System Performace Tweaking?

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "After being on a rather slow PC for some time now, I have finally made the jump to a 1GHz+ PC. Being fairly new at having a rather fast PC, I am not very sure where to go for system performance tweaking. A few friends pointed me to Monroe World and TweakXP. Both are pretty good sites, however I find that my system still doesn't perform as well as it should when running a benchmarking test like 3dMark 2003. My score is just under 2000. I know people who have slower systems than mine and get a score around 5000. So I am turning to the Slashdot community to ask: Where do you go to find out the latest and greatest hardware and system tweaks? Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?"

Comments

well what have you done?

[donutz]

You don't seem to have mentioned the steps you took to improve your performance.

Have you shut down unnecessary services if you're running Windows XP? Do a google search and you'll find a page telling you which services it's ok to turn off.

What programs are starting up when you boot your computer? Stuff you dont need? Axe it!

Downloaded any "free" programs? Go get adaware and clean up any spyware that might have been installed.

There's plenty more you can do, go google for ideas!

Who cares?

[addaon]

Does it feel fast enough for the work you're doing on it? If so, great. If not, address the problems directly, not through synthetic benchmarks. If you're swapping, buy more ram. If your CPU is maxing out, upgrade it. What's the big deal? It's a tool, not a dick measurer.

Re:Who cares?

[isorox]

Yes, but how do ensure you are making the most of what you already have. If your OS has a setting that by default takes up 50MB of ram, and controls bridging your network and firewire card (for example), you might not realise it exists. Turn that off and you've just saved yourself a ram upgrade.

You can buy a faster hard drive, or you can change hdparm. Same result, one costs money, the other costs 5 minutes.

If someone is getting twice the frame rates you are with the same hardware, you should also be able to get those frame rates. Twiddle a setting and you save big bucks on a new video card.

CPU speed

[Anonymous Coward]

3D mark doesn't measure CPU. Your video card must suck. Get a new one.

Wrong benchmark

[topside420]

If you want to test CPU performance, try a differant benchmark program. While your friends may have had a slower CPU, they most likely had a much better video card than you have. I'm sure you could find a rather decent card for cheap if your not *too* concerned with the latest/greatest. I'm chugging along on a GeForce2 TI, and its still serving me very nicely. [I paid quite a bit for it back in the day :\]

If your not concerned with 3D performance, 3DMark isnt a good program to base your judgements.

5000 points

[yarbo]

You're not going to score 5000 points unless you can play all the tests. You'll need directx 9 hardware to run all the tests. A geforce 4 ti 4600 won't cut it.

btw, to increase your score easily, just turn the quality all the way down ;)

more info

[Wuffle]

It would be nice if you would supply your computers specs then we can judge if your 3dmark 2003 score is good enough.

The 3dmark 2003 score is very dependant on your graphics card because it is designed to test DX9 features, not what current games are like. So if you have a geforce 4 and your friends have Radeon 9700's your score will suffer badly in comparison.

What do the games you play run like? As long as they don't have a shitty fps I don't really see the problem - benchmark scores aren' everything as long as the pc does what you want it to.

Hardware tweaking a waste

[0x0d0a]

Mention the OS and the programs you use.

Hardware tweaking is a waste. In almost any real-world situation, maybe you'll get up to 10% more performance.

A software tweak can buy you much, much more. Your system is *definitely* not running twice as slow as your friends because of a lack of "tweaking" the hardware (assuming you aren't doing something bizarre like running the processor at only half the rated frequency or something silly like that).

You'll have to mention the OS and the programs you're using.

Abstract benchmark scores pretty much mean nothing. Say "Apache maxes out at 150 simultaneous connections" or "I only get 20 FPS in foggy parts of Max Payne".

the hard way...

[i chose quality]

...,darling, i'll teach you:

1. download the latest drivers for all components (chipset, controllers, graphic, ...) and the latest BIOS for your board
2. backup all important/personal data + new drivers
3. format harddrive (physical)
4. remove all components but psu, mb/cpu, ram, hdd, cd, graphics card
5. repartition hdd with software of choice (1 system partition, 1 app. partition, 1 data partition)
6. option: now's the time to think about multi-boot-systems ;)
7. install new os (if it's windows, remove all bloat)
8. install:
8.1. new BIOS
8.2. chipset drivers and all os-specific tweaks
8.3. graphic drivers
9. add one component after the other and repeat:
hardware installation - drivers installation - reboot(!)
10. install your apps on the app. partition, put your data on the data partition, leave the sys partition as it is!
forget c:\programs!
forget c:\<whatever ms wants you to put your files in>!

nothing beats a fresh system.

have fun!

Hang On a minute.

[His name cannot be s]

There are several things that can vastly affect performance:

Warning: This stuff ain't for the faint of heart, nor the weak of will.

Know your machine.
What processor does it have
What type of RAM (DDR/SDRAM/RAMBUS/etc...)
How FAST is the ram rated for (PC2100,PC3000...)
What type of hard drive do you have? is it UDMA66/100/133?
What type of motherboard do you have? Does it support dual channel ddr (interleaving banks of DDR memory, gives a nifty boost to ram read speeds)
What are the settings in the BIOS set to? Do you know what that stuff means? Do you know how to agressivly set those, but keep some system stability?

In Windows, there are many many many factors which are going to affect the 'speed' of your computer.

Primarily: How much memory did your system have when it was installed. Windows tends to set certain values depending on what your system looked like when it was installed.

Secondly: What software is running. Are you running a virus scanner that checks every file as it's written. Do you think that is helping the speed of the computer? Try to limit the unneccasary software that's running. Open up the task manager. go to the performance tab. Howmany processes and threads are running. Check this versus your 'friends' computers to see how it relates. If your computer is running 450 threads over 41 processes, and his is running 200 threads over 25 processes, which one do you think is running too much crap.

Services: Processes in Windows that run, as parts of the OS, to provide 'services' to the OS. If you are running Windows XP Pro at home, there is a crapload of services running which are providing you with zero value. Find out what each service does, and determine whether it is useful to you.

This stuff is hardly rocket science, and there is no 'magic' button to press to automagically get you the best settings, you are going to have to learn what the PC is doing in order to make it work better.

Eliminate Paging

[automandc]

The number one speed improvement on WinXP I've found is to prohibit paging the kernel to VM. I don't have a specific cite right now, but this is a very common tweak which you should be able to find easily. I think there is even a way to do this through the control panels, but I never managed to make it "stick" after reboot without manually editing the registry.

A great resource is www.winguides.com. They have a good app you can demo for free that has lots of Win Registry tweaks it will apply for you. The program also does "live update" from their site, so you get new tweaks people figure out.

I echo many of the other statements below: turn off all non-essential services/programs/tray extensions etc. (unless you like the functionality more than performance).

One of the biggest performance suckers is the "Sytem Restore" crap that takes "snapshots" of the system everytime you change anything. It eats hard drive space too. Unless you are a compulsive fiddler, and don't want to have to reinstall a driver manually, turn that right off.

Finally, in XP, you absolutely must turn off all the crappy eye-candy. Go to "System->Advanced->Performance Settings" and select "Fastest" or whatever. That turns off all the dumb GUI effects. Using the old Windows "theme" also seems to improve GUI performance significantly.

Finally, run AdAware, and keep careful track of what is getting installed on your system. (e.g. turn off Google Computing if you run the toolbar!) In the Windows world, everyone is always trying to put their junk on your box.