Really shoddy performance with decent specs

[CommonTater]

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...

 

[0rbytel]

Hey Commontater- thanks for all your help. I did initially have sata/raid setup in the bios, then changed it to AHCI, which was due to crashes among other things.

I was running the gigabyte drivers, and still had the same issues. I ran a low level format on the drive, and then ran a full diagnostics. The drive came up with several errors, all of which couldn't self repair. I tried to reinstall w7, and it crashed half way through installation.

I ended up going out today and buying a 128mb OCZ Vertex SSD, and have just finished setting it up. And I have to say- without actually installing the official vendor drivers or doing any cleanup (from the initial install) it's fast... very very fast. I actually boot in 11 seconds from cold boot.

My WEI is currently sitting at 7.4:

Processor: 7.4
RAM: 7.6
Graphics: 7.4
Gaming Graphics: 7.4
Primary Hard Disk: 7.4

What I was amazed at was how quickly w7 installed. From start to finish it took 18 minutes- including all updates.

 

[0rbytel]

Something else interesting I just found- my 8GB pro duo memory stick is now useless. Readyboost has been enabled as "the system disk is fast enough that ReadyBoost is unlikely to provide additional benefit"

Thats a good sign i suppose