doveman

So boot to normal mode, uninstall the Nvida FX5600 entry in device manager and reboot? I guess I'm a bit nervous that could result in not even the TV displaying a picture either I guess if that does happen, I'd have to get him to go into the BIOS and enable the onboard graphics (I presume I must have disabled it when I installed the Nvidia card, my Mum's got the same PC so I can check the BIOS options this weekend) and connect the monitor to that and hope that works OK.

From what he told me, the nvidia option wasn't in the right-click on desktop menu in Safe Mode and in Normal mode he only saw an Nvidia option that brought up TV settings but obviously it's hard to be sure considering he was having to look across the room at the TV. It's been a long while since I've used Nvidia, so maybe there's some other way to access the Nvidia software from the control panel or something?

So my brother's just moved and after connecting his PC back up, he can't get Windows to display on his LCD VGA monitor. The Nvidia graphics card (FX5600 I think) has a composite TV output and that's working so he can see the XP desktop on his CRT TV but that's the other side of the room so tricky for him to do much using that. I got him to boot into Safe Mode and still it only displayed on the TV. He managed to right-click the desktop and click properties and could see two monitors, with only one enabled but he was unable to change this being in Safe Mode. After rebooting it was still only on the TV and he right-clicked on the desktop and there was an Nvidia option he selected but apparently that only gave him some options for the TV settings. The monitor works fine as the PC displays POST and the "Windows needs to check your drives" screen OK, it's just once Windows has booted he has no picture. In Safe Mode, I got him to check Device Manager and as well as the Nvidia driver there's the LogMeIn mirror driver and a Mirage driver (I think we installed that for VNC) but they've been installed for ages and it was working fine before the move. I installed a backup XP on there for him, so he's currently trying booting to that to see if that displays on the monitor. If not, I've told him to remove the graphics card and plug into the onboard VGA. Even if that works, it won't have all his software installed and he hasn't got his Internet connected yet, so he'll want to get the other Windows working, although it might have to wait until he does have Internet so I can remote desktop in and sort it out for him. So can anyone advise what I need to do to get his monitor working with the Nvidia card again?

I ran Memtest overnight and that completed two passes no errors. Any ideas why using the RAMdisk is causing my PC to lockup?

Well running ArmAII from my 11000MB RAMDisk was working fine but now it's started randomly locking up the entire PC, requiring a hard reset. It happened with SoftPerfect, which I've been using for ages but I've moved away from that now as a) it annoyed me that it auto-mounted the last mounted RAMDisk when starting the app after a reboot and b) it started throwing up errors and failing to mount RAMdisks anyway. So I'm using Primo RAMdisk at the moment but I ran through one of the benchmark scenarios in ArmAII a few times, until the last time when it locked up the PC again. After that I ran from HDD and it didn't lock up at all. I could try IMdisk awealloc again, I'm not sure if I've tried that since experiencing these lockups. It's a lot slower than the other apps but still twice as fast as a SSD. Note I'm still running at the BIOS defaults I think, certainly CPU-Z shows NB 2000MHZ, DRAM Freq 666.7Mhz, 9-9-9-24-34-2T. The voltage is probably at default 1.5v as well. Might I need to boost that slightly for 16GB and if so, what should I boost it to or should I loosen the timings instead?

There's a new version of SoftPerfect RAMDisk available now which fixes the problems I was having before. Speeds look good. FAT32 is a bit faster than NTFS but I think that's normal because of NTFS' overheads. I just need to confirm that it prevents any of the RAM used being paged out, like awealloc.

This makes little sense. 400 Mb is NOT a "biggish"disk size, you were talking till now of a several Gb one. IMHO what you should try is making a disk of the size you need it using IMDISK "native" allocation and test it in both ATTO and CDM, then make another disk of the same size using awealloc and test it with both ATTO and CDM, then disregard BOTH results of BOTH benchmarks and simply try running that game with one and the other method and choose the one that "feels" better (if a difference can be felt) pr that results more stable. Well Raymond's tests were done with a 512MB RAMdisk and he got good speeds, so it seemed reasonable. Just for you , I've done the CDM and ATTO tests with a 10GB awealloc RAMdisk and as I expected, it's just as slow (ATTO and CDM results for 10GB non-awealloc RAMdisk are in posts #20 (RAMdisk Enterprise) and #25 (IMDisk, only CDM but sufficient to show it's slower than RAMDisk Enterprise and faster than awealloc)) It's still many times faster than HDD and three times faster than SSD though, so plenty fast enough to rule out slow data streaming as being the cause of any stuttering. I've now tested DCS World from HDD, IMDisk and awealloc and I get the same stuttering with all three, so obviously that's not the problem. it is very likely that there are reasons... Well yes, as I said IMDisks can end up paged to the swapfile on the HDD, which rather defeats the purpose of a RAMdisk, so that's a good reason

I tried making a 400MB RAMdisk using awealloc - imdisk -a -f \\.\awealloc -s 400M -m S: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y" As you can see from the CDM results, it's much slower:

Yeah, I could but that's too much hassle. I just want to load an image and play It does but when you look at the RAM benchmark Raymond's just given me, which is pretty typical for Intel RAM benchmarks I've seen, it's more understandable Copy 21168 MB/s Read 19418 MB/s Write 18784 MB/s Score 18.10 GB/s Latency 52.4 ns compared to my Copy 10466 MB/s Read 8107 MB/s Write 6831 MB/s Score 7.47GB/s Latency 66.9 ns I'm not sure that would help. It seems that's mostly for use on 32-bit systems to be able to use the RAM above 4GB and both the thread you reference and this one suggest that awealloc will just make things slower Then again, that thread suggests that the method used to allocate RAM for IMDisk could allow it to then be paged out to the swapfile back on the HDD whereas the method used for awealloc prevents this, so maybe it's better to use that even if it is slower.

Just wanted to mention that the author of SoftPerfect tells me he's identified the problem and is looking into it, so hopefully that will be an option in the near future. IMDisk is OK and I tested ArmAIIOA running from it yesterday and it did load a lot quicker (unlike DCS World) although I haven't had time to test whether it makes gameplay/streaming smoother. The only issues I have with IMDisk is that it seems to take a lot longer to load images than the other programs I tested (it doesn't show a progress bar either, making it hard to know how long it's going to take) and that the 4k and 4k QD32 scores were quite a bit slower than some of the other RAMdisks, although I don't know if those or the Seq and 512k speeds are the most important for my games. It's great being able to easily load/save images with IMdisk though, unlike RAMdisk Enterprise which also didn't appear to provide any way to unmount the RAMdisk to release the memory, whcih IMDisk does

Well I've been told it's because he's probably running Intel and I'm running AMD, which has a crappy memory controller That sounds like it could be right actually, as I've seen RAM benchmarks on Intel systems that are much higher than I could ever hope to achieve with my system. Hey, 2965MB/s is still 25x faster than my HDD and 5.93x faster than a SSD and that's just the Seq speeds B) Sucks that it doesn't make much difference to loading/playing DCSW though. I'll have to test some other games, including ArmAII, when I get a chance.

Thanks, that should do the trick I've just tested playing DCS World from an IMDisk and that worked fine, although to be honest I didn't notice it made much difference to loading times and I still get the occasional stutter, so that's obviously not being caused by the HDD being unable to stream the data fast enough and it would be a waste of money buying an SSD to run it from. I double-checked straight after by loading it from my 3.5" HDD and the experience was much the same. I did a CDM on the IMDisk, my 2TB Samsung drive, which contains W7, the swapfile and all my data (plus my games) and my 2.5" 500GB Samsung drive, which I thought I might use just for games to keep them separate from my WIndows/swapfile drive. Clearly the 2.5" drive is a lot slower than the 3.5" one and they're both massively slower than the IMDisk but as I say, the IMDisk didn't seem to benefit DCSW over the 3.5", so it seems the latter provides as much bandwidth as DCSW can use, at the moment at least. Last time I tried it from the 2.5" it wasn't great but there's daily updates coming out for DCSW at the moment and I haven't tried the latest one on the 2.5" drive, so I need to do that to see if it's fixed the problem.

Thanks, I overlooked that so I'll give it a go. I don't think my RAM's unstable or else I'd have expected problems with RAMdisk Enterprise. Seems more likely that SoftPerfect just needs some work. If you know of some software that can test my RAM in Windows (as opposed to outside, which I've already done with memtest) I'll do that though.

It seems to me that Softperfect is probably trying to use part of the RAM it shouldn't as although I can copy the files to it OK as FAT32, they then don't work properly (game crashes on loading) and if I create an image and try to mount it, it BSOD my PC. As you can see from the RAMdisk Enterprise screenshot in my first post, the default settings make it avoid using some of the RAM, so perhaps that's what Softperfect needs to do. Gavotte_RAMDisk_1.0.4096.5_200811130 looked promising but I can't seem to get it working under W7 x64 as it just showed error code 19 in Device Manager (missing registry entries apparently). It comes with a 64bit driver and ram4g.reg which contains [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RRamdisk\Parameters] "UsePAE"=dword:00000001 which I merged and there are other settings in that key. Has anyone else got this working under W7 x64?

Thanks, there's a co-incidence So I tested with ATTO then CDM and had rather disappointing results compared to Raymond's http://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk-software-benchmarked-for-fastest-read-and-write-speed/ This is my 10GB NTFS RAMDisk Enterprise disk in ATTO: and this is my 512MB FAT32 DataRAM RAMdisk: This is the 10GB NTFS RAMdisk Enterprise disk in CDM: and this is the 512MB FAT32 DataRAM RAMdisk: and lastly I made a 512MB FAT disk with Bond Disc (which did very well in Raymond's tests): As you can see, the Seq and 512k results are about half what Raymond got and only on the 4K and 4K QD32 figures do I match, or in some cases exceed his results. In fact, on the 4K QD32 Write I exceeded his best result (324MB/s) quite considerably but that's not much consolation when I want to use a RAMdisk for loading games (i.e. only reading) and I'm getting such poor Seq and 512k results. I also tried the SoftPerfect RAMdisk and was able to create a 10GB NTFS RAMdisk but whilst copying the DCSW files to it, it said it was unable to continue as the files were corrupt. Checking the RAMdisk showed that that the DCSW folder was now inaccessible or and non delete-able and so I had to unmount the RAMdisk and re-mount it (now empty) to clear that problem. Trying again gave the same result so I gave up on that software.

So I installed RAMdisk Enterprise http://ramdisk.tekcities.com/RAMDisk/ramdiskent.htm and created a 10GB RAMdisk, copied the DCS World folder to it and updated the shortcuts and registry to point to the RAMdisk (S:\Games\DCS World). I'm not sure if it loads any quicker, maybe a bit but the stuttering/freezing is even worse, which doesn't seem to make much sense. In Cold Start in Mozdok, if I rotate the view at the start in the cockpit by holding down Num4, it sticks at one point (the point varies) every one or two rotations and when flying along it keeps freezing constantly. I thought when running from HDD this was being caused by not being able to stream the data from the HDD quickly enough but this obviously shouldn't be an issue with the data on the RAMdrive. I've still got about 3GB free even with the 10GB RAMdrive and Black Shark loaded, so it's hasn't run out of RAM. This is what my RAmdisk Enterprise settings are (most of them are default as I don't understand them!) On the Image File Processing sub-page, I've just pointed it to F:\DCSW.img, clicked Save RamDisk content and ticked Load RAMdisk content from Image at Driver Start, although I've unticked this now as it made Windows take about 10mins to start! I prefer DataRAM RAMdisk as it lets you easily load and save different images. stop/start the RAMdisk but that's limited to 4GB RAMdisks so I can't use that for DCSW. With my browser open, which does have 34 tabs open at the moment, there seems to be a lot more HDD activity than before I installed the RAMdisk, even though I've still got 3GB free so it shouldn't be needing to use the swapfile any more than before. I've changed the RAMdisk from FAT32 to NTFS now so I'll see if that's helped but I'd like to find a program to benchmark it first. HDTunePro recognises my 512MB DataRAM RAMdisk and let's me bench that but the 10GB RAMdisk Enterprise drive isn't listed at all. Also, is there a program to test the RAM in Windows? I've done a memtest from boot which was fine but as we've already seen, Windows can be a bit particular about RAM settings, so I'd like to check that it's all working fine in Windows as well.

Well as we've seen, there's so little difference between running @1600 or @1300 that we can ignore that as a consideration. For the benefit of anyone else who reads this in future, it seems worth clarifying the relatively small contribution memory performance makes to overall performance, so even a 6.91% increase in read speeds won't make much practical difference. It also seems unlikely that 16GB @1333, which is the proper supported "non-overclocked" spec of the chipset will be unstable and I'm not worried about wearing them out a bit as they have a limited lifetime warranty, so let's just concentrate on any possible benefits I might find with 16GB. To expand on what I was saying before about certain games, DCS World has a problem on my system (and others apparently) of stuttering, which is probably caused by not being able to stream the data from HDD quickly enough. The game folder is approx 9.45GB, so by creating a RAMdisk to hold these files and running it from there, I can see if that is indeed the problem and whether it's worth spending £115 on a 256GB SSD (if I get one, I want one big enough to run Windows and several games from). I may in fact decide to just stick with the RAMdisk and the extra 8GB cost me about £35, so I'll avoid spending more money on a SSD if I decide to do that. Another game that tends to struggle with streaming data fast enough is ArmAII. That's a bit tricker as the Operation Arrowhead data folders are about 7.7GB whilst the ArmAII data folders are about 15GB, so 22-23GB for Combined Ops, which is obviously not practical to put on a RAMdisk (and that's not even including the mods, not all of which necessarily will benefit from running from RAMdisk, but some, like custom islands/terrain (or at least some of their files) of which I have 7.8GB, probably would. However, other people have done lots of test to determine which files get used the most and put only those on a RAMdisk with good results, so I plan to try that sometime and if that works, again it will make it less likely that I buy a SSD. I also use a 512MB RAMdisk currently for Mediaportal, so that when watching TV it creates the timeshifting files on that rather than constantly writing to the HDD, helping to keep noise/power down and reduce wear and tear on the HDD. I also put some temp files on there but it's impractical to use for all temp files as when installing games it might create several GB of temp files and when downloading with IE it creates a temp file before moving it to the final destination, so if downloading a 4GB file it would take 4GB on the RAMdisk. I actually use Opera or Iron rather than IE most of the time, which don't have this problem and just create a partial file in the actual download folder but for someone who wants to use IE and use a RAMdisk to store both the IE and system temp files, being able to use around 4GB for the RAMdisk would be useful and that wouldn't be practical with only 8GB. For my 512MB RAMdisk I don't really need more than 8GB though. That gives me approx 10mins timeshifting for SD TV and 4mins for HD and I don't currently receive HDTV so I find that plenty but other users of Mediaportal find it far too small and would use at least 2GB for the RAMdisk. Apart from the RAMdisk, as I mentioned DCS World, being 64-bit, may benefit from more than 8GB and there's a 64-bit version of X-Plane 10 due soon, which it's been suggested will also use as much RAM as is available to increase performance and I believe ArmA3 will also be 64-bit and give better performance with more RAM, although all these need testing to confirm if there's any benefit and if so, how significant. Now, I'm building a PC for my brother and I decided I'd put 8GB in that to somewhat future-proof it and was going to buy that 8GB when prices come down, as they're predicted to do soon. However, if I determine that there's no point having 16GB in my PC and I'd be better off buying a 256GB SSD for £115 than trying to use £35 worth of 8GB RAM for a RAMDisk, then I'll just put the extra 8GB in my brother's PC, which is one of the reasons why I wasn't too concerned about having to buy it to use my PC whilst I was waiting for the original kit to be replaced. If I didn't have the option of putting it in his PC if it turned out the running games from RAMdisk idea didn't work out for me, I probably would have been more hesitant to buy it. Then again, if the RAMdisk doesn't make my games work better, I can't be sure that a SSD will either (although many people have told me that both DCS World and ArmaII perform a lot better since they got a SSD to run them from).

CPU-Z shows that my Phenom II X4 955 has revision RB-C3. I'm aware that the spec doesn't officially support 1600 DDR though but as it worked with 8GB I was surprised to find it doesn't with 16GB. I'll look at tweaking the voltages to see if I can get it to work though, thanks.

As I've already explained (twice ) it wasn't a "perfectly working machine with already 8GB" as I had to send the 8GB back to get replaced as it was faulty, so I didn't "add" another 8GB to the existing 8GB, I bought 8GB so that I could continue to use the machine in the meantime, then put the other 8GB back in when I got the replacement kit. Sure I could sell one of the kits now but I'd make a loss so it seems rather pointless.

Well the third question is addressed in my first post I had to buy another kit otherwise I wouldn't have been able to use my PC for two weeks whilst I was waiting for the original faulty kit to be exchanged. However, I also have a couple of experiments with running certain games from RAMdrive that I'm interested in trying to see if they eliminate some stuttering problems I'm experiencing with them and it's possible that DCS World, ArmA 3 and X-Plane 10 will be able to use more than 8GB in the near future (DCSW may already be able to as it's 64-bit). I probably wouldn't have bought another 8GB if I hadn't needed to though. I can't answer your other questions but perhaps these benchmarks with 8GB I did a while ago will be of some use. Note I don't think I ever got it stable with the NB at 2600Mhz though, so settled for 2400Mhz. DDR3-666 (1333) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2000Mhz: Copy 10466 MB/s Read 8107 MB/s Write 6831 MB/s Score 7.47GB/s Latency 66.9 ns --- DDR3-800 (1600) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2000Mhz Copy 10560 MB/s Read 8667 MB/s Write 6734 MB/s Score 7.70 GB/s Latency 65.0 ns --- DDR3-800 (1600) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2400Mhz Copy 11602 MB/s Read 9457 MB/s Write 7883 MB/s Score 8.67 GB/s Latency 61.5 ns --- DDR3-800 (1600) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2600Mhz, CPU-NB 1.32v, NB 1.3v Copy 11867 MB/s Read 9822 MB/s Write 8457 MB/s Score 9.14 GB/s Latency 60.4 ns --- DDR3-666 (1333) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2600Mhz, CPU-NB 1.32v, NB 1.3v Copy 11350 MB/s Read 9010 MB/s Write 8583 MB/s Score 8.80 GB/s Latency 62.5 ns

That tells one that Windows Memory Control is tighter than the one done by the BIOS, but that's just what's expected, anyway. The only way to know for sure is by testing. OK, thanks.

Wouldn't surprise me. Manufacturer's always obfuscate about the capabilities of their boards I'll test as you suggest but just want to be clarify that from the tests I already did the BIOS detects all 16GB at 1600Mhz or 1333Mhz, as does Windows but 4GB of it is unusable in Windows at 1600Mhz, whereas it's all usable at 1333Mhz. If I can't run it at 1600Mhz, should I still be able to overclock the NB to 2600Mhz as I did when running with only 8GB? That would help make up for it. In fact, when I tested before that made more difference, although obviously ideally I'd be able to run both the RAM at 1600Mhz and the NB at 2600Mhz.

It's a MSI 990FXA-GD80. Haven't noticed any option for Memory remapping in the BIOS (it doesn't have onboard IGP if that's relevant) and I haven't used MSconfig either. As I say, the whole 16GB is usable in Windows if I set it to 1333Mhz in the BIOS but I'd like to run it at the specified 1600Mhz and I don't see why one stick should be unusable at that speed whilst the other three work fine.

I installed an extra 8GB the other day and it was all showing as usable in Windows 7 x64 Ultimate then. Today I noticed only 12GB was showing in HwInfo, so I checked the System properties and that showed 16GB installed, 12GB usable. So I rebooted and checked the BIOS and that shows 16GB. I changed it from 1600Mhz to 1333mhz and rebooted in Windows and now it shows the entire 16GB as usable. It's Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3, which is specified to work at 1600Mhz at 1.5v. CPU-Z shows JEDEC#4 as 666Mhz@1.5v and XMP-1600@1.5v. I've left the Voltage and timings in the BIOS on Auto. I actually just had one 2*4GB kit replaced as one of the sticks went bad and the other I just bought so that I could use the PC whilst I was waiting for the original kit to be replaced, so I hope another stick hasn't gone bad!

Thanks for the link to the manual but I can't get it working under XP in PIO mode. Instead of drives it just lists two interfaces, both highlighted in dark blue which the manual says indicates drives the application is running off and shouldn't be scanned and then I get a "Get drive passport: Drive error" message. I think I'll just run it in API mode and see if that does any good. To be honest, I'm somewhat doubting that the problems I've been having with my Xbox can be accounted for by the HDD having 5-6 blocks that are a bit slower than they should be!