i7-920 P6T Deluxe - slow (help / opinions)
I don't know if this is the right place to ask for some ideas but since there's a P6T thread I thought this might be the best place to start.
I finally took delivery of my i7 system. Currently on a budget so it's lean at the moment but I was surprised by my first impressions which is that it doesn't seem to run particularly fast. In fact my current Athlon 2800 XP is perkier in many respects.
This is what I've got as a basic setup:
P6T Deluxe rev 1.xx
i7-920
Asus ATI 4850 512MB
Corsair 2GB DDR3 1333
Hitachi 1TB SATA
Pioneer IDE DVD 216
Win XP Pro
Out of the box without loading anything the company that put it together loaded XP Pro, drivers and AVG.
The only thing I've done is test the HDD which appears to be reasonable when tested with HDtach - 100 Sequential and 270 burst. The reason I did this was that there are two areas which bothered me.
1) Clicking back and forward through folders there's about a half second delay often. Instantaneous on my old rig.
2) Emptying the recycle bin takes a LOT longer than my old rig. Too long for what's in there.
apart from this scrolling doesn't seem that smooth again compared to my rig nor does any of the visual updates appear any quicker.
I really expected a big improvement on my old system without overclocking. It should be noticeable but it isn't, it's pretty clunky and unimpressive.
BIOS currently is set up with default settings. I've installed the Asus utils and confirm clock is not running in powersaving mode, although what I'm describing wouldn't happen on a 1GHz system let alone 2.66GHz. No change before or after this step.
I've also re-loaded the drivers in case something got missed out - to no avail.
This is the first time I've felt that a new Winxp install wasn't perky and responsive.
Currently I'm not keen to start transferring my stuff over to this computer until I can be satisfied it's running ok. God knows what it'd be like once the registry grows.
None of the components including having only 2GB ram really explain what's happneing here.
My question would be, is there a feasible reason why this is happening with a bios in it's default setting?
Has anyone experienced a problem when building a similar system? Perhaps there's something about this Motherboard that needs tweaking before it starts to perform?
Is there a particular recommendation for checking this out with a utility that might point to the root of the problem (preferably a free one)?