rockoman

Shane_B

Hi rockoman,

I had the same problem you are having and it ended up being my RAM. I was using the XMS3 RAM at the time. After 4 defective sticks of it, I went with Kingston because it was on the list of tested RAM that Gigabyte provides for their motherboards. I have the Gigabyte UD2 motherboard and had issues when it was running the XMS3 ram even though there is a version of it on the tested list. BTW the XMS3 RAM is only 1333 RAM, but 'tested' to run stable when overclocked, basically they stuck a huge heat sink on it to be able to handle the heat from overclocking. I never OC and didn't realize that the advertised speed on the XMS3 was the OC'd speed until long after I had it installed.

I looked on Gigabytes website and got a list of all the RAM they tested and got the fastest speed I could run without overclocking (1333). I installed it, went in to bios and told it to load optimized settings, and my CPU usage in Sonar dropped significantly. Last project I did had 9 tracks, 2 synths, 4 reverbs, Sonars Tube Leveler on a buss with 3 tracks routed to it, Alloy on every track, and I slapped Ozone on the master buss to see if it would handle it ... CPU usage was 19% with Sonar's Tube Leveler set for oversampling and I had the 64 bit engine turned on. It dropped to 12 ~ 13% when I disabled Ozone, and down to about 10% when I turned off oversampling on the tube leveler.

Gigabyte had some memory problems on the UD2 mobo that they fixed with BIOS updates. I think it's up to F11 now. You may want to check on that too. There are some updates to Win 7 that say they improve performance but I didn't notice anything in Sonar's CPU usage when I installed the updates. Never hurts to try though.

Hope this helps.

Shane

Awesome reply, thank you. Man, I hope it's not my Ram. When you say yours was defective, does that mean it wasn't showing up in BIOS or in system specs? I ask because all 12gig of mine are. I am running it at 1600MHZ by setting the multiplier in BIOS. I'll try 1333 and see if that improves anything. BTW, Will a supplier (NewEgg) take back defective RAM if so?

All of my RAM showed up in my BIOS. Based on some suggestions here in the forums I tested my RAM and it tested bad. If you try to do an RMA with Corsair they force you to use MemTest 86. Memtest 86 reported my RAM was ok, but when I tested it with Windows 7's RAM diagnostics it showed it as being bad. I told Corsair that Memtest 86 reported it bad because they weren't going to issue an RMA if Memtest 86 tested it ok. <--- See where I'm goin' with this?

You have 30 days to return anything but software with Newegg. I was past the 30 days so I emailed and asked if I could return it for store credit and they ok'd it. This was after waiting for a month to get my RMA'd ram back from Corsair ... and they ended up sending me another bad stick and it blew out the remaining good RAM that I had in my system. What a nightmare.

I don't have the video drivers currently installed (about to do it now).

I have a Galaxy 9500 PCIe card. When I loaded the drivers for it the Aero feature in Windows would keep turning on and off and make my screen freeze for a second and blink. During one a of my system formats I let Win 7 auto-detect the video card and use the Windows driver and I haven't had a hiccup since.

Good luck with this. These kind of things can be very frustrating. Oh ... another thing ... invest 10 bucks in one of those anit-static clip on wrist bands to help against accidentally frying your PC. :)

John

I have a Galaxy 9500 PCIe card. When I loaded the drivers for it the Aero feature in Windows would keep turning on and off and make my screen freeze for a second and blink. During one a of my system formats I let Win 7 auto-detect the video card and use the Windows driver and I haven't had a hiccup since.

This is not a good idea. The Windows drivers are generic and will not run the vid card to its best performance.
If a video card is not working well with its drivers from the brand name maker try using the driver from the chip maker. I always use the Nvidia driver from their web site. I use the model type as my DL and OS.

The other option is get a well known well built vid card. For Vista and Windows 7 this is more important then it was in the past.

Thanks John. I just double checked and there are no Galaxy drivers, when you go to their support page, the download link is just routed to Nvidia's drivers. I tried the latest version and Aero is still messed up. It keeps shutting off and on by itself. Drives ya crazy when you're in the middle of something. When I use the Windows driver, it's stable as could be. You would think any PCIe card would be able to handle a simple desktop screen these days wouldn't you?

I think I'm going to go to Best Buy and use them as a guinea pig and pick up a few video cards and see which one works best. I'm so sick of waiting for UPS to bring me replacement parts for my new PC! :)

Thanks again,

Shane

Shane_B.

All of my RAM showed up in my BIOS. Based on some suggestions here in the forums I tested my RAM and it tested bad. If you try to do an RMA with Corsair they force you to use MemTest 86. Memtest 86 reported my RAM was ok, but when I tested it with Windows 7's RAM diagnostics it showed it as being bad. I told Corsair that Memtest 86 reported it bad because they weren't going to issue an RMA if Memtest 86 tested it ok. <--- See where I'm goin' with this?

You have 30 days to return anything but software with Newegg. I was past the 30 days so I emailed and asked if I could return it for store credit and they ok'd it. This was after waiting for a month to get my RMA'd ram back from Corsair ... and they ended up sending me another bad stick and it blew out the remaining good RAM that I had in my system. What a nightmare.

Thanks for the reply. I get where you're going and it's very good to know. I ran the memory diagnostic included with Win 7 and everything reported back fine. So, I don't think it's my memory or I at least feel better about it. I'll do a test with Memtest just for the hell of it. Sucks to hear you had to wait so long to get your new RAM shipped to you; yes it can be VERY frustrating!

Sorry to hear about your vid. woes. I don't have any trouble with the one I purchased (GIGABYTE GeForce 8400 GS GV-NX84S512HP Video Card) Went in like a charm and doesn't install all the "bloat" alot of other cards do just to install a simple driver. I was going to keep just the Windows drivers instead too but my graphic meters were lagging so I had to install the manufacturers driver (glad I did). You don't notice any "graphic lag" using just the windows display driver??