CPU Slowdown?

[Sapphire]

I've had a 700 Mhz Athlon for about nine months now and been very happy with it. Then out of the blue the performance dropped through the floor yesterday. I did all the usual things (scanned and defragged the disk, checked for viruses, looked through what was running), no effect. I downloaded a couple of benchmark programs to try to quantify it. According to SiSoft Sandra, all the components look okay except the CPU. It gets Dhrystone scores of about 210-220 MIPS and Whetstone scores of about 240-250 MFLOPS. The closest comparison they gave was a 600 MHz Duron that gets 1675 and 817 respectively. I tried going into safe mode and running the same benchmarks and it only added about 10 to each score, so I'm guessing that means the problem isn't software. If anyone has knows where I can get a DOS program to get these benchmarks I'd be interested in checking that. I also went into the BIOS and turned off the power management since it had a throttle down option. Nothing helps.

I'm stumped and I just discovered that the company I bought it from went under 3 weeks ago (figures). Any help would be most appreciated.

System info:
700 Mhz Athlon
Asus K7M motherboard
128 Meg RAM
28 Gig HD, 13 Gig free
Geforce Video Card
Windows 98 SE

[nasic]

hello Sapphire,
Have you tried cleaning out the windows\temp and windows\temporary internet files folders? This can improve performance
drastically. Also, if all else fails, try backing everything up and do a clean windows install. If the problem is hardware then i would recommend talking to Paleo Pete.

[Reid]

Have you checked to see if the caches are enabled in BIOS? You did say it happened suddenly, but it is a simple check.

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rdrummond@thesimpsons.com

[Sapphire]

Interesting--

I went into the BIOS and it said all the various caches were working. So I disabled them all. When I ran Sisoft again I got the exact same scores. I reenabled them all, and still the same results.

Seems to me this means one of two things:

1) The cache really isn't working.
2) The cache is working and refuses to be disabled.

Sisoft lists the caches even when turned off. I'm not sure if it's claiming they are functional.

I tried clearing out the temp files (I'm desperate), but no result. The CPU benchmark doesn't access the hard drive.

Thanks for the help so far.

[bassvax]

There may be some additional benchmarking software available at www.thescreensavers.com (http://www.thescreensavers.com) or www.hotfiles.com (http://www.hotfiles.com) Good luck http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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Jerry

[Paleo Pete]

nasic I deleted your second post, no reason to have it twice...server glitch?

Sapphire Try resetting BIOS to its original settings, or look for an option to "Load Optimum Performance Values" or "Load setup Defaults" then make sure the hard drive and floppy parameters are correct. Write them down FIRST. You might also have to check the COM ports, if you have a hardware modem COM 2 must be disabled. (3f8)

Then go into Device Manager and check the Performance tab, see if it says MS DOS Compatibility Mode That's most likely when the system suddenly slows down to a crawl for no apparent reason, often related to the installation of 16 bit programs requiring real mode drivers, especially DOS based games. If that's the case: Troubleshooting MS DOS Compatibility Mode (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q130/1/79.asp) might help.



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Soon as I come up with all the answers...they change the questions!!

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[Sapphire]

Problem solved. Wintune gave me some more data on the cache. It got good times for reading but not for writing. Furthermore it was ignoring the BIOS when I tried to disable it completely. So I got the latest BIOS upgrade from ASUS and now it's all fixed.

Thanks to everyone for your help.