Massive performance drop!

[Harudath]

Hello again, mishap man is back!

My PC's gradually been getting slower, much to my irritation. Taking place over the last 2-3 days my framerate has been dropping. This happens to have started at the same time as I got my new monitor which is now running in side by side with another one. Could this be causing it? If not what is?

Issue 2: I've got some annoying problem with my RAM in that I can't get my Kingston HyperX DDR2 800MHz (stock) RAM to run dual channel, overclocked or not. Single channel it works fine, but will crash if I do so much as open My Documents in dual channel.

PC STATS:
2.6GHz Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 3.3GHz (Stable)
2x1024 800MHz chips @ 950MHz, single channel (Stable)
ASUS P5N-E SLi


Thanks in advance :D


EDIT: My performance has also dropped in that while playing some games it will slow down and accellerate, like a learner driver going up a hill.

[Your Amish Daddy]

Alright, what is your drive layout, how many hard drives do you have, and how often do you purge your page file?

[Harudath]

I have one drive, two partitions, one that I don't use (yet, it's spare for backups if I format etc). Laid out in C:\ (unused) ad D:\ (has everything on it). Single hard drive and do what to my hoosit?

[Your Amish Daddy]

Page file, unless you've got 3+gb of memory, you still use one. A Page file is "pretend" memory on the hard disk. Well actually that's not true, it's a physical memory extension that Windows uses like the swap partition in Linux. Say like you've only got 256mb, and you need to free up some physical for MSN or something, Windows will write the data it's moving out of memory to the hard disk to recall later at a faster rate. Sometimes the page file doesn't clear right, or at all if the system isn't pure or had some complications when setting up, or after a system crash or it just feels like being a tart. The only way I know the purge the page file is to resize it or move it. I'm pretty sure there's a tool out there that does it.

Often times when someone has a decent machine like yours and their performance starts to wane, it's because of the page file not clearing on restart or whatnot. You DO restart your computer about once a week, right? Well let's assume you do and this is happening because your page file is too small. You can just go into your system properties (Rightclick the My Computer icon and choose properties) and go to the Advanced tab and click the Settings button in the top little box that says Performance. Go to the Advanced tab, and you'll see another box called Virtual Memory. I always say that if you have 1024mb, your virtual memory should be 1153-2650 or something like that. 2048 is -1153-2048 since you have more physical memory, and anything over 3072 can safely disable it if they so choose. I still run my page file 2048-4095 because I switch from games to image editors and even though I'll never fill all of my memory I can still use the extra reading speed.

If that doesn't work you might wanna try deleting all of your temporary files and see if that helps. I've heard it does but I never had to do it. Also, I do hope your defragging regular too.

[Harudath]

Defragging at least once a week, restarting my PC is irregular but I turn it off every night before going to bed :P. My Virtual Memory is at 2048 at the moment. I'll try deleting my temp files now to see if that works, although I think I deleted them all yesterday with yet ANOTHER problem with my Black & White game... I am cursed, aren't I?


EDIT: My pagefile is 2GB, normal?

[Harudath]

My temp folder is empty... Nothing drastic has happened, slight fps improvement in WoW but that could always be due to players moving about and stuff happening.

[TheLostSwede]

You mention 2 monitors. Are they sharing the resolution or are they having their own resolution? Is the desktop stretched?

[Harudath]

One's at 1650 by 1080 and one's at 1280 by 1024. They have the same background, although one for each, to get it to cover the screen it's on stretch, but not across both monitors

[Harudath]

Here's what I mean:

[Your Amish Daddy]

That's not going to affect too much, but it will affect video card perfomance by atleast 20% if the draw modes are separate. Try it with only one monitor set up. (Turn off the monitor you don't play wow on in the video card.)

[Harudath]

Turned off the secondary monitor (disabled it) and there wasn't any fps increase (not noticably). Could playing at a higher resolution (1650x1080) on a old(ish)(kinda)(sorta) card (nVidia 7600GT) reduce the fps as I was on 1280x1024 before

[Thrax]

1680 is not a GeForce 7600-friendly resolution.

[Your Amish Daddy]

Well that's true...

[Harudath]

So you guys reckon that going from 17" to a 22" AND a 17" is what caused it?

[Your Amish Daddy]

Well, I wouldn't say run both at the same time.

[Harudath]

I'm looking into getting an 8#00-- card soon anyway, so that should help solve that

[Harudath]

Second issue... Anyone got a clue as to what's wrong? :P

[primesuspect]

You've just asked your video card to almost double its workload. Of course adding a second monitor is going to affect game performance.

[Harudath]

Is it really that strenous? It's not like I'm playing 2 games at once :P But aye, I see what you mean. Okay, I'll keep it in mind when browsing for graphics cards

[TheLostSwede]

And in what games do you see the drop in performance? That WoW screenshot is at over 90fps. WoW doesn't get any better whatsoever at above 60 fps, so you may as well cap it to 60 for a more smooth rate overall.

Even though WoW isn't very hard on hardware,at 1680 res, a 7600 will come up short unless you supertweak both windows and WoW itself and turn off all candy.

[Harudath]

It's at full defail, but I used to get 120 fps in combat in Karazhan, never less than 80, that was 90 facing a wall with nothing happening. I like keeping my PC running at peak performance, something dropping by that much could have been significant. Surely if your PC slowed down you'd want to know why?