A7V-133A Harddrive access makes windows stutter ...
Christoph Maria Dahlen
just sold my good old PIII BX system and got a shiny new AMD system for
it. Here's the system data:
Asus A7V 133 (Via KT133A) board AMD Duron 800 CPU
128MB PC133 Siemens Infineon memory
Elsa Erazor X (GeForce 256) gpu Terratec DMX XFire 1024 soundcard Symbios
Logic 8100S scsi controller No name Realtek 8139 network card.
- a Seagate ST320423A is attached to default IDE port as primary master
- two IBM DTLA 305020 drives are attached to the Promise IDE port as
primary and secondary master. They are access as RAID 0 stripe set
- a Plextor UltraPlex32TSi CD-ROM is attached to the Symbios Logic
controller.
The system works fine, both on Windows98SE (located on the IBMs) and Linux
(Debian based, kernel 2.4.2-ac20) (on the seagate). But ...
... when I play games like Project I.G.I. who do a load of loading from
disk *while* the action is running, the harddisk-access make windows pause
for some milliseconds, giving the game a block. Games which load their
data, before running a stage (like Unreal Tournament) are not affected.
How to avoid this ? I tried the following till now:
First, Windows was on the Seagate. Since this is an older U66 drive,
playing I.G.I. was hell, felt like it was accessing a floppy disk while
play. Then I swapped Linux and Windows, giving the IBM (a U100 drive) to
Windows. That helped a lot, the blocking was minimized, nearly unvisible.
So I thought, striping a second identical drive would increase throughput
and decrease access time, but I seems like I was wrong. The pauses are
still a lot shorter than with the Seagate, but they are longer than using
a single IBM.
Can I do anything about it ? I don't want to distribute Windows on two
drives, I like my 40G raid. And I hadn't such behavior with my old system,
a PIII500 on a Abit BH6. Are the VIA chips crap ? Is AMD not as good as
expected ? Or is it simply a misconfiguration ?
--
Christoph Dahlen
Vobis Groningen Technische dienst
"Christoph Maria Dahlen" <chri...@dahlen.org> schreef in bericht
news:bfb299...@194.97.108.49...
VIA chipsets are a bit slower than Intel chipsets.\, thats for sure, but
your problem can also be driver specific. Try installing the latest drivers
for the chipset (most are available at www.viatech.com ) and another thing
which might help is running your system as clean as possible (i know the DMX
1024 standard drivers sucks bigtime, there is an update, have you installed
this yet?)
Good luck
GDT
If you want to compare your configuration with mine look for a posted
message titled "[HELP] A7V133, Unreal Tournament & Promise".
If you get the solution PLEASE let me know...