Bartimaeus

Did a final test - only one I could think of. Stuck the SSD in another computer as a storage drive - i.e. not the boot drive - and loaded up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from it. Still suffered from the stuttering, even doing nothing else besides playing Stalker. Blah.

Is this solely a TBS game, or..? Your post makes me want to play the game in question, but I'm usually more of a RTS kind of guy, or better yet, hybrid.

1. Sleep after: Never; Turn off hard disk after: Never. I also have any special "power savings" modes disabled in my BIOS. 2. For the image, what I basically did was setup a super basic computer, stick in an old 80GB Barracuda, formatted it to Windows 7, 64bit, install all the stupid Windows Updates that take forever to install, (this was the main purpose of creating an image - so I wouldn't ever have to install the hundreds of Windows Updates as a result of having the initial release copy of Windows 7 every time I reformatted a computer), and not install any drivers specific to the computer, nor any third party programs, so that I could re-image any computer I wanted within a fairly fast amount of time, and without worrying about incompatibilities. I'm sure a few generic drivers were installed to make the system usable at the time, but that shouldn't be a big deal. My previous AMD system was not a re-imaging, but, as I said, had the same problem - this system was re-imaged, but it came from an entirely different computer I setup, so it doesn't really make sense for the problem to translate over. FTR, it was an old Intel Pentium 4 system. 3. Thanks. Tried it, but no effect. 4. I actually started with the Microsoft standard AHCI driver - I didn't really know I was supposed to install the Intel one. I also started with the third party ASMedia SATA controller, too. As far as I can figure out, there's something wrong with the SSD itself...can't see how it can be anything but at this point. Wanted to fix it on my own, if possible...but at this point, it seems unlikely. Another thing - I only updated the firmware fairly recently - the previous version of the firmware, which was a few versions back, had the same exact problem. Bah. lol. Uhh, thanks.

Once again, I forgot to mention something: its firmware is flashed to the latest. Pagefile...as well as my entire user and temp/appdata folders, are all on my D:\ drive, not my C:\. So, if anything, the stupid SSD should be having an even *easier* time than it would normally - not that there's any bloody excuse for what it's doing now even if I were running a typical setup. I run Diskeeper, an automatic and manual defragmenting program. Enabled for my D:\ drive, completely disabled for my C:\ drive, obviously. You might've missed my previous edit: "(edit): Except, now that I think of it, my previous install, for my AMD computer, was a completely new format - not a re-imaging...and it had the same exact problem. So that's bunk, too."

Oops, I forgot about that. Yes, I did use AS SSD to do that - incorrect alignment, incorrect controller, and incorrect drivers. Fixing all of that didn't really make any difference, besides switching from the ASMedia SATA controller to the Intel solution, which made the SSD go about 15% faster. Speed doesn't really seem to be the problem, as far as I can tell, though, so... I also installed the RST drivers - I didn't originally, 'cos I didn't think I needed them, but apparently they include some semi-important drivers that are good to have even if you're not planning on using RST itself. The alignment was incorrect because I foolishly used the Windows 7 re-imaging process, which was the sorriest excuse of a re-imaging tool I could've ever possibly imagined, so it didn't surprise me when I found out the alignment offset was incorrect and set to 31 K instead of a more normal value, (I corrected it to 2048 K, and it reports as being good). I'm new to SSDs, so give me a break. Like I said, though, none of that really made a difference. Mayhaps I should try a secure erase and a complete, clean reformat - no Windows re-imaging? (edit): Except, now that I think of it, my previous install, for my AMD computer, was a completely new format - not a re-imaging...and it had the same exact problem. So that's bunk, too.

I'm sorry: what was warned against? I didn't propose actually doing anything, I don't think, so I'm not sure what you mean! Thanks for the input. I decided to monitor Resource Monitor on the drive tab on my second monitor while playing the game on my C:\ drive. Strange results. For every spike you see for the queue length on the C:\ drive, there was an associated stutter. This was easy to notice because during the time where there was no drive activity for a little, there were also no spikes. I'm not sure what it's loading, because, as I said, I'm not moving my character or even my camera, and the one major thing that would normally cause stutter loading in in Stalker - AI characters as they reach the arbitrary distance from your character to be switched "on" - I have virtually completely disabled, (the vanilla switch is 150 meters - I have it set to 1 and I'm in a remote location - ergo, no character switching). My OS is also not hardly interacting with my SSD when it's happening, so I don't think it's that that's causing the stutter, either...

Motherboard: Asus Maximus VI Hero CPU: Intel i7-4770k RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz Video Card: AMD 5770 System Drive: PNY XLR8 120GB Storage Drive: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM OS: Windows 7 SP1, 64bit I have two copies of a game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R...one on my SSD, one on my HDD. I'm playing at minimum settings for the sake of the test. The HDD version plays perfectly. The SSD, on the other hand, while having much faster load times, stutters for about half a second every 3-10 seconds, no matter what I'm doing - even if I'm standing perfectly still. I'm loading from the same save, with the same settings. Both drives are plugged into the Intel SATA solution on the board, not any third party controllers. It is in AHCI mode, not IDE. My specifications should be more than capable of running S.T.A.L.K.E.R., particularly on minimum settings. Light benchmarking utilities say my SSD reads close to 400MB/s for 1MB random reads, with my HDD only getting around 50MB/s. The system is not overheating, (having monitored my drive temps, as well as my CPU and HDD temps). Anyone have any idea what's going on? (edit): Oh, also, the SSD is only 40% filled - about the same for the HDD, too. (edit): Also, furthermore: this happened on my previous computer, which was a quadcore Phenom II 3.5GHz with a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 motherboard. This is also a recent reformat, and it's new for this computer. So I can't see this being anything else besides the SSD itself.

I don't fully understand what's going on, but it looks ridiculous.

This is making me want to give all three movies a relisten...it can be a little hard at times to appreciate the music with the movies themselves as a backdrop...

I disagree with the latter half of your post, but whatever. Personal preference, I guess. I've always felt like 16:10 is much more aesthetically pleasing than 16:9, having used both...I can't imagine what I'd think of using 21:9.

I don't "get" 21:9. I think 16:9 looks bad enough compared to 16:10 - why would I want the proportions even more stretched out?

Anyone else getting really annoyed by the new chat link filters Steam has put into place recently? (There were old ones, but they weren't nearly as insane as they are now.) It's ridiculous you can't disable it. Drives me a bit crazy.

Isn't Lawful Stupid kind of the role you have to play to be a paladin, though? I mean, you can't just go around murdering people because they registered evil with a spell...that is literally against the law, which following is kind of a big part of your alignment. And can't particular items screw with the alignment detected, to boot? You can't ever know what's on a person...there's reason why the spell is not enough to convict.

Aren't Paladins bound to the *Lawful* Good alignment...at least in 2nd Edition? I'd hate to agree with Volourn, but...

Oh yeah, they should definitely be able to be changed - I mean, I can't see how you couldn't. Funny thing is, a lot of the caps on the board had been popped for years, and I'm wondering why the board hasn't exploded yet...or at least have more problems than it should. It does admittedly crash if I even so much as unlock the CPU for overclocking - not even overclocking, just setting it so I could - but that's a relatively small problem for a board and CPU of their age and condition, (it's still using the default HSF...and I doubt it's had thermal paste reapplied in over five years, at the very least). @Humanoid: I can't even imagine spending $1000 on a computer - much less double that. $800 is pushing it for me...$600-700 is a very good amount, with $500 still being close to enough. I spent less than $400 on this computer sans the video card, which I'm still to buy at some point...although I did buy parts that were very steeply discounted - but if I hadn't been able to, I would've never gotten them, so.

Yeah, the only difference between the audio chips is that the ROG boards are supposed to have better shielding from internal interference or something or another, (all the Realtek chips seem to sound exactly the same to me regardless of their "specs" and anything the manufacturers do to "enhance" them, but your mileage may vary, I guess). Unrelated: does anyone know what the consequences of popped/deformed capacitors might be? I have an old FX-55 housed within this thing, and seems to be working fine, (and has been), but more than half of all the capacitors on the thing are wrecked. I'm wondering if I should be worried about that...

What features are you going to miss from the Deluxe, (you said it wasn't all that great on features before, so now I'm curious)? I see a Thunderbolt card, integrated Wireless and Bluetooth, ...more back panel USB ports, I guess...and Sata Express port. Hero has an integrated VGA port that the Deluxe doesn't have, so that's neat, I guess...not that you'll probably find any use for it, I'm sure. So I guess there might be a few scenarios where the Deluxe would be better, but I don't really see it for most typical users.

If you don't have need of the Thunderbolt port...or the other small things the Deluxe has in favor of the Hero, I can't see any reason why not.

From what I can see, it seems to be a fairly good board. 8 true phases, high quality gold chokes...normal/good quality everything else. Really, my only complaint is its price...and that there's at least one other Asus board (not mentioning other manufacturers) that has roughly equal build quality, (i.e. the Maximus VII Hero - which seems to be made of mostly the same stuff, with the exception of the transistors...where its are higher quality, but there are less compared to the Deluxe, weirdly). At $250, I was kinda expecting at least three PCIE 3.0 x8 slots, if not four...maybe 2-3 more fan connectors, etc. (To be perfectly honest, I don't think most users...essentially, unless you are running a crazy build like 2 super high end GPUs or 4 regular high end GPUs with 4 sticks of high speed RAM and/or doing some *crazy* CPU overclocking - which is becoming harder and harder to do as CPU die sizes get smaller and smaller, by the way...I don't think are going to ever be able to notice any difference between a $120-140 board and a $200 board in terms of motherboard build quality. The only reason I got my Maximus VI Hero was because it was ridiculously cheap for its quality at the time, and matched the price and not so minorly exceeded the quality of the board I was gonna get instead, the ASRock Extreme4).

100%ed Rogue Legacy. It's an alright game, I guess. I think the "mage" classes - particularly Dragon - are mostly useless, with the exception of Spellsword...if you spawn with the right spell(s). I wasn't as in love with it as a lot of other people were - I honestly didn't really like the Rogue"lite" elements too much. Oh well. 100%ed the first 2 (of 3) chapters of Bit.Trip.Runner. I put a few hours into it a year or so ago, then quit because I got stuck on a particular level, (1-11). Came back to it yesterday, and it seems a lot easier now than it did then...although 1-11 was still super hard. I went through all of chapter 2 dying maybe ten times. Weird.

What makes you choose the Deluxe specifically, out of curiosity?

http://forums.obsidian.net/forum/54-skeeters-junkyard/ Any information that would actually be useful for us to help you with your problem would be appreciated. Your motherboard would be a good start...

Uh, do you ever plan on Crossfiring? I didn't realize you weren't going to get dual video cards at all. If you're not planning on Crossfiring, like, ever, drop to a lower wattage PSU. You probably need an absolute minimum of...500W, (I don't think I'd be comfortable cutting it that close, personally, though), with 550W being fairly comfortable, and 600W being very comfortable, (this is probably what I'd get...and not just because 600 is such a nicer number than 550, ). And...uh, I know you mentioned *why* you're planning on getting that much RAM...but...uh, are you sure? I mean, I feel like most everyone could get away with 8GB...with 16GB being a little ridiculous but understandable for some cases...but 32GB for a regular desktop computer? That's server level amount of RAM. Are you *really* sure you need that much?

290 might be worth it, depending on the person buying...but there's little benefit for paying an extra $100-150 for a 290X, IMO. I feel like we're not really helping you enough - is there anything you specifically need help with? (As a side-note, I'd suggest the Gigabyte UD3H vs the Gigabyte HD3 motherboard - little more expensive, but 8 true phases vs the 4(+1?) the HD3 has. Additionally, you may want to look at the EVGA G2 750W instead of the Seasonic unit - both units are fully modular, as well as very well renowned, but you're not paying a $20-30 premium for the Seasonic unit).

This is not really true of the games - at least, not in my experience. When I first went through Dark Souls, (without having ever played Demon's Souls), the biggest challenge were the controls, not really the enemies/bosses. I beat, I think, after the few three or so when I was finally got a decent grasp of the game, roughly 4/5 bosses on my first try. Dark Souls (on NG - that is, before beating the game at all) is really actually decently lenient...there's just a really steep initial learning curve. Once you understand your own character, and how bosses *tend* to move, (all the "giant" bosses are pretty predictable after one or two, if you care to notice - only the smaller, faster ones really leave any surprises), it's generally pretty easy. It's NG+(+++++) where you have to perfectly choreograph your character, and perfectly learn the moveset of each boss - 'cos each boss (and regular enemy) has twice as much (or more) health as they did in NG, do much more damage...and yet your character can get hardly any better compared to how they were in the middle to the end of NG - only the first few are comparable to NG difficulty. Then again, I enjoyed doing this, too, except for a very few that were blatantly unfair - e.g. the Capra Demon with the stupid dogs that had extremely random behavior and movesets that killed me probably 50 times in a row on NG++++++...or the Four Kings, where, unless you're wielding an ultra greatsword or something, you simply cannot do enough damage to outpace their spawn rate, and you die in a battle of attrition against 4 of them at once while they only have like 1/3rd-1/4th combined health left - stuff like that is not fun. But for the others, there's something neat about being able to know a boss so perfectly you can deal with literally anything and everything they throw at you, and then exploit those attacks to defeat them. On-topic: I like my games decently hard. However, if there is a set of difficulty rules where the game is "fair", (e.g. Core Difficulty for the IE games), then I tend to use that.