Vista x64 Ultimate stutters

busbys · May 23, 2008

I just finished a clean install of Vista Ultimate x64 on new hardware:

Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R Motherboard
Intel Q9450 Quad-core 2.66 Ghz
8 GB Corsair RAM
PNY Gforce 8800 GTS
Boot Drive: 2-160GB RAID 0
Apps Drive: 2-500GB RAID 0
Data Drive: 2-250GB RAID 1

I have the latest drivers for all technology and all works well, with one exception. Vista will "stutter" or have small freezes when I attempt to:
1. Open My Computer
2. Open or Close Media Player
3. Some websites also generate this behavior.

Each "freeze" period lasts about 5 to 10 seconds before the system returns to normal. When I view each of the processor cores during these "freeze" periods, each cores cycles to 100% utilization, in order.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

acdcfan · May 23, 2008

busbys said:
I just finished a clean install of Vista Ultimate x64 on new hardware:

Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R Motherboard
8

Please explain?

busbys · May 23, 2008

Not quite certain why my hardware specs nor my explaination of what was wrong did not post properly, but I'll try again...

Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R motherboard
8 GB Corsair RAM (PC-6400)
Intel Q9450 Quad-core 2.66 Ghz processor
PNY GForce 8800 GTS
Boot Drive: 2-160GB SATA RAID 0
Apps Drive: 2-600GB SATA RAID 0
Data Drive: 2-250GB SATA RAID 1

The stuttering or "freezing" occurs when I attempt one of the following:

1. Open My Computer
2. Open or Close Media Player
3. Some websites will also cause the "freezing" to occur

When I monitor the processor cores during one of these "freezes", each core will max out at 100% in turn, moving from one core to the next. The "freeze" will last about 5 to 10 seconds. I have the latest drivers for all hardware.

Sorry for the incomplete post. I hope this posts better.

johngalt · May 24, 2008

I see your specs in both posts just fine....

In fact, I see you pretty much wrote the same thing both times - so I am not sure why the others did not see anything, other than the possibility that the posts were not correctly *loading* because z3r010 was changing something in the forums, as he mentioned in another topic....

Anyway, I am not sure why you are having issues - have you scanned for Malware?

SCSIraidGURU · May 24, 2008

Did you apply chipset patches for you motherboard and latest NIC drivers?

Romann_AV · Jun 24, 2008

I am experiencing the EXACT same issues as Busbys. I get the same consistent stutter when opening My Computer and when opening and closing media player. I haven't found any sites igniting the stutter, but I'm almost certain it relates to the RAID driver.

I have a brand new Vista x64 install with all the latest drivers that the fancy Gigabyte driver update and windows update sites tell me about.

My hardware is as follows:

Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 1600Mhz
Intel Q9450 Quad-core 2.66 Ghz
4 (2x2) GB OCZ RAM
Gigabyte NX9800GX2 1G DDR3 2xDual
Boot Drive: Seagate 1TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA3.0Gb/s NCQ Server edition (ST31000340NS)
Disk Setup: RAID 5: 3 x 1 TB attached to the intel RAID controller.

The three disks are attached to the intel RAID controller. The installed RAID management software indicates there are no issues with the disk and I've tried both to enable and to disable write caching, but unfortunately neither is having a positive effect.

The key overlaps I see are the use of RAID (although different setups entirely), the use of a Gigabyte motherboard (so likely the same SATA chipsets) and the 9450 CPU.

I don't know what I can do to troubleshoot this other than contact intel and/or gigabyte. does anyone have a practul suggestion as to what the cause or the solution may be?

SCSIraidGURU · Jun 24, 2008

RAID 5 does parity writes to the drives. On three drives, only two have data and one has parity. I would consider doing RAID 1 + spare, if the controller allows spares. You are not really gaining performance on three drive RAID 5. You need 5 drives to really get RAID 5 performance. Then, you get 4 disks for data reads and writes.

Romann_AV · Jun 26, 2008

No offense, but I'm well aware I'm sacrificing performance for integrity. I don't need instruction on this and this was not the nature of my post nor of this thread.

I've chosen 100% file integrity over the potential for any single drive failure to result in data loss. If I want to increase performance I'll get more 1 TB drives as you suggest or switch to a more performant configuration in the mean time.
I don't see much point having 1 TB redundant and 1 TB not if my preference is to retain data. I may still consider 1+0 whenever I get a 4th drive.

What you haven't even discussed though is why my system stutters. Rather than dwell on this, I've done further investigation and I've now discovered that the problem seems to be all over the internet.

For whatever reason the FAQ here doesn't have that information, but so far, there's a problem with the combination of intel's ICH9R chipset and windows (mostly x64 XP and Vista). Many people seem to relate it to the audio stuttering, but from my symptoms, that's a symptom and not the cause.

Gigabyte and Abit boards have common issues, noticably because they both use a Marvell RAID chipset in addition to the intel ICH9R one (gigabyte likely rebranded theirs).

Potential offered solutions range from:
- Reinstalling the OS and timing the driver installation in such a way as to reordering the INF and RAID drivers in opposite order (mixed results on the net, and I'm not sure I can control that if I want to get my DVD visible on installation.)
- Updating to the latest intel drivers (not working for me)
- Switching from ACHI or RAID to IDE (not an option for a RAID 0, 1 or 5 setup)
- Moving the drives to ports 3-5 (this could work for me, but haven't tried it yet)
- Switching to the Marvel/Gigabyte RAID controller (it only has 2 ports (purple) that I can see, eliminating my RAID 5, which as mentioned above is not my preferred option).

Can anyone here confirm or deny the above stuff I've found?

integra144 · Jun 26, 2008

It has something to do with the Display Driver. I have Thinkpad T61 with the Nvidia and had that issue when opening and closing the lid while my notebook was attatched to an external adapter. Try disabling Aero and set it to Windows Basic Display mode or Classic windows. And see if it still occurs.

Romann_AV · Jun 30, 2008

integra144 said:
It has something to do with the Display Driver. I have Thinkpad T61 with the Nvidia and had that issue when opening and closing the lid while my notebook was attatched to an external adapter. Try disabling Aero and set it to Windows Basic Display mode or Classic windows. And see if it still occurs.

I haven't seen any reports associated the RAID with the NVidia, I will give that a try and see what happens. I'm surmising that closing the laptop lid kicks off the same disk stuttering behaviour as opening Media Player and opening My Computer.

Kaneda0 · Jul 3, 2008

Hi, i think i have good news, i had the same (DPC latency) problem with my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 Board (glitchy sound and performance issues) and i searched for a solution for about 2 Weeks now. I think i have it. There is a faulty Driver in Vista which generates a LOT of DPCs, when sound and/or Video is played. The driver is the one for the MMCSS service, which has the function to reduce gliching ( yeah, i know, that service does a BAD job :confused:

) To deactive it, you have to follow this procedure (BIG thanks to Courtney on Mark's Blog : Vista Multimedia Playback and Network Throughput !!!! ):

my first thought was to disable the MMCS service, but the Windows Audio service is dependent on it.

So I ran regedit, and changed the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Audiosrv\DependOnService

Just remove MMCS from that key in the list, and set MMCS to disabled in services, then reboot.

As soon as I rebooted I was able to copy files at 40mb/s+ while listening to audio

-Courtney

I still have light DPC lag, but it's harmless because the numbers of requests don't increase anymore, when i'm using sound and graphics.

I hope this helps, good luck !

Romann_AV · Jul 12, 2008

Thanks for the added info Kaneda.

I've been away on business this week, but I'll be going through the options. I just now went through yet another intel RAID driver install as suggested by the automated "Problem reports and solutions" component of Vista (this one is dated 1 May '08 so I've likely already got it installed).

Assuming this update doesn't fix the problem, I'm going to go through all the options I've found and see what works and what doesn't.

Given enough time tomorow, I'll see if I can find the reason the service dependency is there in the first place. I haven't done much network testing yet (I've got a 802.11n adapter in my desktop, so performance is a variable factor by its very nature).

Romann_AV · Jul 12, 2008

integra144 said:
It has something to do with the Display Driver. I have Thinkpad T61 with the Nvidia and had that issue when opening and closing the lid while my notebook was attatched to an external adapter. Try disabling Aero and set it to Windows Basic Display mode or Classic windows. And see if it still occurs.

I tested this on my system by switching to the Windows class scheme. I am able to replicate the exact same behaviour in Windows Classic mode, which eliminates Aero as a potential cause of the issue.

I did as follows:
1) Right-clicked the desktop, selected "Personalize"
2) Selected "Theme" (2nd from the bottom)
3) Changed from "Windows Vista" to "Windows Classic". Okay'ed that.
4) Got a desktop that reminds me more of windows NT 4.51 than XP... *shivers* must be that hue of blue they've used for the desktop colour.
5) Opened My computer: presto. STUTTER.

Interestingly, while still in Classic mode I went through the Device Manager to look at the driver I updated and as I was populating the volume(s) for the RAID-5 Disk logically attached to the intel ICH9R RAID controller, I was able to predictably and repeatedly product the same kind of stutter. The trigger appears to be linked closely with volume interrogation or some phase of this. I can't imagine this behaviour being linked with the video drivers.

Strike video configuration off the list (to my satisfaction at least).

Romann_AV · Jul 15, 2008

This thread is fast becoming quite a litany of failures.

So I originally had my 3x 1TB disks on SATA ports 2,3 and 5 on the ICH9R controller.

I moved the drive on port 2 to Port 4 and managed to invalidate my RAID setup, with the disk on port 5 showing up as "bad".

I'm guessing the shift in disk order threw the parity calculations off. One thing I wasn't prepared for was the long time it took to rebuild the 2 TB of data (roughly 36-40 hours for the lot).

Changing the disks to be on ports 3-5 and subsequently rebuilding the RAID 5 Array did not remove the stutter and the same actions still produce the behaviour.

In fact after completely verifying the RAID 5 and enabling write caching, I get the exact same timing on the stuttering.

So I guess that solution's off the list...

on to the service rescheduling.

Romann_AV · Jul 15, 2008

Kaneda0 said:
Hi, i think i have good news, i had the same (DPC latency) problem with my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 Board (glitchy sound and performance issues) and i searched for a solution for about 2 Weeks now. I think i have it. There is a faulty Driver in Vista which generates a LOT of DPCs, when sound and/or Video is played. The driver is the one for the MMCSS service, which has the function to reduce gliching ( yeah, i know, that service does a BAD job ) To deactive it, you have to follow this procedure (BIG thanks to Courtney on Mark's Blog : Vista Multimedia Playback and Network Throughput !!!! ):

my first thought was to disable the MMCS service, but the Windows Audio service is dependent on it.

So I ran regedit, and changed the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Audiosrv\DependOnService

Just remove MMCS from that key in the list, and set MMCS to disabled in services, then reboot.

As soon as I rebooted I was able to copy files at 40mb/s+ while listening to audio

-Courtney

Click to expand...

I still have light DPC lag, but it's harmless because the numbers of requests don't increase anymore, when i'm using sound and graphics.

I hope this helps, good luck !

So I disconnected the dependency of the Windows Audio Service upon the MMCS service. Set the MMC service as disabled and stopped the service.
Rebooted as the dependencies aren't looked up in real time, which mean a reboot was needed to bring the Windows Audio service back up.

I still got the stutter on startup (it actually seemed a bit worse, but that might be just perception sitting here looking at it).
Opening My Computer resulted in the same stutter frequency.

Opening Device Manager actually gave me some interesting observations:
- If I go directly to device manager and populate the volume of RAID 5 logical disk, then I get the EXACT same stutter timings (18 stutters) as before. This pretty much eliminates MMCS as the point of interference as I confirmed it was disabled.

- I was thrown off by the Logical Disk Manager. I acidentially clicked on it, which resulted in it spending 40 stutters/seconds loading the volume information. However once this had all finished, it appeared to be caching the disk volume information, as loading the disk volume properties up in the device manager section was suddenly instantaneous and didn't produce stutter.

When I tried to review the volume information through the Disk manager rather than through the device manager only, I noticed it caches the volume information that gets loaded (and produces stutter) on initialisation of the module.
When looking at the disks in the bottom list, right-clicking the label for each, brings up a near identical volume information screen. I say near, because the button to populate was missing (telling me it was cached).

This caching unfortunately doesn't seem to take effect system-wide as opening My computer still results in the exact same stutter pattern.

I'm now out of viable options, unless I consider throwing away my RAID 5.

HELP!

user1238 · Aug 13, 2008

Romann_AV,

I have almost exactly the same hardware as you (gigabyte x48t-dq6, q9450, corsair xms3 4gb (2 x 2gb) DDR3, gigabyte hd4870 512, 1 x Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB, 1 x WD Caviar 500GB) with exactly the same problem. The only (temporary) fix I have found for the moment is changing the view option in my computer to list view, so that it doesn't have to show the size or amount remaining on the disk. As soon as it has to show any of that info, the stuttering returns.

It's definitely something to do with the disks, when I generate a system health report, I get an average disk queue length of 4, which gets flagged by the system.

Although I'm not going with a RAID configuration like you, I have two HD's connected, one is connected to SATA 0 and the other SATA 1 on the ich9, with my two optical drives connected to the (purple) gigabyte sata controller ports. The ich9 sata controller is set to RAID in the bios, with the gigabyte controller set to ACHI.

Did you load the intel msm64 drivers on vista install? I didn't, but I'm going to do another install trying that. I can't think of anything else at the moment.

If you make any more progress, please post it!

njnitehawk · Aug 14, 2008

i like to ask this question.

i ran into something similar my hard drive freezes(stutters) a few seconds 5-10

then resumes what it was doing is this what you have been addressing or am i

off base? Freezes- Stutters- Times out are these words what you have been

posting about. i say times out or freezes i never used stutters when talking to

techs should i be say stuterring to help expalin my problem

user1238 · Aug 14, 2008

Ok I managed to solve the problem here anyway...

The problem seemed to be caused by using the installation cd that came with the motherboard. I simply reformatted and downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte's site and used them, as opposed to the drivers on the CD. Everything works fine now. Hope that helps.

Fumz · Aug 14, 2008

Just a thought if updating chipset drivers doesn't work out: could it be a combination of power saving "features" and Indexing that's giving you the stutters?

Romann_AV · Oct 4, 2008

user1238 said:
Ok I managed to solve the problem here anyway...

The problem seemed to be caused by using the installation cd that came with the motherboard. I simply reformatted and downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte's site and used them, as opposed to the drivers on the CD. Everything works fine now. Hope that helps.

For various reasons, my system has been left off for over 2 months... ( a baby will eat time beyond words!)

I have heard that a reformat with other drivers will fix the problem. I am right now testing the latest intel drivers, but I am guessing this won't fix it. I will investigate the driver on the CD and compare with what's available on the gigabyte website and see what the differences are.

My first choice is to find out what files are being left behind in a replacement driver installation and fix those (assuming again it's not something fundamental that's been configured differently based on using the CD or Web drivers).

This might take a while, but it does look like the most drastic option is available...

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