Lag issues and hangs

I am hoping that I can get some help here before the games go live. I have 'freezes' or lag in the game that can last for a couple of seconds up to a minute. This can be standing still or in full battle.

I have DSL.

System Specs

DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra B motherboard
Asus 9600xt ATI
AMD AthlonXP 3200+ (2.20GHz)
Samsung harddrive (2 in Sata O) 120GB
1 GB Ram

I am heading to work and will not be able to view this thread until after 5pm central.
I have all the latest drivers for my graphics card and I am running Windows XP SP2. Any other specs that are needed, let me know and I will provide

If you are using spybot, I found it was dreadful for causing those lag moments and hangs during GuildWars betas. Webroot SpySweeper has solved both problems well for me.

Try cleaning off the dust on your fans if you think overheating is the problem. It worked for me.

I do have spybot installed on my system, but I only use it weekly. Are you suggesting an uninstall to see if this cures my problems? I will give this a try. Any other programs that you suggest being a problem? I also have the Microsoft Antispyware that I kill when I game.

I will post results to the removal of spybot. GW is not the only game I am having problems with...

I put my puter together about 8 months ago. But, I have had the case open in the last month and did the recommended cleaning.

Ok. Its a little better. I am going to remove all of the spyware programs and tryout the one you suggested. Will post another follow up.....

If you are running the lastest ATI drivers I found them to be buggy. You should roll them back or go get an earlyier set.

Download 3dmark05/03 to stress the card out for a good test.

http://www.guru3d.com/

You can get the drivers and 3dmark at this web site.

Thanks Mss Drizzt. The removal of the spyware programs did not help. I am downloading the 3dmark. Is there anything I should look for on the results?

Also, do you have a recommended version driver for ATI?

I reccomend 5.1 or 4.12 for ati drivers. Many people have had issues with 5.3+, especially with modern cards and games.

Hoever, I read something about someone using winamp while playing causing issues too.

I'm using omega 4.12 for my 9800 pro and they work fine until issues are resolved with newer drivers/games.

What game is it that you are having problems with?

Also, for me it was GuildWars that Spybot interfered with, and just for clarity, when you get a hang or lag does the screen freeze with the image that's there or do the players appear to have lost the commands coming to them? Say you were attacking, does your character just stop but breathing or other animation continues, then he might stand upright and all the characters just stand their like waiting for the next commands, but not like the screen is "frozen?"

*Edit* Jaie thank you for that info on mother boards. Very helpful.

What you are describing is what i see all the time with motherboards that are running in safe mode. Where your motherboard slows down and can do things like stutter and cause wierd freezes here and there.

Newer motherboards have whats called a safe mode (just like windows safe mode) and if the clock speed and multiplier are set up too high or wrong your mother board will run in safe mode. Safe mode is still fast even though its the slowest possible speed the motherboard will run on, so if its always ran at that speed since day one you would never know it could actually run faster.

So if the spyware is gone and you are still having trouble, you've tried updating your display drivers and still are having trouble my advice is to lower the speed of your clock settings. Remember an underclocked cpu with a motherboard running correctly will run faster than an overclocked cpu on a motherboard in safe mode.

Addition ~
I am on dial-up and i run spybots and i have zero trouble and no freezes with the game and i repeat i am on dial up =P.

The other game is Diablo LoD. On GW, the screen will freeze. The mouse will not always freeze but will at times. If I was doing something, I will find myself finished with the action or if running/walking, I will be further down the path.

With the 3DMark05 test, I seem to have a problem. I will type it out and someone can put it into english for me. I am afraid I know the answer.

The error message is on starting the 2nd test:

IDirect3DDevice9:rawIndexedPrimitive failed: Out of Video Memory (D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY)

Could not resume test and since I downloaded the free version, I can't select the individual tests to check other areas.

Do I have a bad card? Also, I have the latest driver. Would a wipe of the current driver and a reinstall of an earlier version help with this?

Not sure I will do all this tonight, but I will continue with this tomorrow and follow up with the post/results.

I really appreciate all the help I am getting.

EDIT - I did not mean for an icon to post in here and don't know how to remove it.

Jaie
You have my attention with this. I did not know of safe modes for motherboards. When I built the computer I left alot of the settings in default. I did set the timings for my RAM that were specified/published from their website for my motherboard.

I have never played with clocksettings much, and I am a little green in that area. Can you point me to a good reference site that could help educate me on this? I can google something, but if you have a site you like, I will check it out.

The best advice i can give you is read your motherboard manual =P everything you will need to know in order to change your motherboard speed should be in there.

Some motherboards require you to change a jumper setting while others allow you to do it in bios. Every motherboard is different so there is no general this is how you do it, just check your manual for where and how to do it. Hopefully you stored it in a safe spot =P.

I do have the manual, but it does not mention a safe mode. I am not saying it doesn't have one, just that I have never heard of it. I googled a forum sponsored by DFI with tech support. I will go there and see what I can find out. I will let you know.

BTW, would the safe mode have caused a failure on my 3DMark test?

What you want to look for in your manual is how to set the motherboard speed and multiplier to match your cpu clock speed.

Modern mobo's are almost all in-bios setup. The only jumper nowadays is to clear the CMOS in case you mess up. Before mucking around, try going into BIOS and loading defaults. This will turn off all OCing and either set speeds to auto-detect or lowest, depending on the BIOS.

And as Miss Drizzt said, Guru3d is a great site to get VC drivers from. My set is actually about 5 rebuilds higher than the official Nvidia download site; not sure how far ahead on ATI they are.

The thing here is .. most newer motherboards automatically set for cpu and memory timings, the only time you need to change them is if (for one reason or another) your system is drastically running slow and having many more problems than simply stop and stutter.

Ok so now we know it could be hardware and or driver problem. Please try some different drivers like omega's

I am running the 5.4 drivers but not the control panel that comes with them.

It is the control panel that is corupted. I am using the control panel that comes from driver 4.12 from guru3d.com. I am running a x700xt 1024 x 768 with almost everything at max. (shadows not a max) and no aa. The game looks just awsome and I ran for 13 hrs straight with not one problem.

Guru3d's drivers I've heard are also good to try.

It might be that another process running is interrupting your CPU. Try ending every process that isn't critical (this includes explorer.exe). And then going to New Task: And browse to your game shortcut or executable and run it this way. This will make sure that it's not another process taking valuable CPU time. From my personal experience with computers, AMD is not near as good at multitasking processes than Intel.. perhaps they need a better pipelined architecture. I don't know.. but I know it seems to run alot faster after you take out other processes (faster than Intel.. is what I'm referring to).

Lansing Kai Don

P.S. Out of Video Memory doesn't exactly mean your out.. it could be a bad video driver (download and install again after removing and a restart into VGA or safe mode). Or check your BIOS for an AGP aperture size (on some motherboards this is buggy)... basically set it to a step higher than your current memory on your video card. If you have 64MB video card memory, make this 128MB. If you want the technical details I'll reply with them.

Except for the memory timings, I haven't changed anything concerning clock speed. For basis of discovering the problem, I will reset all to default in bios. The memory timings was from manufacter official website.

I visited Black Vipers site (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm) after sp2 was released and shut down all processes that were not needed. I will try what you mentioned for the rest of the tasks.


My card is 128MB with a x8 AGP. The bios seems to reflect this. Later this afternoon, I will be trying the drivers that seem to be recommended here and a complete reset on the bios. I will check on the motherboard bios and the updates to see if there is anything that addresses my problem.

At this point it seems reseting the bios and and trying the recommended drivers. Will check back this afternoon. If all else fails, I have considered doing a fresh install.... ugh.

If it reflects 128MB try increasing the aperture size to 256MB. Also, please try to end all non-critical processes (critical processes won't let you kill them or give you a timer till restart... just remember which ones are which, write them down).

Lansing Kai Don

I have discovered a conflict with my bios and my CPU. Their is a recommended bios for my processor that I am not running. I will check back after I go through this headache... rather update.

Ok. Be very careful when flashing your BIOS.
Read (and possibly print out) the instructions from your manufacturer's website. Download the latest BIOS that definitely is for your motherboard off of the manufacturer's site. IDK about your mobo, but not all come with BIOS recovery (I'm glad mine does, it's a kind of security blanket if something goes wrong); you get 1 chance if it does not have a recovery feature. Just follow the instructions religiously and you should be fine. If you do end up screwing up the BIOS chip, there's the possibility of ordering a new chip from the manufacturer (they're made to be removable). Don't worry too much though; I've only done it once and there were no problems whatsoever with my first try. (I had to update my BIOS because the original didn't come with full support for the Winchester core AMD64)

I recommend not using a floppy; they can be too unreliable. First choice is to run it from your HDD, and second to burn it to a CD.

EDIT: here's the manual if you have no clue where yours is:
http://www.dfi.com.tw/Upload/Manual/...0775003341.pdf
It's in the "Updating the BIOS" section. They say floppy, but you can place it in a folder on your HDD [i.e. C:\BIOS\] and run it from there: it will be faster that way, too. Make sure that the HDD partition you place it on is FAT32 and not NTFS. I hope you are comfortable maneuvering around in DOS .

If you have Win98 or ME, just use the install CD as a dos boot disk.
"To create an MS-DOS startup disk under Windows XP, right click on the 3 ½ floppy drive icon under my computer and select format. On the format dialog box, check the box next to “Create MS-DOS startup disk” and then click the start button to make a MS-DOS startup disk."

Follow the instructions from the manual. It appears that you can recover your BIOS with the save if you screw up.

I was unable to update to the first recommended bios. It is an AWDFLASH bios... when I put in the proper commands... it will drop to the next line and seems to freeze. I did google up a site about this program.

So, I went to the second recommended bio's which creates a bootable floppy (yes, I did this before seeing your instructions and everything went great.

But, (yes, you knew this was coming) everything is running slower than previously. They said this bios would not solve most peeps problems. Will try again with the AWDFLASH bios that was recommended. I must have typed something wrong. The command I was using:

AWDFLASH N24LDB27.BIN /QI/CC/SN/PY

After entering, it seemed to freeze. After 5 minutes, I softbooted out as the keyboard was not taking commands. Is there supposed to be a 'space' between bin and /qi .... that is how I entered it.

I will have more to time to devote to this over the weekend. My board and 3200's don't like each other it seems and I am considering getting 2600/2700 to replace mine to see if that will solve my problems. It seems the cheaper option.....

I have a couple of suggestions after reviewing the whole thread.

First I hope your bios update went well. However if things still seem slower....
(By the way, all the rest of you correct me if this seems out of line.)

Mantis is that Asus 9600 ATI built in video? If so this could be the larger portion of the problem and all I have said below is likely meaningless.

Also is your motherboard one of those Asus AI motherboards? If so you could be having a sort of "mind duel" so to speak in that there is obviously a component that isn't working accurately enough for the AI to adjust to, however by the adjustments it makes it is masking the true culprit problem from detection by the human observer.

1) Adjust the timing to the ram in bios if that is possible. You may have a bad module considering what you got from 3dmark.

2) Another possiblity since it looked like something form Direct X 9, although I haven't a clue, is that you have a bad video memory module in the beginning video addressing. I noted in one of your above posts the problem is in both Diablo and Guildwars. If you have WarCraft III, I'd like to see if you get the problem with a 8 person FFA I'd do it against the AI at home first and then online against people. This might help narrow down more specifically where the freeze source is.

3) Some bios offer a series of ram timings some sequence like "r0 w1 x0" and another with higher numbers, you might wanna adjust that up 1, if this helps it is a very good possibility you have a cold or bad solder, or at least a marginal to below spec, connection to one of the chips on a memory module. Though this is relatively rare it happens on occassion.

Obviously if you computer won't boot or hangs further after making one of the above adjustments adjust it back. Again none of the above may be applicable. I am just trying to narrow down the source of the hangs as that would appear to be the best way to determine a course of action in solution.

Yes, everything is slower and my cpu is not represented correctly in bios. Although, there are 2 bios updates that I could of tried, I only was able to get one to flash. See above post concerning AWDFLASH problem. The other sucessfully flashed because DFI had their own flash program but again it has slowed me down worse. I need to try and flash the other bios.

If I understand your question correctly, I have a Asus 9600xt in an AGP slot.
The motherboard is DFI, no relation to ASUS.

In order
1)I have adjusted to manufacter specs in relation to my motherboard. I did this about a month ago and it did help some. I will experiment taking a stick out during the weekend and changing back and forth to see if i have a faulty stick.

2)When I first put this together, I had the problem from the start. I thought it was because of a Direct X version difference and the game being built around Glide(d2). I have never asked for help till now. DII was my first computer game, and GW will be the second. Now I know my computer is the problem..... I don't have Warcraft.

3)I will check into this as a final result. My time has been limited during the week and will be spending more time on this during the weekend. If by Sunday I don't have a solution, I will order a 2600xp and see if that makes the difference. My motherboard and the 3200xp don't like each other much from what I have seen in the forums at DFI.

I have to find a way to make the AWDFLASH program work to make sure the other bios will/will not help.

I did uninstall the ATI drivers I had and reinstalled what seemed to be recommended most here... that did not help. Still haven't tried the omega ones yet.

Wish me luck, its going to be a long weekend.

Also, if you want to follow my thread and simlar ones, the DFI site is at:
http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/ I am under the same handle of Mantis. There is better info/responses posted in other threads than the one I started there.

This thread has different but similar problems:
http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=8

If I have broken ettique by posting links to other non competing forums, please let me know and I will edit it them out.

After changing some settings in the bios, I tried and failed the 3DMark test and decide to look at the detail more closely.
Does the below seem odd since my card is an AGP card. My PCI slots are empty.


Slot 2/6 (PCI)
RADEON 9600 SERIES
Order 2
Designation PCI1
Type PCI
Characteristics 5.0V, PME Signal
Data Bus Width 32 b
Details In Use, Long
Device Class Display Adapter
Manufacturer ATI Technologies Inc.
Driver Version 6.14.10.6525
Driver Date 3-22-2005
IRQ 19



Slot 6/6 (AGP)
Order 0
Designation AGP
Type AGP
Characteristics 5.0V
Data Bus Width 32 b
Details Available, Long
IRQ 0

It appears to me you have a PCI graphics adapter. Yes this is odd, and what it indicates to me is that...alright does that motherboard have on board graphics? if it does go into windows and select that system devices thing, then go to the onboard graphics adapter as it will be showing under "display adapters" I believe. Right click and select properties, then select "disable in all profiles" or whatever means similar in windows xp. Basically you have to disable the onboard AGP on some mother boards for the card to be used. It is a weird quirk i've ran into before. It also happens with PCI based adapters on some motherboards with built in video. Oh and then reboot.