New motherboard and it has slowed down! Any ideas?

[Spitoon]

Computer had been running on an ASUS motherboard for a couple of years. Been very happy with it - but then it died... I couldn't get another ASUS board of the same model quickly and the man in the shop recommended a Gigabyte as a replacement. Everything else is the same - just switched the mobo.

It works. Processor-intensive tasks run fine - and seem to take about the same time as before. BUT anything reading or writing to the HDD - loading an application or accessing the IE cache, for example - is taking forever.

I'm wondering whether there are settings in the BIOS or wherever that could be adjusted to improve the situation or, perhaps I just bought a pup. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Mobo is a Gigabyte EP43-DS3. HDD is WD SATA and a benchmarking tool says average read 84.4 MB/sec and access time 13.8 ms.

TIA.

[mixture]

Obvious question but have you downloaded and installed the latest drivers ?

It can be many months between the time some person at the factory throws a driver CD in the box and you buying the thing. Bugs happen.

Also, just to be sure.... ......I assume you have taken the scientific approach and run the exact same benchmarking test on the exact same hard drive on your previous motherboard under the exact same background load conditions ? Otherwise you don't really have much basis for comparison ?

[Saab Dastard]

BUT anything reading or writing to the HDD - loading an application or accessing the IE cache, for example - is taking forever.

Very slow hard drive access can occur if the IDE controller channel(s) revert(s) to PIO mode from DMA - check for each controller in Device Manager. It's a "feature" of windows that it can fail back to PIO, but not return to a higher mode.

Sometimes you have to edit registry settings to force it back.

SD

[Spitoon]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Yes - all the latest drivers installed. Benchmarking is a bit tricky - I didn't do it for the old mobo...and now I can't. It may only be subjective but the HDD is waaaay slower now! But I wondered whether anyone might have a view on the absolute numbers.

I've checked the Device Manager and all channels are DMA of some flavour.

It's a shame because the rest of the kit is fairly high end and worked well straight out of the box with the ASUS board. Sadly I needed a working machine when the old board died so I went for a quick solution - but I kind of assumed that I'd get similar performance from a reasonably well known brand.

I'm fairly computer savvy but tweaking hardware and the like is not something I've got much experience of so I'm a bit lost on this one and haven't really had time to research.

Ho hum....

[FakePilot]

I had this from a loose SATA cable. Wiggled it and all got better.

Also, if you are slightly linux literate boot a live-cd or your distro. Do a "dd if=/dev/drive of=/dev/null bs=4096 &" then watch "iostat -dxk 1" If you see 100% utilization and something like 40MB/s, the drive is probably good.

Also there's a s.m.a.r.t utility that lets you access the harddrive's built in diagnosis and error reporting.

Speaking of which, I'm going to check my drives...