Tweaking motherboard response times - possible?

[blackbeltninja]

Hey guys

Hoping someone can give me some advice here.

I recently built a machine at home - sourced some decent ram, a good cpu and a decent board and gfx card. Put it all together and voila! Result. I was quite pleased with it. I then put together a second machine for my sister. Her budget wasn't as big as mine but I still got her some good stuff.

Having had the two machines running side by side, hers seems much more nimble than mine and I'm not sure why. Windows starts up and gets to desktop much quicker than mine does and seems to shut down faster; additionally, basic programmes like Firefox and Thunderbird seem to start faster on hers than mine. Additionally, someone at my office purchased a new machine which also seems significantly faster than mine even though our specs are similar.

Our installations are identical since I used my office XP install cds as part of my licence agreement for all the installations; same virus scanner; everything. Is it a basic difference between the 2 boards, that the Intel boards just respond more quickly than the MSI board? If yes, is there any way to tweak the MSI board or am I living in a fantasy world? I can see the MSI board takes longer to fire up after the POST; but even after the Windows logo appears on the systems and that little progress bar spins up and down underneath it, there are differences - mine does 9 spins; my sister's does 5 and the one at work does only 4 before bringing up a Windows login.

My specs:
MSI board G43-M2F; Intel G43/ICH10 chipset; 1333MHz fsb
1 x 2Gb ram 800MHz
Intel E8400 3GHz Core-2 duo 6Mb cache

Her specs:
Intel board DG35EC; Intel G35/ICH8 chipset; 1333MHz fsb
1 x 2Gb ram 800MHz (identical to mine)
Intel E5300 2.66GHz dual-core Pentium 2Mb cache

Office machine specs:
Same as mine, but an Intel DQ45QC board;with Intel Q45/ICH10 chipset

It's probably nothing serious; I'm just wondering why I spent significantly more money on a machine which seems significantly less powerful for simple things like Firefox and email. I don't plan on overclocking the machine; I'm wondering if perhaps there is another way around this since the faster chip in my system doesn't seem noticeably better than her one, so overclocking probably won't change that.

In short - is there a way to make my uber supercomputer behave like it should?

-d-

 

[Corny]

What kind of harddrive do both machines have?

 

[blackbeltninja]

Um... the office one and my one both have sata drives as primary driving the OS; mine has my old ide/ata133 as a second drive. Ironically, I went for a fast 7200rpm/32mb cache sata drive

My sister's has 2 elderly ide drives in it; probably 5400rpm/8mb cache ones.

-d-

 

[Corny]

are we talking about a 3rd machine now? Or what is the "office one"?
For that MSI board .. did you install the chipset drivers?

 

[blackbeltninja]

Mine and the 3rd/office machine have the same CPU; my sister's is the slower CPU. The office and my sister's are both Intel boards and both faster than my system.

Yup, did the chipset and everything else on the install CD, then went to MSI for updated drivers.

-d-

 

[Corny]

Do both Mainboards and Harddrives Support SATA II? Maybe one of them is just SATA I?

This seems like either an HD, RAM or caching issue.

Did Windows enable UDMA for the IDE channels? (check Hardware Manager)?
Is write cache activated?

 

[blackbeltninja]

Yowsers - not sure. I'll check on these things when I get home.

As for the sata stuff: Yup - MSI says:

Intel® G43 Chipset
- Supports FSB 800/1066/1333 MHz.

• Intel® ICH10/ICH10R Chipset
- Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 480Mb/sec, up to 10 ports.
- 4 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s.
- PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
- ACPI 2.0 compliant.
- Serial ATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD. (ICH10R)
- Integrated AHCI controller.

However, the drive is sata-II with native command queueing - could that be it? I've heard people say NCQ is sometimes slower, but I didn't think it would be that noticeable. It's a Seagate Barracuda, fwiw.

What I can tell you, until I can check these other things you've suggested, is that after POST my sister's hdd light starts flashing immediately as Windows loads whereas mine takes a good few seconds longer to start working and loading Windows. There is also a point halfway through the startup sequence where both machines' hdd lights stop flashing for a couple of seconds before resuming; again, my wait time there is longer than hers.

As I said, it's probably nothing serious; more idle curiosity and a touch of irritation than anything else.

-d-
PS: Thanks for the help, Corny.

 

[Corny]

hm the startup troubles sound more like a driver/cache problem.

did you check if udma is active?

you can check the pure performance (not affected by startup) with a tool like that:
http://www.hdtune.com/

the tricky thing about the startup process is that you never know what else is loaded - maybe you installed more drivers for peripheral hardware, got more services to initialize etc ..

 

[blackbeltninja]

I'll check udma when I get home.

I haven't specifically got more services and that running on one machine compared to the other - they are pretty standard installations running almost identical software except that I have a dedicated graphics card and my sister's is just the onboard vga. Neither of us is running anything special which fires up on startup, I don't think, and we have no peripheral hardware except hers has a printer attached to it.

I'll have a look at the services tab as well when I get home.

-d-

 

[blackbeltninja]

Okay, looking in Device manager, write caching is enabled; also, the drive is set to Transfer mode: DMA if available. Current transfer mode: Not applicable.

The drive is showing up under IDE ATA/ATAPI adapters section in the Device Manager on the primary IDE channel, even though it is on my SATA port #4. There is nothing listed under the SATA controllers on the same tab - is this normal?

In the bios, the dma settings are on auto, but there are tons of different modes available (udma1, udma2, udma3 up to 6 or 7 as well as others).

-d-