My new gaming/HTPC rig - comments & advice welcomed - Page 3

They are legitimate items, just not official microsoft items. Check the hologram on the bottom, if it has one, lot of them have a different hologram.

The clone doesn't detect and install drivers properly. It's a pain in the butt to own and use because of this. Buy the real one with the controller bundle.

Macks - Daver removed his link. Now you are the one sharing the link to the fake dongle, after telling him not to do that.

I was tempted to leave it in b/c it provided some context. I have removed it now though.

The biggest issue is that they sell them like they are the genuine Microsoft one. Looks like Daver might have got a real one though, lucky.

I would if they updated to the new transformer pad.
But I don't know if I've ever used the pad on a pc.

Windows 8 - SSD - World of warcraft, Firefox, mpc, and steam open.



Apologies for hijacking.

Your Cached is really low. I'm guessing the Up Time (CPU page) on this machine is less than an hour? It takes Windows a while to load stuff in, as it tries really hard to not effect your current experience by precaching for your future experience. Also, how old is the Windows install? It takes a couple weeks for Windows to get a good idea of what you use, and a good month or two to get a serious precache going.

Check again in a couple hours to see what your Cached climbs to. I'm usually at 10GB within the hour, stabilizing at 20GB after a couple.

That was about 20 hours as I had to restart for some windows updates. When I mentioned it was 4.4gb in an earlier post, it had been up for weeks. This computer is around 2 months old now.

Was it a fresh Windows 8 install or an upgrade from Windows 7? Is WOW literally the only game you ever play on it? Were you originally on an HDD then moved the install over to an SSD? I'm trying to find somewhere along the way that SuperFetch had opportunity to get confused...

Such a low Cached number is not normal. Windows should really want to chew through a good portion of your ram caching things. Doing nothing special, tweaking zero Windows 8 settings, and just giving Windows a bunch of ram to do whatever it wants with, I'm sitting here at 17.2GB cached at the moment. It's been this way on every machine I've run with every revision of the OS since Vista's launch. In fact, this is the first time I've ever managed to actually exceed what precaching wants to eat.

As an experiment, pull all your ram, shuffle it around, and put two random sticks back in running on 16GB for a bit. You may also want to run Windows Memory Test / Memtest86 somewhere in there as well. Windows may have decided that your 8-16GB stick is busted, so is also ignoring your 16-24GB and 24-32GB stick as a result. Drop back to default clocks as well as part of your exploration.

Fresh install of Windows 8 Pro on a vertex 4. I play many other games. I actually just managed to get to 5gb used running steam, foobar, utorrent, firefox with many tabs open, notepad(lols), and 2 instances of WoW.

I've also ran Memtest86 and intelburntest when I first OC'd it. I could drop my CPU clocks back to default for the hell of it. My DDR3-2400 is runnin at default everything already.

"Fresh install of Windows 8 Pro on a vertex 4"

I don't know what to tell you then. Windows should certainly be caching a lot more. Looking around at all four of my Windows 8 machines, my 32GB box is at 17GB cached with 8GB free. My 6GB box is at 0MB free with 4GB cached. My girl's 8GB machine is at 2GB free with 4GB cached, but that Windows install is only a couple days old. All three of those are running SSDs for the OS drive with HDDs for data drives.

Booting up my 8GB Mac Mini, it capped out at 2.0GB cached within 15 minutes. That machine has literally had Windows 8 installed on it, then never been booted back out of OSX since Windows' installation. Your machine that is used for many things often is acting like my "never used" Mac Mini installation. Something is very wrong, but I do not know what to tell you outside of the troubleshooting that I pointed you to earlier.

Now that I've run around the house looking at Task Manager on all these machines, I've noticed that my main machine is reporting a super-low memory clock. I had always just assumed Windows 8 was using the bus-clock instead of the labeled effective-clock, but everything else is reporting memory speed that's on the label. Off to do some troubleshooting myself!

EDIT: Mac is at 2.7GB after 30 minutes.

EDIT 2: I even pulled my 3GB Windows 7 laptop out of the closet. That thing even precached 1.7GB before running out of ram to use.
Edited by darklordjames - 3/17/13 at 1:02am

Sorry to butt in, but I'm curious about this too.

Here's mine with Borderlands 2, Firefox and Origin running in forground, around 15 minutes after booting:



Am I missing pre-caching too? Is there something we need to do to activate pre-caching?

If you're playing a game, then that looks about right after 15 minutes. See what it looks like in an hour.

Ah yes, you are correct sir:

So now the next time you load BLT it will come up faster. Any other games that you regularly play will also come up faster with that 13GB cache than they would have 15 minutes after boot like your last screenshot showed. You'll also notice that evey drop of your ram is used up with no fourth section to that Memory Composition graph like there was in the first screenshot.

Cache is still lost in S2 or S3 sleep isn't it?