Strange Observation...ignorance unlimited

[nubeekb]

Hi All, I just assembled my PC .
The HDD is connected to SATA1, the bios is showing that...however in my windows, it is being detected as a removable disk...just like they do when you connect an USB Pen Drive! I am too novice to understand this. can anybody enlighten me?
The Windows is XP SP2 version.

Another problem is whenever I am trying to play games like FIFA 2006 or Hitman, the HDD front LED indicator red light blinks rigorously showing a high amount of usage in HDD resources! Is this normal? I thought during playing mainly RAM and graphics card would be involved. Also when I play FIFA at higher speeds, the frames get freezed for some moment after 10 minutes of play time....what may cause this?

Hoping to get some help.
Thanx...

 

[bigsby]

Well to answer your first question, SATA is a hot swappable type of device, just like a pen drive or anything else connected via USB or Firewire. What this means is that you do not have to turn off your computer to switch hard drives, although I believe the partition that holds your OS is an exception and must stay in. I must admit that having that little indicator down there 24/7 kinda bugs me, there's not much I can do about it, so I just leave it.

For your second question, HDD activity during a game is somewhat normal. At the start of a level, or part of a level, it will load a bunch of stuff off of the hard drive, because having the whole game on your ram is a bit silly, it's just unnecesary and there are very few people who have 4+ gigs of ram to hold the whole game. Also, if you do not have lots of ram, you may be pagefiling to disk quite a bit, which would bring your preformance down.

As for the last question, I don't quite understand what you're trying to convey (higher speeds? like how?) and I'm just too frickin' tired right now to answer any more questions. I hope this is good enough for you tonight.

 

[rupert86]

Lots of HDD activity would be like when the game is loading. What's the pagefile size (see task manager while running the game).

FIFA at higher speeds

What do you mean? I don't get it.

 

[SRRAE]

I doubt games now load EVERYTHING needed to play. Yeah, you computer might be able to handle it, but others cant, so they make them so it loads sounds textrures, amimations when it needs it.

Also I believe SATA2 is hot plugable not SATA1. So maybe you have a SATA2 motherboard and drive and not realised.

Note. Sata1 was ment to be hot plugable, as far as I can remember, but it never appeared. They may have introduced it.

 

[nubeekb]

Hi Friends,

Thanx for your inputs.
With my ASUS Probe, I can see that the core temperature is around 44 degree centigrades during boot up and after running for 15 minutes to half an hour, the temperature goes as high as 56 degrees...at that time MoBo temp is showing 46 degrees...now is this alarming?

Well, Fifa at higher speeds, I admit, was a vague thing to say...actually I tried to mean that when I play Fifa 2006 at higher level(pro, world class) and when I used the arrow keys almost constantly pressed (u press the arrow key in Fifa to make your players run) for some time, like for 20-30 seconds, say, then sometimes the frames sort of freeze momentarily, starts to blink sometimes...I have played Fifa (same game) in an AMD 3200+ (939 socket) with ASUS Mobo having onboard VIA chipset which is having one fifth of the cost of my MoBo+graphics, but there I faced no such problems...I was really annoyed...

 

[rupert86]

temperature goes as high as 56 degrees...at that time MoBo temp is showing 46 degrees...now is this alarming?

Not at all.

ASUS Mobo having onboard VIA chipset which is having one fifth of the cost of my MoBo+graphics, but there I faced no such problems...

Isn't it funny when goody goody high-end stuff always plays up while the average-end stuff goes OK. I think it is all due to the optimizations not fitting with each other. That's why I always prefer to get mainstream parts. High-end technology sometimes takes more time to troubleshoot than you have to enjoy its benefits. I have seen this type of thing many times, still I have no solid reson, just the guess I've stated above.

I doubt games now load EVERYTHING needed to play.

You are right but the individual level files I think have also got quite big, and in the RAM they are decompressed so they get even bigger.

 

[TBlaar]

how much ram do you have? and remember, windows XP uses a lot too. so, the amount u got left when playing the game, is not what you have installed.

in your bios you can set a few thing options for sata.
make it ATA mode, and it will work as standard drive. bit difficult to say without seeing what it says...

i recently installed a drive, and pc took minutes to start. then, switched SATA mode to auto, in stead of something else it was on, and now it works nicely.

 

[nubeekb]

I have a Kingston DDR2 667 MHz ram of 512 MB size...and by the way, I also have a graphics card which has 128 MB memory in it and which shares another 128 MB from system with 512 MB RAM using turbo cache technology (nVIDIA 7300GS)...

With a system configuration like mine, how much core and MoBo temperature can be safely tolerated? I have a 400 Watt SMPS

 

[merc14]

512MB of RAM is the minimum I would recommend for any machine running XP and the normal background stuff (virus scanner, spyware etc) and whose owner just wants to surf the web and do email. A gaming system is a different beast altogether.

Open your task manager (ctrl, alt del) and look under the performance tab for how much Memory you are using just browsing this forum. There probably isn't a whole lot leftover, I bet and games need LOTS and LOTS of memory. Also, you are running only one stick of RAM which means you are missing Dual Channel performance. Lastly, turbo cache vid cards require board RAM to run properly. It is no wonder you are seeing spotty performance.

Gaming rigs require at least one GB of RAM to operate efficiently given the demands of todays games. 2GBs is the new norm. Either of those configurations should be two sticks of RAM working in dual channel mode. In other words 1GB of RAM should be configured as two sticks of 512MB sticks and 2GB should be two sticks of 1024MB RAM.

I suggest you do yourself a big favor and get a scecond stick of that RAM (get an identical stick if possible) and install it in the proper slot. You will notice an immediate and dramatic improvement in performance.

 

[jitpublisher]

I have a Kingston DDR2 667 MHz ram of 512 MB size...and by the way, I also have a graphics card which has 128 MB memory in it and which shares another 128 MB from system with 512 MB RAM using turbo cache technology (nVIDIA 7300GS)...

With a system configuration like mine, how much core and MoBo temperature can be safely tolerated? I have a 400 Watt SMPS

Well, there is a lot of your slow down problems. 512meg of memory is not enough for windows and smooth gameplay. You need at least 1 gig.
Also, if your video card is sharing system memory, then it get's even worse from 2 perspectives.
First the video card is using a big chunk of memory that you do not have enough of in the first place.
Second, the shared memory it is using is much, much slower than the memory on the video card it's self.
Add another 512 meg of system memory and turn off the sharing on your video card and see what happens.