Really shoddy performance with decent specs

0rbytel said:

Yes, I have AHCI enabled in the bios. Primarily because the bios either has IDE, RAID or AHCI.

I was having real issues with IDE, where W7 would freeze on boot, so I enabled AHCI. It boots fine now, but I do get the occasional BSOD and performance is slow. I don't understand why though, considering my WEI is high and all benchmarks are above average. It just seems to be the initial boot (takes a good 5-10 mins before I can do anything), and when I try and load programs everything is unresponsive for a good 15-20 seconds.

And just out of curiosity- would the SSD drive or the raid 2xvelociraptor 10K rpm drives be more beneficial cost and performance wise?

Ok... now... did you switch this setting after installing windows?

If so the AHCI drivers may not be properly installed...

In device manager open the IDE controllers branch... does it show a SATA controller?

If not... your problem might well be that windows is thrashing around trying to find a way to communicate with the drives... The answer might simply be to download the SATA controller for your chipset and install it....

Also you should note that Microsoft's drivers are seldom worth powder... For the most part they are the absolute minimum needed to get a given piece of hardware working. There are very often entire sets of features that are not enabled. When I first put in Win7 to experiment with it, my disk performance massivly sucked... like 15mB/s throughput. When I got and installed the NVidia SATA drivers it jumped up to nearly 80 on a WD 500g. So I would suggest you do try the latest SATA drivers for your system...

For the second part... quite frankly before I went spending money I'd exhaust all the free options with your current hardware. Reading the thread so far I'm becoming convinced that you have an installation error that's messing you up...