[Solved] StarCraft 2 pausing [X58 chipset, SATA AHCI issues]

when i'm playing the single player campaign the game would occasionally pause up and pause up really bad, up to the point where i think it would freeze but it does not
also i notice intermittent pausing, half a second to a second
it's annoying but it doesn't impede gameplay and it doesn't matter what's happening on screen, could be an intense battle or i could be mining
i play everything on the ultra setting and it is very playable, very good fps but i don't understand the really bad pausing
here's my specs:

Intel i7 960 @ 3.2ghz (NO OC)
Asus P6T6 WS Revolution Motherboard
Corsair 850HX PSU
6GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 1333
eVGA Nvidia Geforce 250GTS 1GB (will upgrade this later)
WD Velociraptor 300GB 10k RPM HDD (Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate boot drive)
WD Caviar Black 2TB 7.2k RPM HDD (StarCraft is installed on here)

my guess is it's my hdd but i play much more higher requirement games and i don't experience this (all my games are installed on this drive)
my hdd indicator blinks like crazy, sometimes staying solid until the lag is alleviated
defragging didn't do nothing
btw the 2TB iteration of this hdd is very fast, almost as fast as my 10k rpm one, according to tomshardware and was a recommended buy

 

I just posted a new FAQ I am working on. This may be the nVidia overheating issue. The FAQ explains something you can try, editing variables.txt.

 

i don't think so
gpu-z reports high 60's degrees when playing sc2, fan speed gets to ~45%
when i run the final fantasy 14 benchmark it's mid to high 70's in complete smoothness, no stuttering, pausing and i even looped it

 

I noticed some pausing, too, when playing SC2 campaign while logged in to Battle.net. No such pauses when playing in offline/guest mode (aside from autosaving). That coupled with loading times make me sorely tempted to buy SSD's.

 

Hmm, if you had an ATI card, I'd say use the new 10.7a beta drivers. What nVidia drivers are you using?

 

the most current 258.96
so u think it's my vid card and not my hdd?
but i don't notice any framerate drop, just sudden death pausing
it's a consistent framerate all the time

 

My vote's on the HDD, too. When you get pauses at the same time your HDD is thrashing while all other factors seem normal, that points to the HDD being the culprit.

 

but it's a brand NEW hdd
i got it the same day SC2 came out
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-3.html
it's basically second to none when compared to my 10k rpm velociraptor, in some tests it beats my velcoiraptor
there's no error's on the disk and i did a full format MBR, NTFS

 

I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's a bottleneck. The primary issue with mechanical drives is access times and random read/write. Even if it goes up to 200MB/s sequential, random read/write operations still don't come anywhere near close to good SSD's.

 

I'd try defraging the hard drive, but don't use Windows defrag, download a trail of PerfectDisk. Before defraging, i would manually set your page file size to something around 4-6GB. The best part about Perfect Disk is offline defrag, which can defrag system files that are normally in use, and most of all, your pagefile and perhaps your hibernate file if you have that enabled.

 

i'll just live with it for the time being

 

Only other thing i could think of it.. its just a kink that needs worked out, or that you somehow disabled multiple cores in the BIOS (which I highly doubt, you seem to know your way around a system).

Really, I don't have any other clues.

 

nope, all 4 cores are running
i can tell when i monitor the temps

 

Is it this at 1:29? (this is in multiplayer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EfLUBAiQMI

 

yup exactly but in single player

 

I heard there's an offline mode for single player where you don't have to be connected to the internet. Have you tried that? Does it do the same thing? (You might want to actually try going into offline mode and then disconnecting your internet.)

 

that's the guest mode

 

I think he's asking, does the hitching occur in Guest mode as well? May be on to something there (such as needing an updated network driver) if it only occurs when connected to Battle.net.

 

If it's because of the network, I'm betting the problem's more on Blizz's end than on the user side. Actually, I was thinking it might be a combination of both Battle.Net and HDD. It does seem as if the local machine connects with Blizzard servers every now and then to synchronize. That or maybe someone started watching YouTube videos or torrent downloads while you were playing.

Mind you, my pauses weren't as bad as shown on the video. They're more like just a second or two.

 

Exactly. There's a LOT of copy protection in Starcraft 2 and some of it involves constantly connecting to battle.net. That's why there's a lot of lag on battle.net. If you can be certain that you can play offline without your cable even plugged into your computer and there's never lag, then its not your computer.