RAM speed problem?

[johnwhelan]

Efficiency would help, I just discovered one major problem with framerates today - each and every loose consist is numbered and considered a "train" by Central Portal Control, whether it's just a single box car or an actual train with an engine or two. While experimenting with that I found I could keep the same dozen or so AI trains running with triple the framerates - by deleting all the loose consists on the route. With MSTS and Railworks when you come into the visible radius of a big yard loaded with freightcars, you get a big drop in framerates, which is to be expected. With TS2010 the big yard can be 15 miles away from the starting point and the framerate drops at the very beginning and stays down in the single digits permanently. Apparently it loads, processes, and continues to fiddle with and worry about every last car on the route regardless of how far away, moving or sitting in a hidden industry spur. Makes a hell of a challenge for a switching route where the whole point is to have lots of cars to switch around. Visibility and quality sliders have zero effect, all the stuff causing the performance drop is way way way beyond the 5000 meter limit.

Now you are beginning to understand a bit more about Trainz and how to get reasonable frame rates. It's very flexible but if you want complexity than you need the hardware.

Bye John

 

[sniper297]

This is new, haven't tried 3Dmark06 for a while, but I downloaded that and tried the benchmark;

Processor
Intel Pentium D 920
Processor clock
2663 MHz
Physical / logical processors
1 / 2
# of cores
2
Graphics Card
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Vendor
PNY Technologies, Inc.
# of cards
1
SLI / CrossFire
Off
Memory
0 MB
Core clock
0 MHz
Memory clock
0 MHz
Driver name
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Driver version
6.14.12.5721
Driver status
FM Approved
General
Operating system
32-bit Microsoft Windows XP (5.1.2600)
Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0YC523
Memory
2048 MB
Module 1
1024 MB Crucial Technology DDR2 @ 400 MHz
Module 2
1024 MB Crucial Technology DDR2 @ 400 MHz
Detailed scores
3DMark Score
2335 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score
915
HDR/SM3.0 Score
846
CPU Score
1426
GT1 - Return To Proxycon
7 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest
7 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight
7 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze
9 FPS

I note it's not reading the specs for the 8500GT at all, but that performed better than the CPU. What jumps out at me is the RAM speed - 400Mhz? If it's reading that correctly, rather than slowing to the system limit of 677mhz, it's running at half speed?

 

[clam1952]

I would think as its not reading the GPU details it's probably reading the ram speed wrong as well.

As a second opinion try FurMark http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

Comes with a copy of GPUz which should be able to read your card properly.

 

[sniper297]

On further review

Ran another test, caught my son at a time when he wasn't busy playing blockland and had him run the same test on his system. Mine on the left, his on the right, identical systems except for the video card and RAM sticks.

Note the major difference in the write speed test - my hard drive has more free space and has been defragged recently, his needs to be cleaned up and defragged, but his write speed is more than twice mine. Ran the tests three times on both systems, identical results. Only conclusion I can come to is my HD is going sour. :'(

 

[Azervich]

Hi Sniper,

Write speed is also based on the cache size of the HDD, it could also be the type of HDD you have vs IDE, Serial ATA and Serial ATA II

IDE = Max 133mb/s
SATA = Max 1.5gb/s
SATA II = Max 3.0gb/s

And the rpm speed of the Hard Drives, I use Seagate Serial ATA II, 7200.10 rpm's and the write test I got was 54mb/s.

-Aaron

 

[sniper297]

Understood, the point is the identical model HD in the other machine got over twice the score. Identical hard drives, should be identical cache, I ordered both of these at the same time with the same specs for both.

 

[Azervich]

Hi Sniper,

I see your point, I use Intel Stress Test to check my system, it does a 3 min test on all hardware, I just downloaded and installed that Novabench and the results I got on the HDD write is rather slow. I did the test 3 times and all 3 said 16mb/s.

there's also 48gb of free space.

-Aaron

 

[sniper297]

"stress test" or burn test? Closest thing I can turn up with google is this;

http://downloads.guru3d.com/IntelBurnTest-v2.3-download-2047.html

 

[Azervich]

Hi Sniper,

It's part of the Intel Utilities Install Disc when you buy a Intel Motherboard, as my current computer is Gigabyte I can't run it on this computer, I do run it on my old '1st Built computer' which was a BTX Form Factor, I use that to check my Hard Drives by putting it in one of the 3 free Serial ATA Ports, if you have an intel motherboard I can send you the install files.

Specs of my old BTX was

Intel Pentium D 3.20 ghz LGA 775
2048 DDRII
4x Serial ATA
1x PCI-E x16

I use to play TRS2006 on it, when I got TS09 that computer wouldn't even run a properly, then I got Mums computer and used that till I got this new one, that old BTX reads as 30+mb/s on HDD write.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q97/Azervich/100_0475.jpg

That's what a BTX looked like, photo was taken in 2009, it's guts have been stripped and only use it for Testing HDD's.

-Aaron

 

[clam1952]

Just going back to the drive speeds, I've come across cases where the cache wasn't enabled, check device manager, also some need a jumper removing to run in Sata 2, if present defaults to Sata.

If not the above have a look in event viewer for any disk related warnings or errors, I'm thinking delayed write errors, usually a sign that something is about to fail or the drive just needs a repair.

I have had problems with a couple of Maxtors. Running Maxtors diagnostics and writing zeros to the drive sorted both of them, they have been running trouble free for a couple of years now in one of my Linux boxes. Obviously you need to backup any data and reinstall the OS if it's a system drive.
Both were DiamondMax drives of about the same age as yours and had jumpers for Sata 1 /2 Worth running the diagnostics just to check the drive anyway.

 

[johnwhelan]

Ran another test, caught my son at a time when he wasn't busy playing blockland and had him run the same test on his system. Mine on the left, his on the right, identical systems except for the video card and RAM sticks.



Note the major difference in the write speed test - my hard drive has more free space and has been defragged recently, his needs to be cleaned up and defragged, but his write speed is more than twice mine. Ran the tests three times on both systems, identical results. Only conclusion I can come to is my HD is going sour. :'(

Trainz doesn't write to the hard drive much unless you run out of memory, it's not really very critical. You can use perfmon if you really want to see what is going on when you run Trainz.

Cheerio John