Judders and stutters with an 8800gts

[Jet Boot Jack]

Hello all

Im having an all around issue that affect every game I try, at least to some extenct-
in the light cases Im talking about judders- when textures look shaky when they are moving across the screen (mouse movement or keyboard's, doesnt matter), in the severe cases- usually on more demanding games- I experience a kind of a frame-skip stutter which is especially evident when I strafe near walls, walk straight to them or look down on the ground when Im moving forward.
If it was a movie- the camera is zooming in, but in the editing room they will cut in intervals so youll have zoom-cut-zoom-cut horror-movie effect. I hope it helps to explain what is the frame-skip stutter.

Oblivion
HL2:1
Stalker
Belongs to the second group and-
Thief:DS
CoC
RO
are just juddery.

My specs-
Videocard: LEADTEK PCI-E PX 8800GTS 320M
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+
Mainboard: ASUS M2N-E 570
Memory: Corsair DDR2 2GB 533MHz
Soundcard: SoundMax int.
PSU: ZM600-HP

I just did a fresh and clean install of XP- it didnt solve my issues.

Things Ive covered (brace yourselves, the list is long):
-Monitor the temps in-games with Rivatuner: 65c (on load, stock speeds) which everyone sais its fine for the 8800's. CPU temps- 51-53c on load.
- installed the AMD Dual Core optimizer
- Clean installed (drivercleaner.pro) different dispaly drivers
- installed AMD drivers
- Updated mobo dirvers (in short- all drivers are updated and clean installed)
- Disabled sound ingames to see if the onboard card is causing the troubles
- Different sizes of the page file (from 200M to 3500)- each time defragging the HDD to prevent fragmented page file
- Reduced RAM latencies
- Tried Vista in a dual boot
- Reduced ingame settings (goes without saying- but I already got that idea several times)
- Tried every tweak available (mostly from K. Ghazi but not only)- game specific or windows tweak.
- Ran 3 different anti-virus scans, checked for spyware with 2
- Cleaned the registry with Abexo and cc
- Tried the streamline 3.0 mod for Oblivion (which helped many others)
- defraged the HDD (with DiskKeeper and ultimate defrag)
- Tried an LCD and just bought a new CRT- 3 monitors in all shows the same performance- not a monitor issue
- Checked the BIOS- cool & quiet and AMD live! are disabled (all the other performance optimizations for the BIOS- my version doesnt show them- tried to update the BIOS- turned I have the newest version)


Sorry for the lengthy post
Id appreciate your thoughts
JBJ

[pharoah]

that power supply that is the zalman modular correct?if it is double check all your power connections.the modular cables can work themselves loose.

[Jet Boot Jack]

Tried it just now and there is no change, thanks for the advice.

Another thing I noticed just now is that it happens even within windows.
If I drag a window on the screen it judders in the fringes, like an image tearing.

[pharoah]

what drivers are you useing for that 8800?if its the newest out now try these drivers 158.22

[Jet Boot Jack]

My system is nearly five months old so the 158.12 were my previous drivers untill recently, and they showed the same issue and worse.
The 162.18 did wonders to STALKER in my rig and got rid of almost all of the HDD and RAM hitches, that were really terrible before hand.
Lol, in fact I didnt even know that Stalker was suffering from the frame skip stutter for all the major stutters and low fps that had been covering it.

Im almost certain its a hardware issue cos I tried just about everything in the software level.

[pharoah]

well first off run memtest let that cycle through all the tests at least twice.if it comes back with no errors run a scandisk to check your hard drive.

[Jet Boot Jack]

Ok, Im gonna run memtest ASAP but is the free edition good enough? And why does it require a floppy (which I dont have) or a boot cd?

Speaking of RAM, I have two sticks of 1G in slots 1 and 3 according to cpu-z. Are those locations good?

[pharoah]

for dual channel memory thats where ya put em.memtest boots from a cd or floppy.it does not run inside windows,and free is fine thats what i use.

[Jet Boot Jack]

Memtest ran twice and no errors found, I guess we can rule out faulty RAM(?).
HDD scan is the one you scheduel after a boot with cmd/ chkdsk r/f, right? If thats the one Ive done that a few days ago and all was well.

[pharoah]

try prime 95 let it run at least an hour.this will test cpu stability prime95 download

[Jet Boot Jack]

I let it run for two hours and no errors found.

[pharoah]

is anything in your system overclocked?

[Jet Boot Jack]

Nope. Only stock speeds fer me. Cept for the RAM but its just downclocked a bit so I could relax the latencies.

[pharoah]

how much did you slow down that ram?

[Jet Boot Jack]

From 533Mhz to 400 and I meant, of course, to tighten the latencies, not to relax them, sry.
My FSB or rather HTT before any multiplier is 200Mhz so I have nothing to gain by increasing RAM clock beyond 400.

In that way I could get 3-3-3-9-11 instead of 5-5-5-11-15.

TBH I didnt see any palpable improvement but Im sure it didnt hurt either- all I did was done according to the SPD- and my issues were the same before and after.

[pharoah]

thats cool i knew what ya meant try them back at stock speed and latency's.see if that makes any difference.

edit:my bad i see you said the same results either way.

[pharoah]

can you provide a link to the exact memory you have?