Extremely bad fps in everything

[Lee]

I dont have a clue whats going on. I sent my pc off about 3 weeks ago to get the hard drive replaced and when I got it back i'm getting extremely bad fps in everything.

Beef 2 is stuck at around 15 fps, css is stuck at around 20-30fps and changing graphics settings doesnt affect my fps whatsoever. I ran the css stress test and got 40fps all on low where as I used to get about 70fps on high.

I'm using the nvidia 77.30 drivers off the beef 2 cd since i thought the problem might be the 78.01 drivers and i knew i used to get good fps using the 77.30s.

Anyone have any ideas about what might be wrong?

btw, my specs are 3.4ghz p4, 1gb pc3200 ram, nvidia 6610xl (oc'D to a 6600gt) so i definately shouldnt be getting frame rates as crap as I am.

Edit: not only does changing graphics settings not affect fps, but removing my overclock makes no difference either.

[Joose]

CIIJASIIE


This is the closest to helpfull i can be.

[FatherJack]

I dont have a clue whats going on. I sent my pc off about 3 weeks ago to get the hard drive replaced and when I got it back i'm getting extremely bad fps in everything.

If the drive was changed, did they (a) restore your data, or have you (b) reinstalled everything?

If (a) you might
- need a defrag, depending what imaging software they used to restore it
- need to renconfigure the Windows swapfile

If (b) maybe they either:
- replaced the the drive with a really rubbish one, I've found Seagates much slower than other types (in the past, at least)
- (more likely) set some defaults in the BIOS disabling hard drive acceleration

Edit: also, they may have reconnected it wrongly, sharing the same pipe as the CD drive is a sure-fire performance-killer

[cashy]

erm... check you havnt knocked out a fan or somthing nooby... you sure its the right pc your using? *runs off*

[FatherJack]

erm... check you havnt knocked out a fan or somthing nooby... you sure its the right pc your using? *runs off*

Good points, as it goes - I was assuming nothing else had changed.

[deject]

Try using Driver Cleaner and re-install your videocard drivers. Also check to see if you hard drives are properly set u, such as with DMA steeings and what not.

And like cashy said, make sure everythings hooked up and working properly.

[Lee]

I've reinstalled windows about 5 times in the last 2 days in an attempt to fix it using different discs and installing different versions of drivers so the 77.30s are a clean install straight after i installed windows.

I'll have a poke around inside my case and in the bios to make sure everything is ok later on.

Also, might the RAM have gone dodgy? If it was that would explain the bottleneck. The ram benchmarks on everest come up with 3143mb/s read, 1414mb/s write and 160ns latency. I'm sure the read/write were higher before and the latency was lower, either that or I'm getting paranoid.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

start > run > dxdiag

might give something away.

[Lee]

start > run > dxdiag

might give something away.

Just had a look and it all appears to be ok.

Also, about the memory, on the Motherboard page of everest it says:

Memory Bus Properties
Bus Type Dual DDR SDRAM
Real Clock 200 MHz (DDR)
Effective Clock 400 MHz
Bandwidth 6400 MB/s

Yet the benchmark comes up with 3143mb/s, think somethings wrong there?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php might give more away

[Lee]

http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php might give more away

Unfortunately not, however more memory benchmarks are feeding my paranoia:

Bandwidth (Write Float) - Prefetch) : 522.43 MB/s
Bandwidth (Write Int.) - Prefetch) : 920.54 MB/s
Latency : 221 ns (751 cycles)
Bandwidth Efficiency : 712%

Do these benchmarks look normal? I dont have a clue but they look a bit low to me.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

tried memtest?

[Woo Elephant Yeah]

What's your 1GB of RAM made up of?

2 x 512MB sticks?

If so try running a memtest with just one stick of memory in a specific slot
Then take that stick out and replace it with the other one in the same slot, and run a memtest on that one.
Repeat this process on the the other slot/s, and it should eliminate if it's a problem with a specific piece of RAM, or whether it's an issue with one of the slots.

Quite often when people replace parts in PC's, it can "loosen" things up, and it might just be a case of reseating the memory sticks into different slots and so on...

EDIT : You might want to think about upgrading the bios on the motherboard, and then resetting it to factory defaults within the BIOS as well

[Lee]

Ok, I'll give memtest a go after i get back from college, i actually hope that is the problem since i can just get a replacement fom ebuyer which will save me the trouble of sending my pc off again to get fixed.

[Lee]

Well memtest wasnt much help, i'm going to try switching ram slots at the weekend and if that doesnt work i'll try my old ram. If that doesnt work then i'll see what the pc people can do about it. If they cant do anything i think i'll try to get a refund and build myself a shiney new pc.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

well, that'd be a bit silly.

reinstalled windows?
used MBM or similar heat monitoring app?
canned for viruses, spyware or badgers?

[Lee]

I've reinstalled windows about 5 times, which makes me thinks its the hardware but i dont have a clue what part. My CPU is at around 65 degrees C but it was that hot before aswell due to the crappy fan but i never had problems. I doubt i'll have viruses or spyware since i only installed windows yesterday and if i had badgers they'd've probably burned to death on my cpu by now.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

gpu temp?

[Lee]

59 degrees C, its in the green on the nvidia monitor thingy so i dont think thats a problem. I dont think its the graphics card since i get the same frame rates no matter what gfx settings I use so it makes me think its bottlenecked by something else being b0rked.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

hmm.

last thing would be newer/older drivers on everything?