Solved Computer is stuttering.

[CaptainSEO]

My old HTPC, went bang, simply refused to boot from HDD or CD, so I pulled the drive and cards out and stuck them in a redundant Celeron box.

Everything was fine apart from the occasional stuttering of sound and picture. Assuming it was the over-tasked 1.7gHz Celeron, I upgraded that to a 3.2 dual core Pentium.

The processor gets 6.8 on the Windows experience scale (or whatever it is called), but I still get occasional stuttering.

What's next? More RAM?

I have 2 DDR2 slots, currently with a 2 and 1gB chip.

What are the correct steps to take to diagnose my weak point?

All help much appreciated.

 

[CaptainSEO]

One more thing: the picture sometimes flashes back to an image that was there a couple of seconds back. This happens around the same time as any stuttering issues.

I know this sounds like a driver update required, but my Sapphire HD5570 has inherent driver problems whereas only the 11.2 driver version from Feb 2011 works with BBC HD.

No subsequent driver updates have fixed the issue. This card and driver combo was working fine in the old HTPC.

Sound isn't over HDMI BTW.

 

[TVeblen]

I experienced similar problems with the PC I use for a PVR. I believe it is the old IDE hard drive, and the motherboard's system bus speed, are just not fast enough to transfer the data.

I began moving the video files from the PVR PC to my much newer Desktop with SATA drives and playing them from there, and all the issues cleared up.

The processor does not do a lot of the heavy lifting when playing mp4 video (if that is the same format as yours), the bottleneck is in the transfer speed from drive to video card.

This, of course, assumes "the card" you speak of is a TV Tuner card and you are recording content as saved files for later playback. If you are using, or doing, something different you should take more time to describe your setup.

 

[CaptainSEO]

The motherboard ir running at 1033mHz according to the BIOS, however a quick scan Belarc says the bus clock is 267mHz.

That can't be right an it?

 

[TVeblen]

Yes, that can be right.
But it gets complicated. Motherboards can use different multipliers over a base bus speed and data path architecture to achieve a total "system speed".

See here for a sample: Front-side bus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[CaptainSEO]

Can this be increased to make the system faster?

 

[CaptainSEO]

After reading that link, it seams like my FSB is at the top end.

Is my problem likely to e mobo related?

I have noticed stuttering when using Spotify which shouldn't really stretch the system at all.

 

[whs]

Run this program and see whether you get any red bars: DPC Latency Checker

 

[CaptainSEO]

Thanks for this. The system is running at 150-200micro seconds latency, then when it stutters the latency reading is off the scale.

The checker, suggests W-LAN, modes, internal sound devices, USB Host controllers etc.

I'll remove the wireless dongle and attach an extnal sound card first off.

Any other suggestions?

 

[CaptainSEO]

Disabled the wireless device and that fixed it. I'm using a wireless dongle which still operates, so all is well.

Thanks for your help.

 

[whs]

You are welcome. Glad you got it fixed.