HP Pavilion P6320Y isn't performing well after hardware swap - Gaming is horrible now.

[Chickenooble]

Two years ago I bought my wife the HP Pavilion P6320Y from Best Buy and I installed an XFX 9800GT 512MB card in.  From what she's said it worked fine and played WoW well enough.  Since then I've decided to combine the best hardware between our two desktop computers; I kept her base P6320Y, but I added my Rosewill 500W PSU  and my MSI 9800GT 512MB card since it cools very well.  

After the swap the MSI video card is performing rather poorly.  In StarCraft 2, I get a frequent stuttering in the grahics and that stuttering coincides with a pause in the high-frequency humming coming from the video card.  (Here is a video of the problem, humming, etc.  Be sure to turn your speakers up since it's recorded with a cell phone camera.)    I swapped the MSI card back to the XFX card to simply see if the MSI card was bad but they both act the same way.  I can't test the MSI card with the standard 300W PSU because the MSI card needs a 6-Pin power connector.  Mind you, the Rosewill 500W PSU and MSI card worked very well in my desktop, running an Intel Dual-Core processor, 4GB Ram and a 32-Bit Win 7 OS.  So, why would the PSU combined with either card work so poorly in the P6320Y?  I intend on switching back to the 300W PSU and the XFX card to try to isolate the problem, but I wanted to float this by people around here.

I'm hoping that someone has an idea or knows some software that might help me determine where the fault in the system lies.  I'm guessing it has something to do with the PSU but I'd like to run some diagnostics on it before I buy another PSU.  Is there a way via Perfmon (or something else) to determine where the hiccup is?

PS: The spec sheet for this desktop says it's PCI Express x16.  The cards are PCI Express 2.0 x16.  How do I know if the motherboard on the desktop is PCI Express 2.0 x16 or something else?  Would it even matter?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I can only answer the last part of your question.

Most motherboard manufacturers added support for PCIe 2.0 cards late in 2007.

Since the p6320y was released in December of 2009, I would have to say with great confidence the PCIe x16 slot is V 2.0.  So, in your particular situation this is not a cause of the problems you are having with the graphics.

Since both video cards respond the same way, and all you did was change the P/S, I would venture to guess that the P/S has an issue with that particular PC, or visa versa.

Paul

[helpme!]

Hi, as you may or may not know it it says on the hp website that due to amd limitation the 8gb memory that runs at ddr3 1333 is reduced to the lower speed cuz the cpu supports only 4 gb of that speed for ram so the ram runs ddr3 1066 with 8 gb, another thing is the speed of the hard drive, the speed of the hard drive if not replaced with another hard drive already is shipped with the 5400 rpm speed, in order for it to be faster you would either have to have a Sata 2 with 7200 rpm or faster like a 10,000 if supported by the motherboard. You would have to upgrade the cpu and hard drive and then maybe the computer would not be bottlenecked by problems that appear with the computer and is a better way of pc health. You can use a free monitor utility like cpuid hardware monitor you can find on search engines that you can download for temperature support, You have to look at the computer as a gaming machine first before you can start thinking it's a gaming machine. It's also a great idea to take some time and have the case open to look at the inside of the computer and look for signs of dust and lint and get rid of all that in your pc by dusting it all out not preferably with a can of air if it's a threat to the computer but you can use something like a brush of some sort to dust off the motherboard and everything inside the pc case and really take care of the pc and you will get cooler temps and less risk of it overheating or causing more problems. Here are some references. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01925562&cc=us&dlc=en&lang=en&lc=en&product=412...

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors

I hope this helps you in supporting your computer better.

[helpme!]

It's a good idea to keep a 500 watt power supply in the computer with a fast video card cuz video cards like that require more power than a 300 watt and it won't run like a bottleneck and it's better for the pc. Another thing if u updated the bios lately which may be dangerous due to what appears to be an error in fan engine speed and overheating of the cpu on this webpage people are talking about, it can be a threatening problem for the computer which must be fixed or it might die. Here is an url about the page people talk about updating their bios with that computer. http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware/P6320y-Problem/m-p/756385#M34508 

[Chickenooble]

Thanks for the reply both here and at Toms.  Since I've posted this I've performed the following steps (in this order).

1) AVG appeared to be causing some crap performance based on a lot of the problems I saw in the error logs.  When I had the XFX Card/300W PSU installed, I uninstalled AVG and I was able to then play SC2 at high settings.  

2) With the XFX Card/300W PSU installed I ran Memtest for 12 hours and the test came back clean.

3) Since the memory test was clean and SC2 played somewhat well, I figured AVG was the culprit for my problems.  I removed the XFX Card/300W PSU and installed the MSI Card/500W PSU.  I fired up SC2 and the game returned to it's poor performance.

4) Since the issue appeared to be related to this configuration, I ran Memtest and over 11 passes it turned up 205 errors within a 24 hour period.

5) I removed the MSI Card and re-ran the Memtest with the 500W PSU installed in the machine.  It was running for about 10 hours and already turned up 50-something errors.  I'm going to run it through this evening and see if I get more.

I don't understand all the technical aspects of electricity in a computer, so I don't know if the Ram/Processor/GPU/etc. is drawing too much from the PSU or if the PSU is just crapping out on the output, causing the memory issues.  From these tests I find it telling that the errors appear with the 500W PSU.  Before I order a new PSU I will re-run the Memtest with the 300W PSU and no PCIe card installed.  If that comes up clean then I'll be confident that the PSU is the problem.

As for your other suggestions:

1) I'll look into the BIOS update.

2) I have a Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM Sata drive in my other computer.  (I don't think Sata 2 was big when we bought this computer two years back.)   I'll try to back up all my stuff to our NAS, swap HDs, install Windows 7 and start anew.

3) The spec sheet on my computer says that I can upgrade to a Phenom X4 Deneb, so I'm looking at this AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4GHz.  I'm also looking at getting EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Superclocked, which will require I get a different PSU anyways since I'll need to get one with two 6-Pin connectors and one that has enough output for it, the new processor and everything else.  Any suggestions on PSUs?

One other question... the processor/OS I have installed is 64-bit so there wouldn't be and down-scaling of RAM capability, right?

Thanks for the lengthy reply. 

[helpme!]

You can try to look for some psus on pricewatch.com or newegg.com or ewiz.com or other sites allthough some say to not buy cheap psus cuz they can have problems and or psu failures. I'm not really sure myself about the amd limitation that phenom processors cause the ram speed to go slower and I'm not sure what processor would support full ddr3 1333 8 or 16 gbs other than this website I found that appears to be the fastest cpu that may or may not work in the am2+ am3 socket. I don't understand how the cpus work that limit memory. Here is an url on what the OS supports for ram limits http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/max-memory-limits-for-64-bit-windows-7/4254 I'm not sure exactly how much ram the motherboard supports max yet.