All games on my computer suffer from hitching. Why?

I was looking through the post here and I noticed no one mentioned overclocking. So do you have any of your hardware overclocked?

I heard that having it overclocked to much and on too many hardware could cause problems like that.

wondering if memtest turned up anything and if you were able to figure out how to install your bios updates.

The reason it's your Video RAM is because your other RAM doesn't seem to be the problem. The system RAM holds information in waiting (not actually being used yet) until it gets called up by your GPU to be processed. Your GPU also holds a little bit of data in wait. When you add something that your vRAM didn't have, it has to grab it from the system RAM (or, worse, from the hard drive-GASP) before your card and processor can get around to rendering and outputting the damned thing.

Whether or not the BEAUTY of something like UT2004 on high pales in comparrison to Crysis on low, there's still a lot of stuff that's being rendered at the same time. Your video RAM is limited and a game like UT2004 will stress it (BF2 was a massive bitch I remember).

Perhaps check to see if your GPU isn't overheating (don't remember if you already did that) which is causing the hitching (though I doubt that would be the case).

Also, When turning your settings up, try doing small things at a time and see what it is that puts your system over the edge, then adjust accordingly.

~Jason

Yes that could be the problem, how is your BIOS setup? is it on automatic or did you set it manually?
What is your Front Speed Bus speed and what s your Multiplier set to?

Your RAM is quite likely DDR2-800. Note the lack of MHz. 800 MHz is the "effective" clock speed, not the real clock speed. DDR2-800 clocks at 400 MHz. Therefore 472 MHz actually sounds like it's overclocked.

Underscore said:

I can't stop mine from getting hitched

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Good job sir :tup:

did u say what type psu & os? & monitor ~ list parts with
Run dxdiag, hijackthis & list
Try new ram ? idk Did you run drivercleaner before installing drivers?
Fresh install of updated, OS...

also might want to try ccleaner. From what I hear it's pretty good, and even if it doesn't fix your problem it'll help your computer anyway.

neilthecellist said:

Hm... Well, I didn't overclock my RAM. For starters - I don't even know how to overclock RAM.

In any case, how would hypothetically overclocked RAM cause hitching in games?

Also, I don't know how my BIOS is set up. I only recently fiddled with it; I've never touched the BIOS ever before that.

Click to expand...

Well go look around in it then. As long as you don't change anything and exit the BIOS without saving just be sure you don't save anything. Try finding the Multiplier and Front Speed Bus and let us know.

Did you check for gremlins?



Sometimes it's gremlins.

Have you checked your power supply? A bad or dying PSU can cause some hitches if the GPU isnlt getting enough juice.

if nothing else works, the culprit is DUST. Make sure your computer is completely free of dust; or overheating.

neilthecellist said:

In any case, how would hypothetically overclocked RAM cause hitching in games?

Click to expand...

No idea. And for the record, I don't know how corrupted RAM would cause it either. I'd expect corrupted data and crashes from defective RAM, not pauses. Back in the days of Windows 98 I had an effect like that that was caused by... I'm not sure but unplugging the mouse helped.

Since you said you had the problem over several computers I'd start looking at similarities. Hardware or software you used with all of them.

Sounds like a slow hard drive to me.

What hard drive do you have?

Brand:
Model:
Size:
Cache Size:
Interface Type:
RPM:

Have you tried running a system-wide benchmark like SiSoft Sandra Lite? Specifically on that hard drive?