what does the FSB do?

The fsb connects all your hardware components together right?

 

the fsb mainly deals with RAM and the CPU while the south bridge deals w/ hdds and I/O devices ... generally speaking for gaming and demanding apps a fast FSB is more desirable .. course depends on what the app is doing

 

ok cool. Now for a second ?... What will it take to make games and applications load faster? For ex: When I play doom 3 or farcry, takes 30 seconds to load a level, however if I die, and reload a level takes 2 to 3 seconds, prob. because it is in ram at that point. How can I decrease load time. All drivers defragged, ATA133 on a high end system. Is my only option to go to a SATA drive? Thanks.

 

How about putting two hard drives into a RAID configuration. What is the "pure performance" config of RAID? Level 0?

 

Ozorowsky, you're probably right about the 2-3 second load time resulting from the fact that what needs to be reloaded is already cached in memory.

That seems to imply that, to make a big dent in the 30-second load time for a new level, you want to get the necessary data into memory faster. Higher-performance hard drives will make a small difference, but I don't think a RAID configuration will make a big difference unless it will allow the system to read data off both drives simultaneously and organize it in memory without saturating the bus or the CPU. The limiting factor remains the speed at which you can pull data off the drive(s).

You've already noticed that data can be retrieved faster from memory than from a hard drive -- by at least an order of magnitude, if not two. If you have enough memory, perhaps you could set up a RAM drive, load the game into it, and run it from there. Then it's all in memory; the CPU then only has to retrieve what it needs from the RAM drive and load it into the executable's memory space -- just as it does when it's reloading a level when you "die".

Let us know if it works.

 

More ram will most deffinately help with loading maps ( or levels ). I know when I play Battlefield, I'm ususally one of the first on the map. When I was running 512megs it would load so slow, but another stick of 512megs & bam, levels were loading so much faster.

Also I used to have a RAID 0 setup on this machine & it really didn't seem to help with gaming too much. I know alot of people swear by RAID, but I really didn't see the improvements they rave so much about.

I'd say stuff some more RAM in there.

 

yea i know what you mean ram is a big deal these days

512 will play the games yea

but a 1024 will play them even better


1536 realy boost the fast load times

i have had 512 and it took a bit to load bf42 DC maps like 1min 20sec

then i got 1024 and it took 50 secs to load the maps

and now i have a 3000+ insted of the 2200+ and the 1536 of pc2700 ddr those maps load up in around 15 -35 sec [some maps are bigger lol]

when playing i am useing only for the game about 600-750 megs of ram just for the bf42.exe so 512 isnt realy all one needs

when i got this pc bulit they said that you will play the game just fine with the 5200 and 512 of pc 2100 [well i dont think they knew what they were talking about] yea it played good and stuff but i had it at low settings

now that i have the hard wear they said i would never need i play all my games [other then doom3] at full settings

 

how would you setup a RAM DRIVE

sorry i dont know how but sounds cool as hell

 

Re: RAM drives (was:what does the FSB do?)

50cal -- I was afraid you might ask that question. If you happen to have a Win98 Startup Disk around, I could point you to an example. But the article here says you can't do it in a Windows version later than 98SE without using a third-party driver. I can't help you there.

If you're running Win98Se or earlier, just Google "ramdrive.sys". You'll get all the information you need to set up a RAM drive. And much of it is better laid out than I could do it for you. I'm not into re-inventing wheels or anything else.

 

thats ok i realy dont need to load that fast any way i am the first one in anyway most the time then i have to wait for the rest of the players lol

30secs isnt realy that bad to me [i remember when some games took 5 -6 mins to load a map lol

plus i use my 1536 for more then just games

i only asked for the "more you know" kind of stuff lol

thanks man i never knew anything about ram drives

 

Re: RAMdrives (was: what does the FSB do?)

... and more power to you for it!

You, and probably most people that didn't get into computers that used 16-bit (or 8-bit) operating systems -- i.e., pre-Win9x. You don't see them being used much now.

RAMdrives were much more popular in the days when hard drives had seek times that were 10 times as long as they are now. Even though computers generally had far less memory than they do now (memory then cost $50/MB) a RAMdrive was often a worthwhile solution.

Micro$oft used the technique in its Win98/SE Startup disks because they contained enough software that it had to be compressed on the startup disk and had to be expanded into usable form. But there was no room on the floppy, and if you're using a Startup Disk, it's likely because you can't access your hard drive. So M$ had to assume the hard drive was unavailable. So they set the Startup Disk up to establish a 2MB RAMdrive in extended memory, and expanded the executables it needed in that space. It works a treat.

You could do worse than keep a Win98 Startup Disk around if you're using a FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem. (It's not much good if you're using NTFS, unfortunately.)