weird issues with quake4

[xomp]

my setup:
sparkle 550w psu (27A@3.3v 29A@5v 36A@12v)
9x seagate 7200rpm/8mb hard drive
1x maxtor 7200rpm/8mb hard drive
Abit Hotrod 100 RAID controller (basically Highpoint RocketRAID100)
Highpoint Rocketraid 464 controller
Asus A8N-SLI (currently 1013 bios, 6.70 nforce4-amd, evga 81.94)
Athlon X2 3800+ at 250x10@1.36v
evga 7800gt 470/1100 (stock, same as friends) updated to 136B BIOS, didnt help
2x512mb corsair value select ram @ 5/6 divider ~208mhz 2.5-3-3-8
Windows 2000 SP4 RU1v2 fully patched

my friends setup:
AMD X2-3800 Dual Core overclocked @ 2.6GHz (260x10) 1.55V VCORE
9/10 RAM DIVIDER @ 236MHz FSB
G.SKILLZ 2GBZX 2x1GB RAM @ 2.5-3-2-5
DFI Ultra-D LanParty uT (623-3 BIOS)
eVGA 7800GT CO (470MHz/1100MHz) MODEL 256-N516-P2
Windows XP SP1 32-bit

so basically my friend and i have a similar setup, so here's where the problem started.
he got 90k in aquamark, and i was getting about 70k. we were confused so we tried a quake4 demo.
i got 60-70fps, while my friend got 85 fps at 1280x1024. i see it max at about 100.
when i switched down to 640x480, it gives the SAME results, changing the "quality" setting didn't help either.
there are about 3 times in the demo where the game gets this massive framerate drop down to 35-40fps for no apparent reason (this is the same for BOTH 1280x1024 AND 640x480, it doesn't look like it's drawing anything more intensive than normal). this happens at the SAME times every time i run the demo.

i've tried these and it still produces the same issue:
setting affinity (even though it should be dual core friendly?)
going back to default 2.0ghz
swapping motherboard (ecs nforce4-a939)
removing a stick of ram and running single channel
fresh installed XP
swapped hard drives and install again
tried asus bios 1011
forceware 81.85whql, 81.94, evga's 81.94, 81.95whql
nforce drivers 6.66 and 6.70
disabled the onboard sound
decreasing the HT freq to 3x250
decreasing ram to 166mhz
decreasing gpu/ram freq.
changing that asus "PEG" crap from "auto" to "disabled" (i think it defaults to disabled anyway)
the pci-e frequency is default and i never messed with it

i've tried just about everything besides replacing the ram, video card, and psu.
the time i tested it with the different motherboard, it had basically NOTHING connected to it. (cdrom, ONE HD, ram, video card, kb, mouse; both raid cards and related hd's removed)
my friend suggested the power supply, but seeing as how i ran it completely stripped down and it STILL did the same thing (i disconnected the psu from EVERYTHING except the parts connected), it doesn't seem likely.

for other benchmarks:
3dmark05 i was a little above 7400, my friend got ~7500
fear benchmarks (that built-in "performance" test) were basically identical.
the sisoft cpu benchmarks were similar, with my friend having the edge.

any ideas? am i missing something very simple here?! am i wrong about something?! ARGGG...
thanks!

 

[stevty2889]

Well you have 1gb of ram, he has 2gb of ram, so thats gonna make some differance there. His ram has slightly better timings as well. And how can your X2 3800+ be at 250x15, when the highest multiplier is 10? If you are running at 250x10 then he has a 100mhz clock advantage on you as well..

 

[xomp]

er sorry, i meant 250x10 edited. the problem isn't really that it's lower. it's the fact that i get some massive slowdown in quake4, which seems to be reflected in the aquamark score, whereas he says his is completely smooth during the whole demo in quake4.

 

[stevty2889]

Run quake 4. Exit out. Go to the performance tab it task manager. Look at the commit change section, and look at the peak value. If it's > 1gb, your slow downs are because you are using the page file, which is using much slower hard drive space as virtual memory. Since he has 2 gig of ram, he wouldn't have the same problem..thats my guess.

 

[xomp]

thanks a lot for suggestions so far, i've edited my original one with more info if other people have any other ideas.
heres a screen shot of the taskmanager, i took two.
q4taskman.jpg
it seems like it is still increasing, but those "laggy" areas have already shown up by the time i took the ingame screen shot

 

[stevty2889]

Well it doesn't seem to be paging, there is still pleny of system memory left. Sometimes demo's are just buggy. You could also try defraging your hard drive. Err do you really have 10 hard drives? 9 seagates and a maxtor?? That could be part of your problem, all those drives are running of the 12v rail as well, so maybe your video card isn't getting enough power.