massive slowdown at seemingly random times...

I have had this problem intermittently over the last few weeks. I've been building and troubleshooting PCs since my parents brought home our first 286 12 years ago, and I still can't nail this one down.

I only notice this problem when I'm playing online, usually Battlefield 2 (cuz that's what I play.) At more or less random times, I can watch my spike to upwards of 1000, then slowly work its way back down to where it should be--around 50. On the days the PC decides to act like this, it will happen for the entire day. Rebooting doesn't fix it. Restarting the modem doesn't fix it. I tried moving the modem and cabling away from everything else electrical, thinking maybe EMF was at fault. Nope. So I start thinking maybe it's heat. I downloaded ASuS SmartDoctor for my video card, and it was running hella hot (like, 90C under load.) So I order a Zalman for that, and figuring how hot it was running, I order an Icecone CPU cooler, too.

Here's where it gets wonkey. The Zalman fixed my VGA cooling issue wonderfully--my load temps are around 50C now. The Icecone I don't know about, because I have the infamous K8T800 chipset ECS mobo, which MBM5 not only doesn't support but will cause to crash. So there's no way for me to monitor my load temps on the CPU or northbridge. However, the idle temp for the CPU taken directly from the bios is ~50C, which is only about 5C cooler than before. It may help under load, though, I dunno.

In any case, the problem stopped. I thought. It worked fine for about a week, and now its back. I've got 2 gigs of ram, so that's not it...and both sticks are recognized and used by windows. I turned off paging when I got my second stick a couple of months ago, before this problem started...so it's not a HDD access problem.

My next step I think will be to take everything onboard and get a PCI solution for it (NIC & sound). I don't know what else to do.

Any help you guys (and gals) can give would be great. Thanks!

 

Your ping has to do with your ISP. Its probably got load. Normal activity to be honest.

 

One would think so, eh? But I tried calling Cox (our cable provider) and they said they weren't experiencing any trouble. Their tech support consists mostly of high-school dropouts, though, so that's not terribly reliable. Also, immediately after the lag situation, I did a bandwidth test...and it tested out at 3.5MB/S. That's about what I expected. I honestly think it may be the onboard NIC. I was just hoping someone here might have another idea.

Oh, and everything has the latest available drivers.

 

Bandwidth and connection is not related to ping directly.

They are indirectly related but your ping is based on how many hops it takes to get a packet to and from your destination to the source.

If your server has lots more traffic at certain points in times, this may be login packets to ensure people are connected properly, they will not say theres a problem.

 

Hmm...could be, but would that cause the problem all day? It happens fairly consistently throughout the day, too...as in, every few seconds. The reason I think it's my PC and not my connection is that I don't notice the problem in bittorrent and it only seems to happen while I'm actually playing, not when I'm waiting to spawn or something. But then, i could be generating more packet requests when I'm actually playing vs waiting to spawn...and the problem could only be showing up in bt when I'm not looking--it's not like i sit there and watch it.

 

The slow down your noticing is because of a high ping, which is seperate to your bandwidth. bittorrent doesn't mind a high ping, as long as you have a decent transfer rate it doesnt matter if a single packet takes 10ms or 400ms to get to you. However with online gaming you require a low ping so the computer and server can communicate quickly and in real time, here the time it takes to transfer a single packet matters.

Think of the difference as being the same as the difference between a 2 lane highway going at 40mph and a single lane road going at 80mph, they are both moving the same number of cars in a given time but the cars are moving much faster on one of them.

Its most likely your isp. There isnt alot you can do. The only thing that could be slowing it down is a firewall, but thats unlikely the cause.

 

Aight, thanks guys. I'm fairly well versed in networking concepts and practice, but I've never even bothered researching ping and how it's determined before (BF2 is my first online game). Thanks for the explanation. I'll call Cox tonight if it's still occurring and see what they have to say...you never know. I'd hate to have to switch providers...

 

Negative, ghostrider. I get the same slowdown outside of online gameplay, as well. it would seem that BF2 interprets any sort of core slowdown while online as a ping spike. Don't ask me, ask EA. And then tonight, I find out that I'm starting to artifact. The video card is running very cool--43C-ish under load--and it's not the only problem. When I'm playing, or even just waiting for the game to load, nothing comes through on teamspeak or it breaks up really badly. Then in game, the sound continuously breaks up.

I'm picking up a new sound card tomorrow in the hopes that it will fix the problem, since that's the simplest solution. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think my processor is overheating because I just installed a new HSF, and it keeps it about 5C cooler idle than the stock HSF did. I can't monitor its temps under load though, because of the reason above.

I'm about to roll back the drivers to just the regular nVidia drivers and see if that helps. i don't know what else to do. :\

 

Have you tried a mates computer in your connection... or your computer in a mates connection therefore you would be able to work out whether its your computer or your connection. I personally think its your connection or BF2 just installed badly :/

Good luck, Ed

 

Thanks for the thoughts, but it's not just online that I'm having the problem. I have the problem online and off, as well as in other games. :\

 

Maybe you should do a few malware scans, if you have been unlucky enough to catch the digital clapper, it would possibly affect performance seemingly randomly, as decribed.
DRP

 

What stuff do u have else in your network? like firewall and stuff?
case it could be like a firewall that´s overhet.. (typ like d-link )

 

Okay, so I'm going back through my original post and getting rid of everything that says "ping". It's not a network problem. I disabled on-board sound and unplugged my USB sound device, and it works perfectly fine now. No more slowdown. The interesting thing, though, is that I'm still getting some artifacting, but that may be because my computer is still trying to use the onboard sound since there's no longer any other option available. So I guess today I'm going out to pick up a new soundcard. :\ Hopefully that'll fix the issue...I don't want to have to buy a new video card! I just got this one!

 

If you're using onboard aswell as USB sound then you're probably getting conflicts. Use one or the other.

 

Okay, so here's the long story of how everything went down. Let me know if I missed anything.

I thought it was an ISP problem at first, but then I noticed that it only seemed to happen when the action got intense. I decided to try it out in single player mode, and if it turned out to be a net problem I was gonna have words with Cox. Welp, wouldn't you know it? The damn game still got choppy...and at one point, I even noticed some rather severe artifacting! But it wasn't as choppy as before when I was online...Now I'm pretty sure that it didn't get as choppy because I didn't have TeamSpeak open (see below).

So last night I rolled back my video drivers as far as they would go, then installed the latest straight-nVidia drivers I could find. That helped, but not much at all.

Then I realized that not only am I having "lag" problems, but the sound always seems to break up...and that's where the worst of the problems seemed to lie. Definitely not a lag problem. So I unplugged my onboard sound to no avail. I then unplugged the USB sound as well, and voila! My computer no longer lags. Okay, so I plug the onboard sound back in, and it comes screaming back. (this is all done over several reboots) Unplug them both, disable them both in device manager, and it seems to work great. Fan-freaking-tastic.

I guess today I'm going out to pick up a $25 sound card so I can play and talk on TS at the same time.

But here's the thing. This morning I was re-testing my sound card theory, and I still saw some artifacting. I didn't get any lag, but large portions of the screen would go completely black, usually only in the terrain. Sh*t. I really don't want to have to buy a new video card. I think replacing the sound card may still help this...you never freaking know...but still...

 

Scroll this page up and down. Both fast and slow, back and forth, do so while you check for any disturbances in the picture.

Edit; if you have not seen any disturbances in the picture in doing so, then try the same approach on a web page that consists of a lot of pictures.

 

Its likely the memory on your gfx card overheating that's causing the artifacting.
Stick your finger on and see if its hot...

 

Hmmm...could be. I've been watching the GPU temps and they stay ice-cold, but I haven't checked the RAM. :\ Shouldn't be too bad, I've got heatsinks on the chips and the Zalman blows right over them. Check'em out, anyway I guess.

 

In that case, maybe the memory heatsinks are not attached properly?
Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree completely...

 

I just had a thought...can't check it right now because I'm at work, but could it be that my Northbridge is overheating? I think it's only got a passive aluminum heatsink on it right now, but it may not even have that.