All Things IT Blog

My system for the last few years has been a Dell Dimension 9200. I’ve done a few upgrades to it that were non-Dell standard but for the most part it has been completely stable and without issue. That was until recently… when I installed a new nVidia GTX 295 video card.  I had thought outside of the SLI on a single card that I wouldn’t experience any issues. My mistake.

Soon after installing the GTX 295 I started experiencing strange issues. 3D Performance was in the pits, video playback had issues and even sound while playing a game was choppy and stuttered. I was at a loss for what could have been happening because I had the latest drivers from nVidia and did a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 Enterprise Edition.

Then I remembered last time I had the symptom of stuttering sound…

Many years ago when the only way you could get even basic RAID functionality was to utilize an add-in PCI card. This was before PCI-Express, so your card was limited to 32-bit/33Mhz standard PCI bus which was limited to 133MB/sec. Depending on your chipset or motherboard layout, you might be using onboard sound or an add-in PCI sound card.

During periods of heavy IO when using a PCI RAID card, the PCI bus would be saturated with data to the RAID card and there would be limited bandwidth for the sound card, causing chopping and stuttering sound. A workaround that sometimes worked was to put the sound card ahead of the RAID card in the PCI slots so it would have priority to/from the chipset.

Knowing this I started doing some research on what hardware my Dell Dimension 9200 was actually using. The chipset inside is the Intel P965 Express chipset, which after looking at the specifications appeared to me to be the obvious issue.

Intel P965 Express Chipset Diagram

The PCI Express slot provided by the Intel P964 Chipset is a fraction of what is available today by modern PCI Express 2.0 chipsets. It came down to the system not being able to quench the thirst of the nVidia GTX 295. Because of this, it was maxing out the available bandwidth on the northbridge and not allowing any other devices to be serviced.

Suspecting this, I upgraded my motherboard (which also required a new case, so needless to day the Dell Dimension 9200 is no longer) to a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P which sports the Intel P45 Express Chipset.

Intel P45 Express Chipset Diagram

All in all, this chipset provides more bandwidth across the board. When I upgraded I kept my Intel Q6600 processor and 4GB (4x 1GB DDR2-667) RAM and wouldn’t you know it, it solved all my problems! Games play super smooth and the sound is perfect.

So if you’ve recently upgraded to a newer video card and are experiencing strange performance issues, you might want to look into your motherboards ability to keep the video card’s higher processing ability quenched without sacrificing servicing additional components.

Cheers!