Just took a run through the manual. If you're interested in trying to run down your bottleneck, try the following:
-I am assuming you have 3x RAM sticks. You have all 3 of them installed in the 3 black slots, I hope?
Doing so will make sure you are in 3-channel RAM mode, eliminating RAM bottlenecks.
The following should be done as a group.
-Disable any overclock you might be using (DIP switches on the board, BIOS FSB/bclk boost, whatever)
-Turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS (Adv Bios Feature -> CPU Feature -> Hyperthreading function -> OFF/Disabled)
-Disable phase switching (Green Power -> set all 4 phase controls to "Disabled")
-Disable CPU power saving (Cell Menu -> Intel EIST -> "Disabled")
-Disable SSC (Cell Menu -> Spread Spectrum -> "Disabled")
Doing the above will lock out the "fake" processor cores (the Hyperthreaded ones) which are only 30% as good as a "real" core anyway, lock your motherboard's CPU power supply at max, turn off the ability for the CPU to throttle way down when not busy, and smooth out the jitter in your clock speed. Doing all of this will see if your pauses are due to lags/latency in the switching of the processor back and forth from low to high power/speed. If your FPS smooth out, then that IS your culprit. You can also use
this tool to see if anything shows up. If not, try the following (after restoring all your old settings back from the above, that is).
-Lower your bclk to 100MHz (Cell Menu -> Base Clock (MHz) -> "100")
(if you can't set it below 133, then you won't be able to do this test)
This will run your processor 25%
slower than normal. Even if the performance is lower across the board, if you are still running into moments where the FPS ramp up and down (though you'd be swinging from 80 down to 20 instead of your current 100 down to 30), then it is
not your CPU's speed which is the problem.
With me so far? Good. Turn your bclk back up to 133 (or wherever you had it) and then try this unusual test.
-
Remove your sound card (or tell the game to play with the sound off.
Not just with the volume turned all the way down, I mean with sound actually disabled in the prefs or in your device manager if the game has no such option).
Turns out your X-Fi sound board
is a software codec, not a dedicated sound card. This means that if the game suddenly has to add another 20 channels of polyphony or something, that's a big dump on your CPU, which will look and test
exactly like your CPU is too slow, but in reality just getting
a relatively inexpensive hardware-based sound card would fix it.
Keep us posted?
--Patrick
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