Windows 7: stuttering in games. (mainly valve)

I've read this thread from the start.

One thing I can tell without any doubt.
The harddisks themselves are not what's causing this.
Even the green Caviar running at 5400 should be more than enough to run any game.

What I would like to ask is a full list of all software installed on the system,
down to the smallest utility.

Untitled-6.png picture by sotorious2000 - Photobucket

And a list with names and versions of important drivers you installed, like chipset, audio, graphics, network card etc.

left chipset alone this time (had it installed on previous hard drve) if you dont mind telling me how to check what the previous updated one is ill find it and tell you. Audio the latest one on asus website for asus xonar d2 (Version 7.12.8.1775 ) and for the realtek also have the latest 1 on the asus website ( Version 6.0.1.5859 ) (i have 2 audio devices) 1 for head phones(realtek) 1 for speakers (xonar d2) for gaphics NVIDIA DRIVERS 195.39 BETA

also for network whatever came with the mobo ( before reformat had the latest ones) only reason why i didnt re install all these new updates is because the stutter was much worse before if you read the "story" under when the os was on the caviar green.

Also a more detailed description of the setup.

In your specs I only see external hard drives.
What kind of drive is the OS drive? Sata or IDE?

they are 500gb and 1tb external my book usb im pretty sure they are sata on the inside. yes they are sata [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-External-WDH1U10000N/dp/B000VZCEUI"]Amazon.com: Western Digital My Book Essential 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N: Electronics[/ame]

Are the games you have problems with, installed on an internal drive or external?

internal the caviar black ( the one with the best performance)

What frame rates and resolutions are you playing the games at?

tf2 1680x1050 300 frames down to 100 depending on how many people are in the server and where im located, along with multicore rendering enabled in the video options.
css 1680x1050 200+ frames never lower then 100.

In the BIOS have you set the disks to 32bit transfers?

i have no idea how to do that or check that (if you want to do a walk threw that would be gread) it's set to whatever is by default.

Do you have a large amount of music or video files on any of the drives?

yes a large amount of music and videos on my externals, and backed up on both drives, as well as a large amount of music on my 1 internal (caviar green)
49.2 gigs of music, which is on all 3 drives besides my one that has windows
31.2 gigs of pictures clips and some audio in my documents which is on all 3 drives besides main.
283 gigs of movies / shows which is on my 1tb external.

Although I ask for much info, keep the comments short.

Your first post was kind of hard to get through. Too much story, too little info.
I hope you know what I mean?

sorry about that, and i hoped this help. thank you for taking the time out to do this.

Greetings

Uninstall the NVIDIA stereoscopic 3D Driver. Probably won't help, but you should anyhow.

"What frame rates and resolutions are you playing the games at?

tf2 1680x1050 300 frames down to 100 depending on how many people are in the server, along with multicore rendering in the video options.
css 1680x1050 200+ frames never lower then 100."

Where's the problem here???

its not the frames im having problems with... its the lock up that it does for half a second, ill freeze and my sound will loop for a second. not to be an ass but if you previous read what i wrote you would see.

That's why I thought about the hard drive area might be the problem. Short lock ups can be caused by the files not being read quick enough, which can be a result of HDD's not being optomized. That's the problem with platter based hard drives. The larger you get it, the farther the needle has to travel for data that's spread out. That can cause seek times to go up and minature lock ups, Then we created defragmentation... But whith 1TB hard drives whole files can be whole but still a million miles apart. defrag doesn't mean move files towards sector one, it just means make files whole.

I'm getting something like this too, it's like a tiny skip that consistently happens every few seconds, along with a multitude of variable duration skips happening randomly. Disabling desktop composition for it seems to help with the consistent skipping but not the random skipping.

Interestingly enough this only seems to happen to earlier source games such as garry's mod and TF2. L4D2 is smooth as it gets and L4D has a lighter version of this stutter bug.

I figured I should post this here instead of starting another thread since the bugs are pretty similar.

For the record I've tried everything related to compatibility on the game exe, my GPU/mobo/sound drivers are the latest 64bit versions, and I've tried resetting the config by deleting cfg files. I'm running in windowed, haven't tried fullscreen but not worth the bother, it looks horrible on a dualscreen setup.

Yea but there is hardly anything on the hdd im using for the game or windows 50 gb max im not doubting you just stating some info.

I will eventually try the partition after all else fails.

ive moved these hard drives (externals) from my previous system. it comes down to 64 bit and drivers / software. cause i mean there are thousands of people out there with 1tb drives and not reporting in on this.

a weird question it might seem.

Is the screen connected through DVI/HDMI?

If so, check if the graphics card is set to the native freq. of the monitor.
You have to check the monitors manual to find out the native freq.

Example, if the native freq. of the monitor is 60hz, set the graphics cards freq. accordingly.

It solved stuttering on my HTPC.

Good luck

Probably won't help but it's good advice anyhow.

Use O&O Defrag to do an offline defrag using its scheduler built-in function. It will do it at the next Windows reboot if you set it to.

This is helpful because it will defrag the page file and more importantly, the MFT. MFT defrag is extremely important because it is accessed each and every time you or or your system accesses any file. It is basically the hard drive's directory.

If MFT is highly fragmented, you will get poor performance throughout no matter how defragmented the rest of the drive may be. So this is basically general advice for system well-being.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archMFT-c.html

"but this fragmentation of the MFT may reduce performance by increasing the number of reads required for some files"

torrentg,

Fragmentation has little or no effect on performance.

Several major test companies, the german CT being one of them, have showed in several studies and tests, fragmentation of a modern disk has less than 0.5% effect on disks access times and no effect on throughput.

De-fragmenting the test drives made no difference what so ever.

Companies still selling defragmentation tools are in fact selling placebos.

Greetings

I read about it also on a Microsoft page and they said it's highly important for file access.

"There is a new generation of defraggers that can work with the MFT and paging files. According to Microsoft, it is vitally important performance-wise to defragment the MFT and paging files. However, it is only safe to do so using boot-time defragmentation."

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kba...FileTable.html

"Diskeeper and PerfectDisk 2000 and O&O Defrag DO NOT defragment these files online, but uses Microsoft's approved boot-time method."

...searching for actual MS page.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174619

"Because of the importance of the MFT to NTFS and the possible impact on performance if this file becomes highly fragmented..."