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koonthul
11-17-2004, 12:02 AM
This can't be right...

I've been experiencing slow load times for games ever since I put my system together, so I'm a little confused. Slow load times as in: Max Payne 1 loads slower than it should compared to a machine of lower spec, Half Life 2 pops and stutters every five seconds (like a cd), etc. This can't be right with the hardware I have.

2 serial ATA 160gig Samsung 7200 rpm 8 meg cache hdd's
ASUS A7N8X deluxe MOBO rev 2.0 with bios flashed at 1007
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
2 sticks of Geil PC3200 DDR RAM at 512 a piece = total 1 gig
Radeon 9800 Pro
3 optical drives (2 unplugged)
4 case fans (unplugged)
2 cold cathode tubes (unplugged)

I have one drive setup to load windows (boot drive) and the other seperate physical drive loads my games. I tried putting the games on root, but still the same problem.

There is definitely something wrong, and I can't figure it out. My load times are ridiculous with the hardware I have. There has to be something I'm missing in terms of settings or drivers, something. Anyone with a similar rig? Any ideas? This is really getting annoying, my gaming experience is suffering, max payne 1 should load lickety split and it takes FOREVER ( a good 5 to 8 minutes)....

BipolarBill
11-17-2004, 12:22 AM
Make sure that you don't use the nForce2 "SW" IDE driver. Be certain that DMA is enabled in Device Manager > IDE controllers > Primary and Secondary channels.

dell8200
11-17-2004, 12:59 AM
also the higher dma the better like dma 5, or dma 6 is what you what,

BipolarBill
11-17-2004, 01:02 AM
You can't choose the DMA type - just on or off.

dell8200
11-17-2004, 01:08 AM
i am sorry you are right, but you want a drive that is udma 5, or 6

koonthul
11-17-2004, 11:07 PM
Yup, I'm officially stupid. I was messing with my Windows Page file settings a while ago. I had the min set to like 100 meg and the max set to 4000 meg. This was killing me. Set the min back up to 2000 and the max to 4000. Helps quite a bit when windows has a larger page file size, especially for load times on games. If I have a gig, what do you guys recommend i set these too? also, should I have a page file for each drive or not?

**ADDENDUM***

Should have posted this earlier, but I am running WinXP Pro SP2

BipolarBill
11-17-2004, 11:12 PM
You don't need a page file at all with 1GB RAM, but I set mine to 1GB/1GB (fixed).