Chainu127

First off, I’m really sorry this is so long, if you haven’t clicked “back” yet, please bear with me

I have the Jetway J7F5M1G5D-VDE-PB motherboard with a 1.5 GHz processor. I purposely bought this one over the J7F2 series because of it’s ability to share up to 128 MB memory for video. I have 1 gig ram installed and 128 set to share in the cmos. When I run Roadrunner with the DFX skin, with music playing my cpu usage fluctuates in the teens % usually. With the visualization in the background of the main screen, my cpu usage is at ~50% and the scrolling title/artist area is not perfectly smooth. If I have iGuidance running at the same time, CPU is at least 80%+ and the visualization is pretty much worthless. I’m just running one of the spectrum analyzers, not any crazy multi-color intense visualizations. Also videos with iGuidance running are not smooth. I’m running DFX with the still photo & compass in the center of the screen.

Now I’ve read the threads on optimization and speeding up Roadrunner, here’s what I’ve done:

Updated Bios (less than one month old I believe)
Nlited Windows to around 350 MB installed, minimal services running.
Updated driver’s on everything (video drivers are less than 2 months old, agp & chipset maybe 3 or 4 I forget)
Disabled my page file
Turned down video acceleration. (tried all settings, one or two notches down works best)
Flash 9, Flash 9 with renamed ocx file from guino’s thread, Flash 8, Flash 8 with renamed ocx from guino’s thread (these are the correct full flash installs as per the install exe file, not a browser plugin)
Video at both 16-bit and 32-bit (roadrunner thread recommends 16-bit is faster, winamp AVS actually says 32-bit is faster because of floating point math)
“Wait for retrace” turned off and slider between 1/4 and 1/2 way in visualizations config

I’ve got a fresh install down to a science now after doing it at least a dozen times in the past week. The only things I install after windows are winamp 5.13, roadrunner binary then weather fixed version, dfx 4, flash, iguidance, xport, ffdshow for video codecs, firefox. I’ve got a 7200 rpm laptop drive in there although I don’t think that would effect the cpu usage in this case. My cold boot time is ~20 secs including POST, and I’m actually to a point where minlogon didn’t make any difference for me. Basically I’m super streamlined.

If I give roadrunner high priority in task manager, videos will run alright, visualizations aren't smooth, iguidance gets slow. If I give roadrunner and iguidance high priority, visualizations are worthless, and music will start skipping. If I give winamp high priority, visualizations run perfect but title/artist info get really bad and iguidance is almost unusable.

Basically I’m wondering, have I really hit the hardware limit of this board already? I haven’t even gotten OBD-II running yet, but at this rate there’s no point since I don’t think the gauges would display in realtime. I've tried switching back to 64 MB video in the cmos and didn't even notice a difference, which doesn't seem right. I've also tried various options like setting video ram cacheable to enabled, with no luck.

Any suggestions?

MP3Car.com

 

BlackStealth

Does that motherboard allow you to plug in an external video card? That alone will solve your problem (assuming you get a good video card).

blk02si

You have not hit a hardware limit, you have hit a software limit

I do all of the above smoothly running a via M10000. You need to optomize the software some, and running a resource hog like DFX skin is going to cause a slowdown.

__________________
Build Things, it keeps your brain busy.

AutoPC v1 (Retired) - AutoPC v2 (in progress) - www.shocknet.us

navputer

I have a MII 10000 tweaked out with changes to Bios/Windows/Services. All the tweaks mentioned.

I also installed a 256MB Nvidia card (maybe overkill) and it didn't affect my CPU usage much. I thought it would make a difference but not really.

There is something different in the last update with RR and DFX 4. I know I don't have the fastest CPU but after update it increased about 10-20%.

However, I do like the DFX 4 features/options/style it provides, so I have to give on something.

__________________
Gee

BiG K

"My cold boot time is ~20 secs including POST"

That's a long time my friend. I originally had a nlited copy of xp streamlined etc but with compatibility issues, I just went with a full version.

It takes about 20 secs to boot up. The Nlite version...well I saw the bios screen, then would go black, I would see the XP logo for a second, then black again and then the desktop would be up!

How much space do you have on your hard drive left? Leaving atleast 30% free space helps.

What 7200rpm laptop hard drive do you have?? RPM does not equal data throughput!!

MP3Car.com