huge drop in performance .......

[thrivx my appendix]

Something happened I believe after I installed SP2 for WinXP, although it could have been after I tried all those custom Flask versions -- not sure on this -- but I get maybe 8fps while encoding to an uncompressed AVI from a DVD rip, and the resulting file seems to play twice as slow.. very strange, as if my machine is somehow being capped, which is again strange, because I'm running a pretty nice rig (at 3.6GHz, 2GB memory, Radeon 9800 XT)..

I was getting ~70 while encoding before (reference quality SSE2, uncompressed) and did not have this trouble with the playback at all.

I'm experiencing this problem with other video files and every encoder I've tried, so it's not isolated to a single app or anything.

Has anyone experienced this kind of thing before and found a solution? I did try installing the latest video drivers, amoung other drivers -- nothing. I also don't believe it's related to spyware/trojans as I've went all through that, found nothing, and I keep my system pretty clean anyway. Don't think it's a hardware failure.. An intensive game (Doom 3) plays as usual and all.. Please help :confused:

[unmei]

You should try to test the hardware parts independenly to isolate the problem.

Did you try to do something that needs relly high disk thoughput, virtually no other ressources? Copying files, or a disk test utility..
Did you try a memory and cpu test? I don't know right now what would test these independently ..for the CPU you could try some 3D or raytracing that uses few memory ..but better were probably specialised test apps.

Doom 3 is my experience mostly a challenge to the GPU while the other parts are not so much stressed (and video where your problem occurs is not much of a stress of the GPU).

My ideas what could have happenened are if the harddrives are slow: DMA disabled - that could really slow you down a lot. For the CPU or RAM it could be reset to a low clock frequency, but i don't think it would have reset to such a low frequency that it would give a performance hit of 10x.

[b0b0b0b]

try uninstalling sp2 and seeing if there's a difference.

[thrivx my appendix]

It's not SP2; It should be confirmed since uninstalling, reinstalling it.

I ran a number of specific tests to 'rate' my CPU, memory, and so on and everything appears to be functioning as expected.. however when I try to run on my HDD a "sequential write/read" test, it's apparently hanging or incredibly slow. I can't say just what's happening, because I killed the process after some 8 hours of little-no progress (slept on it).

I then had XP check the disk for errors, and it found none -- neither in the NTFS structure or the physical sectors... This took about 20 hours. :o

Could it be some runaway driver causing this slowdown? Or something malicious?

[thrivx my appendix]

Hmm, after a lot of bullshite I figured it out. Some obscure Windows 'feature' (annoyance) that was removed in the SP2 update, ironically. Anyway, it was a DMA issue: Windows had my hdd locked into PIO mode. I reinstalled the controller driver and it solved it. Got everything performing as it should. PIO had me at 3 megs/sec, so there you go for huge drop..

Thanks, guys for taking the time :thanks:

[b0b0b0b]

good job with the pio vs dma

for some folks, installing the intel drivers (named "intel application accelerator") might be helpful