Motherboard asus, abit, epox ...

[pr-man]

yeah I have this exact same issue and my mobo is using the AMD-761 chipset (8K7A) Im running my HDs on a controller card and I noticed if I use promises version 34 of their XP drivers CPU utilization runs at 10-14% but I have skipping in mp3's etc.

[Christianb]

I sold my Promise Raid controller and it was the smartest thing I ever did even after taking a loss from the original purchase price. That thing was nothing, but trouble. Promise FastTrack 100 EHCK! FastTrack my A S S: FastTrack to system crashes and data loss.
-Christian

[BladeRunner]

Oh, what did you get instead of the Promise controller then?
Cause if it was the Highpoint one....well....ok, suppose some people like to do downgrades on their systems, I tend to upgrade - far more fun.

Lets see, Promise Fasttrak 100 with 4 HD's in RAID 0+1.
Almost as fast as a standard RAID 0 array (The Highpoint's cannot cope with 0+1 without taking a massive performance hit) and all under 6% CPU utilisation.

Early warning system from the Fasttrak software is excellent, warned me on an iminent HD failure (My first and only IBM fail) and enabled me to have a replacement ready to go.

Promise controllers still cost about twice as much as the Highpoint's and they do so for a reason, you are paying for quality.
System crashes and data loss - me thinks you had other problems, we are currently trusting two servers at work to RAID 0+1 on Promise controllers and both have been running for 12+ months without a single problem.
Promise RAID controllers - beautiful piece of kit, the only upgrade I would consider would be too an expensive true hardware solution, however 6% CPU utilisation is excellent for soemthing software based.

[sapiens74]

One of the big Issues with Via chipsets is performance on raid.

What I would suggest, is to Back up your data, Re Partition the Drive, reformat, then install in this order:

Windows XP
Via 4 in 1's
Video Driver
SP1
then rest of drivers.

I had some performace issues when I swapped motherboards, and Video cards, so I started from scratch and all is well

[Christianb]

Personally I don't think performance is the number one feature of any Raid controller. I mean sure maybe one is 1-10% faster than another, but who cares? The two most important things are stability and compatiblity, because all Raid controllers are fast and of course faster than a single drive solution. The fact that promise raid controllers won't work with Norton Ghost is enough of a reason alone for me to look elsewhere.

However, come to think of it the two problems I had with my Promise Raid card were stability and compatibility.
The stability issue I believe was the raid controller, simply because things seemed to get better when the card wasn't present. However I came to find out later that I had a bad motherboard, but to my knowledge the only thing that didn't work on it was USB, everything else worked fine (to my knowledge) for 3 years.

The other problem is only partially promise's fault, yes they should pay Symantec to have native support for their controllers in Norton Ghost which is pretty much the number one backup title out there. The half of this compatiblity problem that isn't promise's fault is that you have to re-install windows just to have your Raid system bootable. That's microsoft's fault, because unlike their support for virtually every other piece of hardware they haven't created a mechanism to change the IDE controller of your boot device. I think it would be relatively simple they'd just need to create a boot disk/Cd or add to their Install CD and allow users to install a diferent IDE controller via drivers on a floppy disk. Seeing how most of these IDE/raid controllers fit on a floppy disk I don't see why this wouldnt' work provided the user propagates the data over. In fact this boot CD should do that for you. Suppose you have one 20GB HD and you want to switch to a RAID Controller. You should be able to set up a RAID array, leave the 20GB on the current IDE controller (presumably the motherboard), install your RAID Controller's drivers, and then Windows should move the data from the old drive to the new, end of story.

However for some reason Microsoft in their monopolistic laziness has failed to add this feature, saying screw you re-install to all their users which I don't appreciate. I would probably have a RAID system today if I didn't have to re-install to truly enjoy the performance gain. Now I know I could re-install or move all my apps to a RAID partition, but I think I'll pass for now. The 100% software based RAID solution built into Windows 2000 sucks too, you can't boot of it. However it is better than nothing and the price is right.

Did they fix that in WinXP can you create a bootable software raid array?
-Christian

[NoOne]

i have the same problem


Only when i install sp1.. my CPU Utilization rise from 10% to 50-60%

[Christianb]

Hi Gang,
This should prove interesting to all you XP users out there:
http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1048644448. I guess MS has fixed the Intel Based slowdowns after installing XP SP1. However they haven't released it publicly. This may work out to more revenue for them. You'll have to write their support staff and ask for the fix. I've done this before and they gave me the file, I can't tell whether it counts as one of your 2 free support issues per product or not?
So Long Guys,
Christian