Paul wrote:
In article , "Johnny"
wrote:
This is a repost as the other didn't appear so if it pops up
twice, sorry.
I posted a while ago the dismal performance I'm getting with
this board and a Prescott 3.0ghz cpu with 2 x 512K crucial
2-2-2-5 ddr400 memory. I've noticed the passmark cpu tests give
significant differences but not entirely sure if that's not
unusual - is it possible the cpu or motherboard is faulty
even though the system works albeit relatively slowly. This
thing has me totally flummoxed and perplexed. I've swapped out
a power supply from another machine with no change (don't know
why but thought it might be a power issue). I haven't got access
to another 800FSB cpu to compare and not sure I'll get any sense
out of the tech support as it is actually working which is
frustrating in the extreme. If I select turbo mode the board dies -
it literally blacks out completely requiring a hard power off
to get bios back with the post message that overclocking failed???
I'm really getting ****ed off with this now - is it likely the
cpu or mainboard are faulty or just a combo of the two, who knows?
Are you talking about Passmark giving different results from
repeating the Passmark test ? Or are you talking about comparing
Passmark from your current machine, to a previous slower machine,
or comparing to the Futuremark database ?
I'm comparing the exact same machine with repeated runs and differing
results within a short time period.
With respect to your turbo mode setting, turbo requires the use
of CAS2 memory, which you've got. So, it should have worked.
A "black out" is what happens with CAS2.5 or CAS3 memory, when
turbo is selected.
The memory is 2-2-2-5 Corsair (not crucial).
How many ways are there to make a slow processor:
1) Internal CPU cache has ECC protection. If the internal cache
has bad bits in it, a single bit in error can be corrected
by the ECC checker, but at the price of extra cycles to
attempt to correct the data.
I don't know whether Memtest86 can detect this kind of
fault or not.
I have a sinking feeling I'm going to need a like for like swap out
comparison which I can't get yet, although I have a couple of PC's to make
so might well get the opportunity although I obviously want to avoid
replicating this problem in their machines so may well choose a different
manufacturers board.
2) Intel processors have thermal throttle. In the case of the
Prescott, the processor reduces the internal instruction rate
when the die temperature reaches 70C. If the CPU die is not
making good contact with the heat spreader on the top of the
chip, it might be possible for the die to be hot, yet the
heatsink won't be that hot. There is a thermal paste inside
the processor, between the top of the die and the heat
spreader, and if that paste was missing, your performance
could drop.
The CPU temperature hovers around 40C tonight it is 37-38. I'm always
careful to spread a thin but effective layer of thermal contact grease on
the cpu heat sink, I removed it to check the grease was where it needed to
be and doing its job, the coverage was complete (at least visually) and the
temperature monitors seem to support that. I should say I have built a good
number of PC's so i'm not a total novice. I always check carefully the cpu
is properly seated and gripped before fitting the heatsink etc. I don't
normally have any issues at all that aren't inherent faults in the hardware.
3) ACPI has an option to reduce the processor clock rate. But
I doubt that is doing anything in this case. ACPI might
use this option, when the processor is idle, to reduce the
processor operating temperature. During benchmarks, the OS
would turn this off again.
I don't think, at this point, temperature is an issue in this instance.
4) Many Northbridge chips have throttle capabilities for the
DIMMs. See section 5.5 (pg.140) of this document, for features
of the 875 Northbridge regarding protecting the DIMMs against
overheat. I doubt Asus bothered with thermal sensors next to
the DIMMs, but there is still the software method:
http://developer.intel.com/design/ch...s/25252502.pdf
"The number of hexwords transferred over the DRAM interface
are tracked per row. The tracking mechanism takes into account
that the DRAM devices consume different levels of power based
on cycle type (i.e., page hit/miss/empty). If the programmed
threshold is exceeded during a monitoring window, the activity
on the DRAM interface is reduced. This helps in lowering the
power and temperature."
5) You could be experiencing an "interrupt storm". There have been
motherboards in the past, where a particular PCI chip on the
motherboard keeps asserting its IRQ, causing the interrupt
handler to be invoked needlessly, and sucking performance from
the machine. Looking at performance counters might identify such
a problem. (There is one report in Google against the Promise
20378, so see if you can run with that chip disabled, then
run Passmark again.)
All integrated devices turned off for test purposes - promise controller,
firewire, audio, network. Left serials and parallel enabled.
6) The PCI Latency Timer setting could influence performance.
A setting lower than 16, could make I/O slow, but the BIOS
on this machine doesn't allow such low settings. Lower settings
promote "fairness" between peripherals, so a sound card can
still get data while a disk drive is doing burst transfers.
A high setting might allow a better disk benchmark, at the
expense of general usability of the computer.
I haven't had too much luck using performance counters in Windows.
I've read that there are all sorts of fancy metrics in Windows, but
maybe you need a plugin/snapin to see them ? I still don't know
what the missing ingredient might be.
It may be easier to see some of these performance counters in
Linux.
The toughest part of your problem, will be finding baseline
numbers for exactly what your combo of hardware should be
doing. Does Futuremark collect enough data, to make sure
the BIOS settings that affect memory performance are the
same, when you compare to other hardware ? If Passmark is
not collecting info on whether PAT is enabled, for example,
that might make a difference to benchmarks.
I tried researching in two directions. I looked for benchmarks
that are a bit simpler than Passmark, and for the CPU, there
is the HINT benchmark. But all knowledge of it is gone from
the .gov site it was on, and even web.archive.org has no
copy of the site. I also tried to find info on performance
counters, and didn't have much luck there, either. Intel
has a $$$ program called Vtune, which is a profiler used by
software developers, but that isn't free.
I was hoping by using free tools, we could compare machines,
and see if you really are slower than other comparable machine,
and what part of the machine is slower. Some things you can
try:
1) memtest.org has version 1.4 of memtest86 available. It is
presumably the same as the other versions, when it comes to
measuring bandwidth. I get L1=8KB=22940MB/s, L2=512KB=19571MB/s,
and main memory is 2955MB/s. Memtest claims PAT is enabled
on my machine. I have a 2.8C Northwood, 2x512MB 2-2-2-6 RAM,
running at stock speed.
2) ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/ctiaw.zip
This runs from a DOS window, and reports a few settings.
It is a way to verify that PAT is enabled. Mine says "fully
enabled".
http://abxzone.com/forums/showthread...ighlight=ctiaw
It also reports two values at the top of the screen, the
"sleep" speed and the "load" speed. On my 2.8C, the values
reported are both close to 2800MHz. It seems other processors
are using different frequencies for this, but I don't know
why. It could be the ACPI throttle feature, not sure.
As for performance counters, booting a copy of Knoppix or some
other Linux distro, might give access to more info than you can
get easily from Windows. If I do "vmstat 5" in a console
window, it says I get exactly 1000 interrupts per second.
(The number will be related to clock tick interrupts, as in
this scenario the system was idle, except for vmstat running.)
If I had a defective 20378, that number would undoubtedly climb.
I don't know how much work it is to get Windows to display
the same stat, whether it is total interrupts, or interrupts
per peripheral device.
HTH,
Paul
Paul, first of all thanks for the help and taking the time to reply, it's
much appreciated. I'm using win2Kpro.
One example I noticed tonight is the CPU passmark suite of tests are all
roughly similar within fractions of a percent (i don't know how this
software rates in the scheme of things but it was readily available so i
used it) All except for the CPU integer math test which scored 170 mops then
a few seconds later scored 246.8 then a few seconds later scored 168 but it
doesn't repeat that pattern of higher then lower. All three scores well
below my other test machine running a 533fsb 2.8 ghz northwood on a P4PE
with ddr333 generic ram which scores 261 consistently. During this time
testing the prescott 3.0Ghz there is no change in monitored temperatures on
the P4P800-E. CPU = 37-38C Board = 29C.
this is what the
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/ctiaw.zip software reports
**** INTEL/AMD/VIA memory config info, c't/Andreas Stiller V2.7 June 03
****
Kernel Driver: WinNT DIRECTNT.SYS V01.09
Pentium 4,(0F34-00)ca 3274 MHz (sleep) 2999 MHz (load)
Bus Speed: max=200MHz, ratio=15 = 200 MHz
Hostdevice: (2570) Springdale i865 MCH, Vendor: (8086) Intel, Rev:0002h
----------------------------------------------------------------
Intel Springdale i865 MCH Rev:02: Bus:0, Device-Nr:0, Function:0
System Frequency : FSB533/133 MHz
Memory Frequency : DDR266/133 MHz (1:1)
IOQ Depth : 12 deep
Top of usable Memory : 1024.0 MByte
Extended SMRAM (Tseg) : disabled
Overflowdevice : disabled and unlocked, ID= 2576h, Rev: 2
Memory Delays Base Address : FECF0000 not prefetchable
CPU Parking : disabled
Memory : row0: 512 MByte/16 KB Pages
: row1: 512 MByte/16 KB Pages
DRAM-Channels : Dual Channel Linear, DDR
ECC & Refresh : Non-ECC, Refresh=7.8 µs
PAT-mode : (1) fully enabled
Active to Precharge Delay : 5 clocks .. 70 µs
Tcl - Trcd -Trp : 2.5-2-2 T (DRAM Clocks)
Memory Read Bandwidth : ca. 5715.6 MBytes/s, Cacheline size= 64
go on with CR
so it looks like the system and memory frequencies are set or operating
incorrectly at 5333FSB/266Mhz although the boards bios is autodetecting and
displaying 800FSB/400Mhz, this is surely the software not reading the system
settings correctly. Also the CAS 2.5 looks suspicious unless corsair are a
bunch of bandits. Selecting 2.0 in bios blacks out the board and gives the
overclocking failed message after hard reset.
memtest 1.4 gives the following info
Pentium 4 (0.09) 2999Mhz
L1 cache 16K 20969MB/s
L2 cache 1024K 18396MB/s
Memory 1023M 2928MB/s
Chipset : i848/i865 ECC disabled FSB199Mhz PAT disabled
RAM 199Mhz (DDR 398) CAS 2.5-2-2-5 Dual channel (128bit)1
test #6 moving inversions, 32bit reports 3 counts of an error at 130.1 MB
whether that is significant in relation to speed issues I doubt, although
have to say I wouldn't have expected to see any errors on new RAM.
I'm going to keep messing but I've had enough now tonight. Will give it a go
tomorrow evening, ******* computers.
Thanks,
J