P4 and FX, are you trying to make a bad computer on purpose? 😀
P4 can be throttling. FX is FX, try gf4mx or something.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-01-20, 08:06:

P4 and FX, are you trying to make a bad computer on purpose? 😀
P4 can be throttling. FX is FX, try gf4mx or something.

good point 🤣

It's probably the CPU throttling, or the disk drives going into stand-by mode or something of the sort. The Thinkcentre mainboard doesn't have a CPU thermal sensor labeled as such, but what temp I can read are 45 and 47C. It also has Idle fan stop, and the CPU fan is off most of the time... It does start running after a few minutes of playing a game. I set it to ON in bios so it wouldn't turn off anymore but that didn't help with the throttling. I tried disabling IDE standby and HDD shut off from windows, didn't help. I can hear the drives turn off and spin back up from time to time. I had a look in BIOS and can't find any setting to disable HDD power saving mode.

I have another very similar machine - an HP Vectra VL420 - 2.8GHz Northwood, 1 GB of ram, Asus P4P800-VM mainboard (the original ASUS made HP board in the machine died a long time ago and the P4p800-VM has an identical layout), 160GB SATA HDD and an FX5700 LE (low profile 64 bit card). It's a lot slower due to the 64 bit memory bus on the video card but there's no stuttering whatsoever.

Regarding FX series performance, I'm quite happy with the 5700XT and FX5900XT and Ultra cards I have in my collection. They are very well suited for older titles that I frequently play (compared to newer cards like my 6600GT and 6800 AGP) and performance is excelent in most titles. Just don't ask them to run Doom 3 or Far Cry and you'll be happy. I also have a couple of 9800PRO's and a 9700 PRO but these ATi cards are getting pretty rare and they seem to be dying (together with a significant part of my Geforce 4 Titanium collection) so I don't want to use any of the working ATi cards I have left. The 9700 PRO should be fine, I've had 4 so far and all were working perfectly when I traded them, but 9800's... I've had 9 in the last 11 years, and only 2 are still in working condition.

Yeah, the pentium 4 is slow or hungry, but the northwoods are a decent compromise. Not very hot, not very power hungry and they get decent performance. I tend to stay away from socket 478 prescots tough. Hot and hungry, not a great performance improvement vs northwood. LGA775 prescots I like fine - same for Ceddar Mill.

As a preference I tend to lead towards AMD and over the last 20 or so years I've had predominately AMD powered retro PCs (starting from a Am5x86-p75, then a K6-2 500 in the winXP era, then a 1700+ athlon XP and so on). I'm currently kind of bored of AMD rigs, and want to play around with intel builds 😜

still doing it with fan running means its probably not throttling, you can always check with http://www.softoware.org/system-utilities/dow … dows-xp-os.html
try a gfx from different generation altogether just to rule it out

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-01-20, 15:20:

still doing it with fan running means its probably not throttling, you can always check with http://www.softoware.org/system-utilities/dow … dows-xp-os.html
try a gfx from different generation altogether just to rule it out

Thanks, I just tried that. I also found the BIOS option that disables HDD power down - it still stutters. I tried the PC with another couple of video cards - the afformentioned FX5700 - the stuttering got significantly worse - and a Geforce 6600GT AGP - stuttering is a bit milder but still there.

I then tried disabling the YMF744 and using the on board Analog Devices codec - partial success! It seems that when using the on board sound card, the stuttering is less pronounced. I then started looking for another set of YMF744 drivers, and came up empty apart from some Aopen ones I found on the Vogons Driver repository, witch would not install. I forced the drivers to install, and I'm now in a similar situation as with the on-board sound card - milder occasional stuttering.

Next, I'll try using another CPU - one with a higher FSB speed and see if there are any changes, but I think the stuttering is caused by a mainboard / chipset issue. I'll also try to look for a BIOS update - to that end, does anyone know where I could get an updated BIOS for this machine?

[UPDATE]

I FOUND THE PROBLEM!!!

Would you believe it was the bloody USB wifi card??!!

After exhausting almost all other options I sat down and took a breather to clear my head. Then I remember I had this exact same issue on my (very modern) desktop computer a few months ago! Said modern desktop is a Ryzen 5700g on a Gigabyte Aorus B550M mainboard. I was experiencing this exact type of occasional stuttering and was browsing through forums to find a fix for it. Turns out there's a bug in AMD chipset drivers (or AGESA firmware can't remember exactly) witch caused stuttering when using certain high bandwidth USB devices like external SSDs, USB 3.0 wireless AC adapters and so on. Disabling my wifi card during gaming solved the problem. The issue was perma-fixed by AMD with a combination of drivers and BIOS update.

Long story short - disabling my USB wifi card made the stuttering go away on my thinkcentre as well.

Now to roll back all the mods I did so far 🙁

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-20, 17:05:

Would you believe it was the bloody USB wifi card??!!

yes, was it coinciding with scanning for other networks?
Apple users know similar bug very well, except its network lag every couple of minutes https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wifi-stu … inutes.2166344/ https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1524791658381910023

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-01-20, 19:25:

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-20, 17:05:

Would you believe it was the bloody USB wifi card??!!

yes, was it coinciding with scanning for other networks?

I really don't know. It was connected to my home wifi. I didn't try to disconnect it from wireless and then play, I just disabled it from the device manager and poof! no more stuttering.