A8N-E running slow

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John

Built a new system for just over a week, based as follows

A8N-E, with Venice 3500
1Gig memory
Windows Xp hjome
dvd rewriter
ati x800 graphics
Hitachio deskstar SATA II drive.

The system ran fine for a few days, but now has started to run very slow,ie
takes an age to load all programmes.
have fiddled with all settings,only oddity is BIOS post reports the hard
drive as SATA I not II. Bios is latest 1008, chip drivers also latest from
asus website.

Any ideas ???

Thanks
 
from said:
Built a new system for just over a week, based as follows

A8N-E, with Venice 3500
1Gig memory
Windows Xp hjome
dvd rewriter
ati x800 graphics
Hitachio deskstar SATA II drive.

The system ran fine for a few days, but now has started to run very slow,ie
takes an age to load all programmes.
have fiddled with all settings,only oddity is BIOS post reports the hard
drive as SATA I not II. Bios is latest 1008, chip drivers also latest from
asus website.

Any ideas ???
Click to expand...

What does Task manager show is going on in terms of CPU and memory
usage? How up-to-date is your virus and malware scanner??
 
Latest Norton Internet security and Windows Spyware installed.
Just updated the HD using a utility from Hitachi. This is now correctly
reported in Biios, but pc still running slow
 
from said:
Latest Norton Internet security and Windows Spyware installed.
Just updated the HD using a utility from Hitachi. This is now correctly
reported in Biios, but pc still running slow
Click to expand...

SATA1 vs 2 is a red herring - the drive can't deliver enough bytes per
second to even trouble SATA1 .. something else is the problem.

You can probably eliminate the CPU/memory subsystem by running the
Prime95 benchmarks and comparing the answers with what others get (it's
always possible that your FSB got turned down, your CPU cache got
disabled, or something whacky like that). Or just run one of the other
benchmark utilities (AIDA32, or whatever) to check nothing daft has
occurred.

If you think it is the disk, the try HDTACH (google for it), or similar.

Norton itself may be a problem, being renowned bloatware. However it's
such a PITA to disable/remove that it's probably better to try
everything else first.

Did you defrag the disk any time recently?
 
"John" said:
Latest Norton Internet security and Windows Spyware installed.
Just updated the HD using a utility from Hitachi. This is now correctly
reported in Biios, but pc still running slow
Click to expand...

Could it be a disk transfer rate issue ?

Check the IDE transfer rate of the disk. If Windows detects CRC
errors while doing operations on the disk, it will downclock the
transfer rate from the disk. The disk may start doing DMA at
100MB/sec, but can end up doing PIO at ~4MB/sec, if Windows uses
the slowest possible transfer mode. (I presume this is still
possible, even though there is SATA in the path.)

This article discusses how Windows treats disk errors, and
how you can end up being "downshifted" to PIO mode:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

  "After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a
   cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check
   (CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the
   transfer mode ) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode
   to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive
   time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer
    mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode )."

Workaround:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware/msg/754224f4bbc59997

HTH,
Paul
 
Ru HDtach and results come out ok,also have uninstalled disk controller
driver, but to no avail.
This may sound like a stupid question, but why is the cpu sold as having a
fsb of 1000mhz, but in the bios only shows to be a fsb of 200 mhz even
though the resulting system speed with multiplier is correct ??
 
"John" said:
Ru HDtach and results come out ok,also have uninstalled disk controller
driver, but to no avail.
This may sound like a stupid question, but why is the cpu sold as having a
fsb of 1000mhz, but in the bios only shows to be a fsb of 200 mhz even
though the resulting system speed with multiplier is correct ??
Click to expand...

To answer that, we need a block diagram of the Athlon64. This
AMD doc is the source of my figure below - page 8:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/Hammer_architecture_WP_2.pdf

CPU_Core
|
SRQ (system_request_queue)
|
XBAR---MCT---DCT
^ | ^ ^
| | | |
16 / / 16 64 / / 64
| | | |
| v v v 8bytesxDDR400 per DIMM = 3.2GB/sec
Hypertransport Memory 6.4GB/sec total, two channels

Hypertransport ==> CLKx2(DDR)x#bits/8bits_per_byte
= 1000MHz x 2 x 16 / 8 = 4GB/sec (each direction)

CPU_clock x multiplier = CPU_core_clock 200 x 11 = 2200 (3500+)
CPU_clock x LDT_multiplier = HT_clock ex. 200 x 5 = 1000
CPU_core_clock / divider = Memory_clock 2200/11 = 200 (DDR400)

To see examples of divider choices used by the processor, see posting
#7 in this thread. (Oskar Wu designs DFI Athlon64 motherboards AFAIK.)
The divider is set according to the user's "target" DRAM speed.

http://xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=41595&highlight=divider

If the BIOS is showing "200" for something, that is the setting of
the clock generator chip. The rest of the clocks are derived from
that clock signal, via the various multipliers and dividers.

I'm not sure the concept of front side bus (FSB) is that useful
here. You might consider the FSB to be the bus at the top of the
SRQ, but unless someone tells us the width and the speed, we'd
never know what it was. Because the Northbridge functions are
more distributed in this architecture, with memory control in
the processor, and video card interface on the chipset, the
traditional FSB concept is kind of fuzzy.

Just a guess,
Paul
 
from said:
Ru HDtach and results come out ok,also have uninstalled disk controller
driver, but to no avail.
This may sound like a stupid question, but why is the cpu sold as having a
fsb of 1000mhz, but in the bios only shows to be a fsb of 200 mhz even
though the resulting system speed with multiplier is correct ??
Click to expand...

The marketing department have been at work again if you were sold a
'1000Mhz FSB' Athlon. Actually the whole concept of FSB makes not much
sense these days .. but hey, these are the same guys who claim 400Mhz
for FSB on DDR memory buses (completely ignoring what a Hz means).

At least they got the 200 right this time - that's the basic CPU clock,
which, as you say, you multiply by the multiplier (hey, another
unscrewed with term .. so far!) to get the CPU frequency.
 
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