Performance Issues and Crashing in Games

[devguy]

So, I've recently set up a hackintosh (iDeneb 1.6) on my PC. Overclock is stable from several hours of prime95 in windows, and CPUTest in Leopard. GPU is stable from FurMark in Windows and runs 3dMark06 great. Specs:

AMD Athlon 3200+ Venice @ 2.5Ghz

Asus K8N s754 (nForce3)

AMD 2600pro AGP 512mb DDR2 (flashed to just under XT speeds)

2x1GB PC3200 ~ 450-3-3-3-8-1T

Maxtor 100GB ATA/100 HDD

Samsung 616f ATAPI DVD-ROM

 

I used the 2600pro AGP drivers to enable QE/CI and they perform well with most 1080p MKV using VLC (so that is good).

 

Now, I have a couple of questions. First, I get really unimpressive performance on this machine. It does support SSE3 instructions but even surfing the web is a little laggy sometimes. Non-HD Flash video is acceptable when windowed. When in full-screen, I must disable hardware acceleration or it will crash. Without hardware acceleration, even non-HD flash is a slideshow in fullscreen. HTML5 video is also quite slow. Also, It seems that the chipset drivers (nforceATA) have abnormally high cpu-usage when doing any heavy I/O tasks (like around 30-50%). No SATA is used on this machine, and is disabled in the BIOS.

 

Also, when it comes to games, I have strange results. First, Halo works (updated to latest universal build), but performance is...strange. Indoors, it couldn't be better, but in most outdoor levels, my FPS tanks. This seems odd, considering PowerMac G4s with GeForce4 cards can run this fine. I'd like to run this game at 1920x1080p, but I get the exact same outdoor lagging even with everything on low at 800x600. In the before game launch settings, I have most things turned down low, and AA/AF set to off. Also, when I try to play any Half-life 2 games with Steam, the computer always freezes when I load the game. More specifically, I see the valve intro logo (the one with the guys head and a faucet knob), then I see the loading screen (all blurry) and I hear a ton of HDD activity, and then when it finishes (and the main menu should load), the computer hangs (everytime).

 

Next, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory crashes on load everytime. It hangs about 2 seconds into the intro video (and I cannot skip it). I originally thought I needed Rosetta to run this PowerPC game, but it never prompted me to install it, and one cannot just download Rosetta from Apple's website. Finally, XBMC is super (and randomly) crash prone. It usually works completely fine and then randomly crashes. The entire machine hangs, making the XBMC log less than helpful.

 

I appreciate any help. I've watched this forum a lot and have figured out mostly everything I need without asking dumb n00b questions (hopefully these aren't stupid questions ).