Older mobo: extremely high cpu usage with IDE

slipstream3d

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May 2, 2005
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As my real computer died (K8N Neo2 Platinum mainboard just failed, gotta RMA it...) I put together a system out of spare parts. Mainboard is a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ running the VIA Apollo Pro Plus chipset with a Celeron 600mhz (FCPGA) CPU, 384mb of PC133 SDRAM, etc etc. Got Windows 98SE all up and running on the 20gb hard drive I had laying around.

System seems to work great, except when I do anything disk intensive (i.e. start a program) the system starts chugging like hell. Scrolling up and down in Firefox is mind numbingly slow (you can watch the page redraw). Open up the CPU usage monitor and it's at 100% all the time!!

I read on a forum somewhere (but the thread was old and locked) that this may have to do with a bug in the hardware-the IDE controller sends too many interrupt requests or something like that, but there's a solution to it- unfortunately this person didn't post the solution.

I've updated the mobo to the latest BIOS available (rev FA) and I've tried the VIA 4-in-1 drivers v4.43, the VIA Latency Fix, as well as messing about with BIOS settings. If anything, it's just gotten a bit worse.

Any ideas? Pleeeeeeeease?

It's bad enough to have to use a Celeron 600 instead of my Athlon 64, but when a Pentium 120 laptop (where I'm writing this from) runs faster than a 600mhz celeron, it's definately a bit of a piss off!
 
Yes, DMA mode is enabled. Additionally, the problem has persisted through three installations of operating systems (Windows ME, Windows XP SP1, and Windows 98SE + unofficial SP). A completely different set of hardware was used between XP and 98SE, with, of course, the exception of the mainboard. (Different RAM, video card, hard drive, sound card, LAN card, CDROM... etc etc.)

Bleah... 🙁 I'm confused.