Solved Do I have a poor choice of hardware?

Hello, I'm CrazyKilla

Back when I was absolute PC building noob I bought the i7 3820 cpu and I bought some Western Digital Power saving HDD. Right now I have a beefy PC but if I try to install a game for example and play a game at the same time, it has a complete mental breakdown. Sound gets really laggy and fps spikes in some games. Sound probably means poor HDD is having trouble installing and opening sound files or something?
I also posted a thread on my 6Gb/s HDD moving or copying items at like 10mb/s, my internet can download faster than that.
I also have some Corsair Vengeance 2x4gb 1600Mhz ram clocked down to 1333Mhz due to another 2x4GB Kingston ram sticks, may this have something to due with my problems?

Please reply which parts I should upgrade or what could be wrong.

You might consider keeping the faster RAM and removing the other 8 GBs. You should be able to work just as well with 8. Give it a try, if you find that there is no improvement, then you can just put the RAM back in.

I'm not sure about your HDD, but if you want faster speeds in that department, try an SSD, and use the HDD as storage.

Make sure all important windows updates are installed, and ensure that you have the latest drivers for your motherboard - msi X79A-GD45 8D

Also, here is a great tut on optimizing windows 8: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/37511-optimize-performance-windows-8-a.html

DustSailor said:

You might consider keeping the faster RAM and removing the other 8 GBs. You should be able to work just as well with 8. Give it a try, if you find that there is no improvement, then you can just put the RAM back in.

I'm not sure about your HDD, but if you want faster speeds in that department, try an SSD, and use the HDD as storage.

Make sure all important windows updates are installed, and ensure that you have the latest drivers for your motherboard - msi X79A-GD45 8D

Click to expand...

I agree.

Also benchmark that HDD and see how its speed goes, first install/update the sata drivers (intel) -> check BIOS to see you are in AHCI mode...
In addition, monitor the gfx and cpu and see if the temperature gets too high when the frames begin to drop.

RAM should be pretty equally placed in dual channel with 1x1 , 2x2 4x4 ... pairs. Don't try to add too many different stuff in the slots, quality is better than quantity (choosing for quality gets you more stability as well).

Good luck.

DustSailor said:

I'm not sure about your HDD, but if you want faster speeds in that department, try an SSD, and use the HDD as storage.

Click to expand...

That sounds like it to me. If you have only one drive and you are trying to read a lot of data from one part and write to another then your disk arm is going to be jumping back and forward rather than doing anything useful and both processes will be a lot slower than running them one after the other. So in this situation the game you are playing will suffer as it isn't getting data fast enough and the install will take much longer than normal.

Have a look at task manager when it is happening and see what your CPU and memory utilisation is. Assuming is not too high then SSD would certainly help.

If the fps spikes, I don't think it is HDD related, though I am not 100% sure. To me, it is more likely either the GPU, CPU, or RAM. What should happen if your HDD is slow is that it will say 'loading' a lot, but graphics and other things shouldn't be effected. Basically it should only translate to longer/more frequent wait times. Again, I could be off on this. It may very well depend on the individual game and how it interacts with your system.

Event viewer may give hints to any problems your are experiencing with your computer. The most important thing to do is update the drivers, etc. And test the benefits of the 'same' 8GB RAM rather than the 16GB.

*edit* I guess if your HDD is extremely slow, than it isn't able to read/write data quick enough and therefore freeze up your system a bit, crating a bottleneck. So it is very possible the SSD is the culprit, it would just suck if you had to go out and buy another, lol. I try to avoid 'power savers'. [*Though power savers, I still recommend SSDs.] SSDs generally save more power, are faster, more durable, and create less heat than HDDs, but cost quite a bit more

Even the most green of hard drives is going to be able to transfer data a whole lot faster than 10MB/sec.

I used a HDD Benchmark tool (HD Tune pro) and I got a max Read of 120mb/s and lowest of 50mb/s whilst idling. When I attempted to open a webpage it fell to about 10mb/s and bumped back up. Throughout the benchmark it fell to about 70mb/s and went back up to 100mb/s over and over. I'll attempt to buy some decent 4x4 ram and an SSD.
What about a SSHD? I found this 4TB Hybrid for just £150 (about $250), should I bother with it? I tend to use up a lot of space. Also would I need to put my games on the SSD to speed up load times?

Thanks guys.

You would be better with SSD or more disks. For example the people I'm working for today have 10TB on their main server made up of 84 128GB normal (non SSD) disks. This is pretty fast but the system is still struggling with IO bottleneck. The same storage with 3 x 4TB disks would be terrible for what they want to do.

Having fewer bigger drives is OK if you have contiguous data but once you have random data or are trying to read and write to the same disk the performance drops drastically.

You'd be better off getting SSD and keeping your HDD for storage as DustSailor said but remember even then if you are running one game from your HDD storage drive and installing another on the same physical disk at the same time you'll get the same issue.

It depends I suppose on how big a SSD you can afford. If you can install on SSD it will be quicker for IO processes (when you are loading stuff) but will not make your FPS etc any better.

I would think a Hybrid SSD/HDD would be fine, but before you go out and buy stuff, make sure you know what you're getting. You'd like to save money, so you might have to go 'shopping'. SSHDs aren't as popular, so the price may not actually be worth it. And have you actually discovered that the problem lies with your current HDD, or is it a problem with something else? A good way to test this is by removing it and installing another working drive, and installing any windows onto it. Don't activate windows because you might not be permanently using the test HDD, but it is a great way to find out if the problem lies with the old HDD or the stuff on it.

If you do decide to buy another drive, then your setup will determine a lot of how you install windows to it:
Do you want faster boot times? Then you'll want to put windows on your new SSD/SSHD instead of a HDD. This may be best practice. Usually HDDs are reserved for excess storage space. Since games take a lot of room and SSD space is limited, you may still need to put them on the HDD. If you do get an SSHD, you might have enough space to put the OS and some games on it, but an SSD will always be a faster choice than a hybrid.

If you have any questions about what to get, I'm sure lots of people can offer opinions on it

And you don't really need to buy more RAM. You don't yet know if that is the issue. That slow speed [*may very well be] the HDD's fault, so don't go buying a new case fan to solve a different issue, etc. lol. One problem at a time, and you might be able to save money