32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

[370forlife]

Which should I run my drive at? It seems like I can't run games on as high of settings with my supermicro that I could with my ECS.

My ECS had the same 8600gt 512mb thats in this computer, and a 3200+, and 2gigs of ram. This has a 3.2ghz xeon and 2 gigs of ram, along with the video card.

It acts choppy every time the hard drive starts reading in games like cod4, and badly in fallout3. My ECS never had this problem, and it had the same WD 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache IDE hard drive.

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

I'm assuming you're in DMA mode. Typically when windows loads its driver, the BIOS settings become irrelevent anyway. Can't hurt to set the BIOS to 32 bit mode though.. which chipset does your Xeon board have?? I remember certain Serverworks chipsets were a bit broken when it came to parallel ATA.. The ATA ports on those were only fit for CDROM/DVD drives. I'd say honestly that an Athlon 64 3200+ especially a S939 one, would typically outperform a Xeon 3.2, for gaming stuff anyway, especially when overclocked.. I remember my brand new 3000+ Winchester core pwning my old Pentium 4 1.8A # 2.8Ghz, at stock speed, no less.

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

It was a S754 3200+ w/512k cache

Its got the intel E7525 Tumwater Chipset

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

I don't recall the 6300ESB having any issues, which i'm assuming is the southbridge your board has. I'm assuming this is a fresh windows install, of whatever flavor you favor.. If not a fresh windows install, try uninstalling and reinstalling vidcard drivers and directx. If a fresh install of windows, don't do that.. If you're running Vista on 2G, buy two more Gigs of RAM.. :-P Got all your chipset drivers loaded?? Set windows to a large sized,(>2GB) fixed size pagefile.

[Wizard]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Jump into the control panel, system, hardware tab, device manager,

IDE ATA etc, primary blah blah, select advanced settings tab and see what it says.

If PIO or not DMA, you are experiencing performance issues. Reset it and reboot. If this fixes it, all good. If not, report back for futuher fixes.

Cheers, Wizard

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Its under windows xp pro 64bit (aka server 2003 64bit)

Latest chipset driver from intel, latest drivers from nvidia's website, both HD's in UDMA 5 mode.

[NxB]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

windows xp pro 64bit != aka server 2003 64bit

You either have 1 or the other. Make sure AGP is on, run dxdiag and see if all of the d3d accelerations are enabled. Is your xeon really 64, some series of intel processors tried to emulate amd64 instructions. The 64 bit was a debacle with intel.

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

And you were running with the Athlon 64 3200/2G/same vidcard, etc under xp pro 64bit also, with none of these issues? On a Blechy ECS board no less?? As i recall, not many people went with XP Pro 64 due to drivers. I'd suggest trying XP Pro 32 bit, if you've got a spare hdd just to try it out on. With 2G of RAM the 64 bit XP OS isn't doing you much good. Try turning off your NICs and disable onboard sound, just for troubleshooting. If turning either of those off fixes the stuttering, it's a driver issue with that device..

Otherwise, review your windows event logs, and see if anything stands out.

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

The processor has the EM64T instructions for 64bit,

>>Make sure AGP is on<<

Huh? It dosen't have a AGP slot, its a PCI-E 16x slot.

>>And you were running with the Athlon 64 3200/2G/same vidcard, etc under xp pro 64bit also<<

No, it was under xp pro 32bit.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Those are Nocona cores,,, right? - If so those should be 64-bit.

Maybe drives are spinning down too often.

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Maybe its HT?

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Well, like i said before, try xp 32bit when you get a chance, as the driver situation for XP 64 bit wasn't exactly great.. With 64 bit OS and only 2G of RAM you're probably using more RAM , resulting in paging to disk.. Try killing off any AV / 3rd party firewall software, etc, before a gaming session. Only go with 64 bit if you have more than 3 to 4G of RAM..

[PCBONEZ]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

He ~JUST~ said he's using XP 32-bit.

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

No, he's using XP 64 bit.. Post number 6....

[NxB]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

>Huh? It dosen't have a AGP slot, its a PCI-E 16x slot.

The 3200+ had pcie. ooops

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Both the Supermicro X6DAL-G (the 3.2ghz Xeon with XP pro 64bit and the 8600gt) and the ECS RS482-M754 (the 3200+ that had the same 8600gt but had xp pro 32bit) have PCI-E 16x slots

[PCBONEZ]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Read post 9.

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

He was running 32 bit xp on his old AMD Athlon 64, S754, with 2G of RAM and the same video card.. And had no stuttering issues like he's having now, with a 3.2 Xeon, S604, 2G of RAM, and the same vidcard.. THAT IS RUNNING XP 64 BIT EDITION......

Hence why i suggested XP 32 Bit, as running a 64 bit OS on 2Gigs of RAM is a bit of a waste, especially if the 64 bit OS uses more memory.


Could be he was close to paging on the old system, and going to 64 bit goes enough over that it starts paging..

[370forlife]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Well, this computer is faster on paper than my 3200+, I know that after running 3dmark06 on it, it got a better score.

It just stutters and slows down when loading a big scene or the rest of the map in fallout 3 or Team Fortress 2.

[gg1978]

Re: 32bit vs 16bit hard drive address

Well, i'm wondering if these games you're having trouble with, are 64 bit executables or not.. If you have dual monitors, this is easy, and if you have a single monitor, still possible.. If you've got dual monitors, whack Ctrl Alt Delete, to open task manager, and drag it onto your secondary monitor. A 32 bit executable will have a *32 in its name, while a native 64 bit executable will not.. If you don't have a secondary monitor, just whack Ctrl Alt Del while the game is running, and find its executable in the task manager listing..


I honestly think you're just paging out to disk, and the easiest way to fix that is to add a bit more RAM.. If any of the games are 64 bit aware, they could also be using more memory in an attempt to improve performance, but killing performance by forcing your system to page to disk.. Needless to say hard drives are much slower than RAM. I'm guessing you have at least a pair of DIMM slots open, as most Xeon boards of that vintage have 6 DIMM slots. Hopefully you can get a pair of 1G Reg ECC DDR2 DIMMs fairly cheaply.. Or install 32 bit XP..