Bad load times, huge FPS tanks when turning around.

[steezzysteez]

Hey there - I'm looking for a bit more input on constant FPS tanks and increasingly long loading times in wow.

Intel i5-4440 CPU 3.10GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
Western Digital WD Green WD10EADS 1TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
ASUS H81M-K mobo
4gb RAM

I recently put the motherboard and processor in - my old mobo had four slots for RAM with 2gb sticks in each, and I'm currently reduced to 4. My hardrive is also pretty old(going on five years), and I'm assuming that might have something to do with it as well.

Anyways, would really like some feedback on these issues, thanks in advance!

[Deleted]

FPS drops a lot for me when using Borderless Windowed mode, if that's the case - try switching to Fullscreen.
Also, turn off Vsync.

[Tradewind]

Probably stuck paging a lot with the limited memory available, combined with an under performing hard drive. Constantly loading and unloading textures and assets from the drive.

Get more RAM for starters.

[steezzysteez]

FPS drops a lot for me when using Borderless Windowed mode, if that's the case - try switching to Fullscreen.
Also, turn off Vsync.

So far fullscreen has shown a good effect in warspear and my garrison. Will probably stick in this now if I'm not just doing something like recruiting or alt tabbing for garrison missions.

Probably stuck paging a lot with the limited memory available, combined with an under performing hard drive. Constantly loading and unloading textures and assets from the drive.

Get more RAM for starters.

My situation with RAM is something I'm aware of - but I'm waiting until I can comfortably afford two 8gb sticks so I won't need to upgrade it again.

Is the hard drive that bad? I'm not really knowledgeable on any of this - was tossing around the idea of buying an SSD or a new/extra hard drive.

[Shadow Fox]

FPS drops a lot for me when using Borderless Windowed mode, if that's the case - try switching to Fullscreen.
Also, turn off Vsync.

I here this a lot, and yet, on the variety of systems, I see nothing but improvements in Windowed Fullscreen and Windowed Mode. Fullscreen for games is often the absolute worst out of the three. So weird.

What OS are you on?
Are you having performance issues with your system while the game is running?

[steezzysteez]

I here this a lot, and yet, on the variety of systems, I see nothing but improvements in Windowed Fullscreen and Windowed Mode. Fullscreen for games is often the absolute worst out of the three. So weird.

What OS are you on?
Are you having performance issues with your system while the game is running?

Windows 64 Home Premium

And from what I've been monitoring, memory is close to being capped while I'm playing the game. I've been monotoring it since the new upgrades(and the reduction of ram) but I'm 99% sure now this is down to me just being a crazy multitasker with my other monitor, obviously something I can't do much anymore with half as much ram. I think just not loading anything else besides wow in the time I'm actually playing the game will be a safe bet until I can afford to buy some new ram sticks.

[Shadow Fox]

Windows 64 Home Premium

And from what I've been monitoring, memory is close to being capped while I'm playing the game. I've been monotoring it since the new upgrades(and the reduction of ram) but I'm 99% sure now this is down to me just being a crazy multitasker with my other monitor, obviously something I can't do much anymore with half as much ram. I think just not loading anything else besides wow in the time I'm actually playing the game will be a safe bet until I can afford to buy some new ram sticks.

Windows what? Xp, Vista, 7 8, 8.1?...

[steezzysteez]

Windows 7, duh, my mistake.

[Shadow Fox]

Windows 7x64?

Your RAM is being capped?

What about CPU? How is the usage percentage when the game is running?

In the Performance tab of Task Manager, what are you Total, cached, available, free, and Nonpaged Numbers in both Idle, and while the game is running during the spikes?

4Gb should be okay. No great, but well above the minimum.

Have you tried running the game in DX9, or even running the game in 32b instead of 64b? (Or both?)

Just trying to figure out if it's a failing Harddrive, RAM problem (Or not enough RAM), or your install of the OS that is being screwy. Sorry for the series of questions.

[steezzysteez]

CPU is at 22-30% with the game running, 6-8% while not.

Idle my memory is at 1.54gb with only battle.net client, mumble, resource and task manager as well as chrome with only mmo-champ

Total: 4035
Cached: 710
Available: 2452
Free: 1751

While just loaded into my garrison, memory is at 2.94GB

Total: 4035
Cached: 903
Available: 1015
Free: 132

I've seen it go higher, to about 3.8.

I haven't tried running in DX9 nor have I tried in 32b.

[Shadow Fox]

Hm...

Okay. Weird. You seem okay on RAM. Getting close to your capacity, but not unreasonably, at least at that near 3.0Gb mark. It wouldn't hurt to get more ram, but I wouldn't say you're in dire need for it.

Outside of testing the DX9 and 32b Client, I'm going to lean towards your harddrive being the source of the issue. But, there are of people on this forum who are a lot more knowledgeable than I.

[MyndZero]

Hey there - I'm looking for a bit more input on constant FPS tanks and increasingly long loading times in wow.

Intel i5-4440 CPU 3.10GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
Western Digital WD Green WD10EADS 1TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
ASUS H81M-K mobo
4gb RAM

I recently put the motherboard and processor in - my old mobo had four slots for RAM with 2gb sticks in each, and I'm currently reduced to 4. My hardrive is also pretty old(going on five years), and I'm assuming that might have something to do with it as well.

Anyways, would really like some feedback on these issues, thanks in advance!

You may want to test your HDD, hell it is a GREEN (!) hdd, therefore it's performance is worse than all the other drives. I would bet my money on it being the HDD, it may have been fine initially but if it's gotten slower over time or is starting to get faulty, you would get this problem. I would buy a new HDD, preferably a seagate one or a WD blue/black.

[Deleted]

I notice that you have on board video with that motherboard, are you disabling it in your bios ?
also Ram, ram , ram. it is all well and good waiting to be able to afford to put 2x8gb sticks in. I'm only running on a single 8gb stick and have no issues, so maybe consider another 4gb stick in the mean time.

what ingame settings you running at too ?

[yurano]

Did you reinstall Windows when you upgraded the CPU/Mobo?

[steezzysteez]

Did you reinstall Windows when you upgraded the CPU/Mobo?

I have not. I'll do that in the next few days when I can find my CDs that are stuffed away.


From what I'm gathering from this thread, the RAM is an issue but not a huge one - I'm leaning to this being mainly a HDD issue. The hard drive in this comp is the only thing that hasn't been replaced with an upgrade, the one that came with the comp blew up about two years ago, and I salvaged this one from my friends old computer when it's mobo fried out or something, no idea how old the computer was that originally had the HDD.

Thanks for the input, everyone. Much appreciated.

[Deleted]

Frame Drops when turning around is normal ... it is an issue called Core-parking. it means that some of your CPU cores are running in standby, and whenever you turn around they turn on, but this takes a fraction of a second, leading to stutter ...

there is a simple way to reduce the effects of core parking, or even removing them completely.
(mind that I use the German version of Windows 8.1 and maybe my "translation" of settings is wrong here and there ^^)

- go to your control panel
- enter energy settings
- chose your active energy profile and go to advanced settings
- at Processor Energy Management there is a option called "minimum prozessor performance" and it is set to 5% ...
- raise the value to 100%. Accept, Reboot ...

frame drops while turning around should now be much less or totally gone.
needless to say this isn't optimal for the CPU.
Although on the other hand ... my "old" i7-2600K ran at constant 100% for about 3 years and it still works flawlessly.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether you want to go through with it or not.


Concerning the hard drive:
i wouldn't wonder if it lost some of it's performance during the years.
you can run a nice disk performance tes with HDtune --> http://www.hdtune.com/

mind that HDDs have better load times on the "inner rings" of their disks and slightly worse load times on the outer rings.
depending on where your game is located on the disk might have an impact. however if you felt that 1 or 2 years ago load times were better that either comes down to two things:
1.) games got more demanding with expansions and patches while your system grew old.
2.) your HDD lost performance due to aging ...

depending on how many games you play i'd recommend to get an SSD.
128GB for a computer that is ONLY used for playing WoW ...
256GB if you have alot of programms installed and a second or third game...
500GB if you play alot of different games.

SSD prices have dropped and with christmas just passed there are alot of sales where you might get one cheap.
I personally recommend the Crucial MX100 SSDs, great value ! but other brands like Adata or Kingston are fine too. Basically you cannot go wrong with an SSD nowadays.
also mind that apart from load times SSDs wont increase the performance or FPS of your games.

- - - Updated - - -

You may want to test your HDD, hell it is a GREEN (!) hdd, therefore it's performance is worse than all the other drives. I would bet my money on it being the HDD, it may have been fine initially but if it's gotten slower over time or is starting to get faulty, you would get this problem. I would buy a new HDD, preferably a seagate one or a WD blue/black.

the green is an OK HDD. it isn't ment for gaming though. The green was build as a storage drive, for personal files, music, videos and the likes.
loss of performance is normal with growing age, but i don't think the drive is faulty yet.

as i've already said maybe upgrading to an SSD for the system and the games is a better solution first.
the Green can still be used as a means of storage.

[azkhane]

you said that you multitask a lot with your other monitor, your gpu is weak for a 2 monitor build so you better cut multitasking and dual monitor or upgrade to a better gpu also you dont have much ram for multitastking(i have 8gbs and i get short sometimes so imagine with 4....), your hdd is a green one that means it works at 5400 rpm (that is ok for a office system for a gaming system you have there a big problem) so i recommend upgrading to a ssd if you can.

pd: your hdd can be even worst because is a recycled one, if u can download and run crystaldisk info and paste a screenshot of it so we can know the current state of your hdd.

[steezzysteez]

Frame Drops when turning around is normal ... it is an issue called Core-parking. it means that some of your CPU cores are running in standby, and whenever you turn around they turn on, but this takes a fraction of a second, leading to stutter ...

there is a simple way to reduce the effects of core parking, or even removing them completely.
(mind that I use the German version of Windows 8.1 and maybe my "translation" of settings is wrong here and there ^^)

- go to your control panel
- enter energy settings
- chose your active energy profile and go to advanced settings
- at Processor Energy Management there is a option called "minimum prozessor performance" and it is set to 5% ...
- raise the value to 100%. Accept, Reboot ...

frame drops while turning around should now be much less or totally gone.
needless to say this isn't optimal for the CPU.
Although on the other hand ... my "old" i7-2600K ran at constant 100% for about 3 years and it still works flawlessly.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether you want to go through with it or not.


Concerning the hard drive:
i wouldn't wonder if it lost some of it's performance during the years.
you can run a nice disk performance tes with HDtune --> can't post links rip
mind that HDDs have better load times on the "inner rings" of their disks and slightly worse load times on the outer rings.
depending on where your game is located on the disk might have an impact. however if you felt that 1 or 2 years ago load times were better that either comes down to two things:
1.) games got more demanding with expansions and patches while your system grew old.
2.) your HDD lost performance due to aging ...

depending on how many games you play i'd recommend to get an SSD.
128GB for a computer that is ONLY used for playing WoW ...
256GB if you have alot of programms installed and a second or third game...
500GB if you play alot of different games.

SSD prices have dropped and with christmas just passed there are alot of sales where you might get one cheap.
I personally recommend the Crucial MX100 SSDs, great value ! but other brands like Adata or Kingston are fine too. Basically you cannot go wrong with an SSD nowadays.
also mind that apart from load times SSDs wont increase the performance or FPS of your games.

- - - Updated - - -



the green is an OK HDD. it isn't ment for gaming though. The green was build as a storage drive, for personal files, music, videos and the likes.
loss of performance is normal with growing age, but i don't think the drive is faulty yet.

as i've already said maybe upgrading to an SSD for the system and the games is a better solution first.
the Green can still be used as a means of storage.

The control panel thing has shown good results so far.

Currently using the program you suggested to do a scan of my HDD. Will post with results when it's finished.

you said that you multitask a lot with your other monitor, your gpu is weak for a 2 monitor build so you better cut multitasking and dual monitor or upgrade to a better gpu also you dont have much ram for multitastking(i have 8gbs and i get short sometimes so imagine with 4....), your hdd is a green one that means it works at 5400 rpm (that is ok for a office system for a gaming system you have there a big problem) so i recommend upgrading to a ssd if you can.

pd: your hdd can be even worst because is a recycled one, if u can download and run crystaldisk info and paste a screenshot of it so we can know the current state of your hdd.

The GPU isn't the issue with the multitasking, it's 100% the ram. Up until four days ago I had eight GBs of ram because my old mobo had four slots, where this one now only has two. Four days ago I was a-okay to alt tab to my other monitor at any time playing wow for a period of about a year, the only issues I had with any freezing was trying to load up Spotify during a loading screen, and that's the only time I can recall ever getting freezes as bad as I am now. and hell I even still am now provided I don't go too crazy on my tabs or anything.

I cannot currently post links or anything - but there's an "uncorrectable sector count" under the ID C6 with Crystal Disk Info - and putting the health status at Caution. Looking this up at the moment, anyone able to give some specifics as to what this means?

[Denpepe]

WD green drives are to be avoided as the plague for gaming, I had 2 in Raid 0 and even then I had stuttering and other performance issues with them (they are basically made for cheap storage drives, not performance and will park their heads all the time to save energy), switched to a couple of blacks and poof, problems were gone.

Also your GPU is pretty weak by todays standards, but it should not cause the huge fps drops, that looks more like a loading issue hence me suspecting it is the HDD's fault, ofc make sure your addons are up to date, some outdated addons can also cause issues (I had it with gatherer tanking my fps is certain spots until I updated it)

[Deleted]

I cannot currently post links or anything - but there's an "uncorrectable sector count" under the ID C6 with Crystal Disk Info - and putting the health status at Caution. Looking this up at the moment, anyone able to give some specifics as to what this means?

it means that some area of your HDD is faulty, it either doesn't keep information written there or cannot read from there...
usually Windows or HDDs themselves are intelligent enough to avoid writing on those areas.

it does mean though that the HDD is beginning to fail and should be exchanged soonish.