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x64 nightmare

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montaillou

Member
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Location
US West Coast
Background:
Used to have a really stellar system (Ultra 320 SCSI RAID 5, P4 3.0, 2g RAM, Nvidia 7800, running on XP Pro) that one day (after 3 yrs) the mobo fried along with 3/4 of the RAM - don't know if the CPU survived, but decided to just upgrade everything and so I wouldn't need it.

Order a Pentium dual core 6600 2.4 (socket 775), Asus P5N32 SLI-SE mobo, 4g RAM, new PSU (Enermax 1000w gamer's edition) and decide to recycle pretty much everything else. Unfortunately I discover that the SCSI PCI card won't work on the mobo - system just won't get past windows install and after reading a ton about problems on the web, it comes down to legacy PCI devices not working in the newer mobo's. Disappointing to lose a very fast array, but ok, time to move on - add a Raptor 10k HD to the mix.

Problem:
At first I load up XP Pro but the system seems more sluggish than my old setup, and only 3g of the 4g of RAM is recognised (I figured out why with a bit of research). So, I decide, I got the dual core, wth, let's try out XP Pro
x64 and so far it's been a disaster.

My secondary system (P4 1.5 with 756megs of RAM, XP Home) operates faster and smoother than my dual-core with 4g. In my old system I could open 20 IE windows at a time, or maybe 150 in day before the system bogged down and I'd have to reboot. With my present x64 system it starts to bog down after 6 windows, plus just opening windows is considerably less responsive. Also the sound is corrupted - I can play music files ok, but any background sound breaks up very badly. I have SP 1 installed but not SP 2 (didn't know SP 2 was available for x64, but some posts here suggest it is - however I don't expect it would make a drastic difference). Open a few windows then try and play a music file and the file plays very slowly and broken up - somehow I'm using up ALL my memory and not getting any back.

I've loaded the newest 64-bit sound drivers, the newest 64-bit video drivers (I have dual SLI Nvidia GTS). Just for fun I tried overclocking the system using the mobo utility to 120%, the system ran so slow it took about 15 min to go reset the overclock to default - I had to wait over a minute everytime I clicked on something for the system to catch up. When I open IE to a blank page, the system uses 60% of the CPU.

I tried installing Everquest 2 on the system, and it took 5 hours! to read from each dvd!!! And the best part is the game won't even run, installs all the way, but ultimately just shuts down (though the process is still active) when I hit "play". World of Warcraft installed fine, and even played ok until I started to move around in the game, then I got stuttering graphics.

Suggestions?
 
for anyone to respond to this post we would need more info on your system like the motherboard, are in raid anymore what kind of ram could be helpfull. I run x64 and find it sooooo much faster than any X86 os. After some dorkin around to find all my drivers and stuff I love it. I run raid also and have run audigy 2 zs but now on my stock 7.1 on MB and see no diff. other than I needed to make some adjustments in windows config..... so give us more info and people will help....
 
I listed the motherboard down to the model number. I used to have a RAID but don't anymore, so I didn't list it. The memory is Kingston HyperX SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) [4 x 1g] - I specifically chose this memory because it was on the mobo's recommended list. I had read about other ppl buying memory for this mobo and not getting the full potential out of it.

I know that ppl are using x64 and it's a great OS for them. I didn't come here to bad mouth x64 - I'm glad it works great for them, I'm just trying to understand why it's not working for me.
 
First things first:

  1. Run memtest86 and make sure that your RAM is OK
  2. If the RAM checks OK, boot via the CD and run checkdisk /f/u (yes, I know it's a new HDD, but it sure won't hurt to look)
  3. If the RAM and HDD both check OK, boot into safe mode and see if your response is more reasonable.
  4. Post your observations and we'll see what we can do to help...
 
Irony...

Went to the mobo web site, dl'd drivers I'd gotten from other places but just to be sure grabbed the ones there. Did some more research on the web. Went to work, got home, spent 3 hours running tests on the RAM...went into the bios and poked around looking for anything that could be the trouble

Noticed something odd in some readings I'd gotten from a cpu diagnostic, decided to look at the bios. Bios only seemed to be reading 3g of the memory

Enable Memory Remap [Disabled]

bleh. Enabled. Memory problems appear to be a thing of the past. Sound is still kinda buggy, but it's something I can work through.

The irony is that I responded in the "Vista 4g" thread with this same solution - though in my case the OS did appear to recognise all the RAM but it just wasn't using any of it.

But, thx for the response.
 
MadMan007 said:
So the remap is all it took to fix it?

In short: yes.

What I believe happened is the bios recognised 3g, the OS recognised 4g and since there was a conflict the OS defaulted to using zero RAM. This would explain why the system felt like it was running on 64megs of RAM. This would also explain the abnormal CPU loads.

Everything is not perfect though. I still have some problems with sound, but this and other minor problems are just that: minor. And this might still be a 32bit square fitting in a 64bit hole.

It'll take a week to a month to hash out other problems and fixes.
 
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