Wierdest Lag ever (HELP!!)

[znader]

My friend has bought a new rig. His system is as follows.

MotherBoard: ASUS A7V8X
CPU: Athlon XP 1700+
Ram: 512 DDR 266 mhz
MSI ti4200 128 MB, 8x
Sound: Integrated
1 IBM 40 gig
1 Seagate 40 gig

The issue:

Ok, the computer is running fine but when he starts a game
for instance Assult on terror (fps game) he gets the wierdest lag ever. His FPS is steady AVG 140 FPS. But between every 10 FPS the computer lags for a millisecond and then runs smoothly again.

A scenario (dun laugh =P)

Smooth|lagg|smooth|lagg|smooth|lagg

His Timedemo statics information doesn't register any frames dropping from
150 to 0 and then back up to 150. It's steady AVG of 140 fps all the time.

What's been done about this?

We have tried to change nVidia drivers (many different ones)
We have tried different VIA drivers.
We have tried to disable his the soundcard in BIOS.
We have tried to reinstall AoT, CS
We have tried to change 3d modes between openGL and D3D
We have tried to enable V-sync at 75hz still same lag as if V-sync was off.
We have tried to change Gfx cards.

We didn't know what to do, so he installed halflife to see if he had the same problem in that game and he did. Both in 3d3 and Open GL

You get the picture, we are almost out of option here and we could really need some help!

Thanks in advance

Best regards

 

[acidosmosis]

One question.. the MSI graphics card.. I am guessing that is a Geforce 4 TI4200?

 

[Nodsu]

How about running a defrag after installing a game?

 

[cslord15]

Does the game have a drop-down console? If so, is your friend running on Direct3D? GeForce series cards have problems sometimes with Direct3D...Try typing in the console "gl_d3dflip 1" and hit Enter. That solved my laggy graphics on games like Counter-Strike and others that had consoles.

 

[olefarte]

Another suggestion, go to Control Panel, Display, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot, and move hardware acceleration back one notch. I had a similar problem at one time and this helped, but I have a totally different system than you. Worth a try anyway.

 

[znader]

One question.. the MSI graphics card.. I am guessing that is a Geforce 4 TI4200?

Yes it is, read more carefully and you'll see that I wrote that =)

How about running a defrag after installing a game?

first off, the disk is completely clean, recently formatted, the only thing on it is those games and winXP

Does the game have a drop-down console? If so, is your friend running on Direct3D? GeForce series cards have problems sometimes with Direct3D...Try typing in the console "gl_d3dflip 1" and hit Enter. That solved my laggy graphics on games like Counter-Strike and others that had consoles

We've treid to run the game both in D3D and openGL. Same lag.
Tried to disable/enable antiscop filtering, everything.

Another suggestion, go to Control Panel, Display, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot, and move hardware acceleration back one notch. I had a similar problem at one time and this helped, but I have a totally different system than you. Worth a try anyway.

Tried it, didn't work.

We think it might be some problems with his bios settings we tried to update it to the latest by flashing his bios with a program found on Asus homepage.

Once the BIOS was up to date the games lagged even more!!

So i guess we need to degrade his bios, but we can't find any old versions of his bios!

Can any1 help us out here? any good sites with these kinds of stuff?

Best regards

 

[Death1203]

I cannot help you but i can say i have a win XP sytem as well and i have a 32mb Geforce MX 400, and a AMD 950mhz processor with 640mb of RAM. I have the exact same problem and i have heard of others with it too. Unfortunately i haven't heard of a way to fix it. I had the same problem on a laptop with XP but i cnnno remember what i did to fix it. It works now thouhg so i know there is a solution. I am searching for it myself. goodluck!

 

[Arris]

Check to see how your IRQs are being shared in whatever version of windows you are using...
I had a similar problem where it was pausing every so often and found that my sound card and video card were sharing the same IRQ, my bios allows me to manually assign the PCI slots IRQs but to save from creating any other problems I just my sound card to my last PCI slot and now its not sharing the video cards IRQ and I have no more little pauses. Check to see whether the sound card/onboard sound or anything else is sharing with the video card.

 

[znader]

We found that his RAID controller is sharing IRQ with his VIA chipset.


We'll try and change those.

 

[Nodsu]

Fresh install of windows means a very badly fragmented disk FYI.