I've been having a problem for a long time where SC2 will freeze periodically then quickly catch up. It happened rarely enough that it's been very hard to trouble shoot. Then Diablo III came out, and I noticed that the same thing is happening all the time. This allowed me to gain some more info and rule some things out, so I want to try and trouble shoot this thing again.
Symptoms
All animations freeze. Sometimes sound even glitches (short stutter loop) if the freeze is very bad.
I have tried diagnosing with Windows perfmon, looking at several performance metrics, and I think I finally narrowed the problem down to "Avg Disk Queue Length" (ADQL). What happens is the CPU usage tends to drop and ADQL skyrockets. I had a friend with a very similar setup to mine monitor this, and these spikes never happen for him.
Here is an example of some gameplay with the perfmon graphs on screen.
Bad freezes happen at 0:30, 1:00, and 5:00, for example:
Hardware
CPU: i5-2500K Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD4-B3 Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws - Memory - 8 GB : 2 x 4 GB - DDR3 - 1600 MHz Hard Drive: Crucial C300 RealSSD 128 GB OS: Windows 7 Professional, 64 bit Graphics: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 x 2 (Crossfire) Peripherals: Razer Death Adder mouse. Steel Series 7H USB headset. Steel Series 6G V/2 keyboard
Things I've tried
I've been trying to fix this problem for about 6 months, so I've tried a lot of things:
(1) Disabled Cross-Fire (2) Physically removed 2nd graphics card (3) Replaced graphics card with my old GeForce 9800 GTX+ (used to run SC2 just fine) (4) Replaced graphics card with a GTX 580. (5) Formatted my SSD and reinstalled Windows 7 (6) Ran with nothing but D3 installed. (7) Updated to latest chipset and other drivers (8) Enabled AHCI and reformatted/reinstalled Windows 7 again. (9) Uninstalled Razr Deathadder drivers and tried using old MS Intellimouse (10) Uninstalled Steel Series 7H drivers and tried running without using the USB sound card. (11) Ran memtest86+ (pass) and also even tried swapping out my memory for a friend's memory. (12) Put D3 on another hard drive that is not an SSD. (13) Set all D3 settings to lowest possible. (14) Updated my BIOS.
Results
None of those thing eradicated the problem. As I mentioned, the ADQL spikes make me think it's a disk access problem. But what is the root of this? I tried moving D3 to a non-SSD drive and the problem still exists. Though it feels different on the mechanical hard drive--rather than periodic long sharp freezes, there are periodic instances of a stuttered sequence of freezes.
I had something similar caused by being SSD my bootdisk. I am using now SATA2 ports with my SSD and everything is fine. Had my old HDD still in the rack so I could easily rule the SSD out.
Last edit: 2012-07-01 03:00:15
GWBuffalo United States. July 01 2012 09:57. Posts 230
On July 01 2012 02:20 LJ wrote: Is it possible the network connection could be causing this?
Nope. It's definitely not this. I disconnected my modem, ran SC2 campaign as guest, and the freezes still happened once in a while. Definitely not network related.
On July 01 2012 02:59 CyTruS wrote: I had something similar caused by being SSD my bootdisk. I am using now SATA2 ports with my SSD and everything is fine. Had my old HDD still in the rack so I could easily rule the SSD out.
Do you mean that the SSD being your bootdisk was the problem, or that just having games on the SSD was the problem?
Do you mean that the SSD being your bootdisk was the problem, or that just having games on the SSD was the problem?
The started game was always on the bootdisk, whether its HDD or SSD, so can't say for sure. I had sc2 installed on both, SSD and HDD, and it only happend when booted the SSD on SATA3 and started sc2 off there. My freezes however required a restart as it did not recover like in your case. So could be a different cause.
from the data you provided I strongly suspect the SSD or SATA controller. have you tried another SATA Port generation ? lookout for the known lpkm/ssd issue ? another sata driver, marvell or intel ? updating crucial firmware ? updating mobo driver fw (u probably did already) ? Another bootdrive SSD with installed d3 ? (or HDD bootdrive w/ d3) Another mobo ? (cables ?)
I'm experiencing the same exact problem as the OP. We have pretty much an identical build, including the SSD, Processor, Mobo, and Video cards (I have a single XFX 6870).
Even when idling I'm experiencing high spikes in ADQL. While gaming, in any game, SC2, LoL, D3 - I experience the occasional lock up of video, while sound continues and sometimes loops. It lasts maybe 2-3 seconds.
I've reinstalled the games, ran them off of both drives. Clean installed all drivers. I even thought it was audio related, which apparently it is not. I'm going to go ahead and try to swap it from a SATA2 Port to a SATA3 and see what happens.
So OP, I think I fixed it. I had to reformat today after my SATA port swapping shenanigans.
I updated the bios on the Crucial SSD to revision 7. Also, before I installed windows, I reset the motherboard bios back to the optimized defaults. From there I then selected the harddrive as AHCI as well as selected the SATA3 AHCI.
Went about installing drivers and I have no problems in league. I'm installing SC2 and D3 now, so we'll see. But my ADQL doesn't jump at all now in league.
Edit: Didn't fix it. After a couple of days of playing, it's back. It has to be from some driver install, or something.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/YnrRh.png)
