1066? 800? eh?

[TdC]

I dunno mate, how about the 3dmark you can download from the futuremark webby? Mine will prolly be slow as well as I'm not goin g to reinstall as it's too much hassle
as to the delivery, packet tracking still says it's en route for delivery, but I just know they're going to fail for today It's always that way when you're waiting :/

 

[Cyradix]

heh, I'll let you know when the new machine is up and running

 

[TdC]

I just know they're going to fail for today

zomg! it's here! it's here!!!

how quick I was, to judge the failure rate of couriers

 

[TdC]

right all seems well. just about to swap the drives over. wish me luck!

 

[Cyradix]

And there was silence....
You do realise you will not notice a speed difference while watching porn right?

 

[TdC]

yes, there's silence :/

the thing's not working: it remains dead when I hit power-on, no leds, no fans, no nothing. should have guessed, because it came together so easilly hehe. anyway, I had to leave off working on the troubleshooting because I had to get the shopping in, which is bugging me because as a slightly autistic geek I have to work on it, but I can't atm because I'm making dinner. The compulsion to just stop dinner and fiddle with the computer is awesome, dude o0

 

[TdC]

well, this is certainly going swimmingly: first it didn't work, then I replaced the 8 pin molex connected to the gfx card with a different one, and then it worked, doze booted, detected all kinds of new hardware and all seemed well. then I rebooted, and then doze refused to boot with a "hal missing or corrupted" error. now i'm doing a recovery boot of the cdrom.

woop woop :/

 

[TdC]

wellp, I've managed to fix the missing or corrupted hal.dll with an expand <cdromdrive>\i386\hal.dl_, but now it's bitching that xposkrnl.exe or whatever is missing or corrupted. I'll give that a go, and if it keeps on moaning then I guess a reinstall will be in order :/

 

[TdC]

quad post madness! how.....fitting :/

whellp, windows is working again for what it's worth, and while the BIOS, windows itself and cpuz all agree that I do indeed have a quad core CPU, windows is most certainly only seeing one of the cores.....sooooo after all my hard work getting the system back up and running I'm going to reinstall. which ofc I should have done in the first place, because contrary to the hordes of people who can carelessly continue on their first ever install, it's never ever worked properly for me. Ah well.

 

[Kryten]

Teeds, can I assume you've done the unthinkable and tried repairing your previous windows installation from the old system? :|
That's gonna cause all sorts of problems from the off, even after repairs and driver replacements you've still got an OS full of unnecessary files and general crud that will only slow matters down.
If that's the case I strongly suggest you get everything backed up and do a fresh install, you'll probably find it all works swimmingly well, either from XP or Vista.

I'm starting to wonder about what you plugged into your graphics card though - I hope you mean 6 pin - the 8pin connector that looks rather annoyingly similar with the same coloured cables is meant for the motherboard (although your board only has a 4 pin for the same purpose). I don't want to make you sound silly or anything but have to check because they're wired up a bit differently and it might have caused some damage if that's the case.

 

[TdC]

well, atm I am watching doze reinstall :/

I'm guessing the problem lies somewhere in the fact that the computer being upgraded to a quad was once a uni-core, though that doesn't explain why XP decided to forget all about ACPI. the hal became corrupted just after I'd rebooted after installing the latest nVidia driver for the 8800, and doze refused to start. To fix this, I went into the XP cdrom's recovery console mode, and just re-expanded the hall.dll, and afterwards the ntoskrnl.exe file, though after this there was no sign of acpi at all any more and the computer had to be turned off by hand, another side effect of not having it.

anyhoo, this morning i thought I'd fix it by adding the halmacpi.dll file off the cdrom, but to no avail: there was no power management and no extra cores worse luck. After some googling I found that at least 2003 server certainly doesn't like you messing about with the hal, though they can write XP pro on the list too imo. It seems that when windows chooses a hal for you at install time, or if you sysprep an install you can do it too, but it will only work at intall time. ho hum too bad for little me


oh yeh, and the plug that went into the gfx card was a fitting plug that came out of the PSU, however the system would not boot with that in the card. as I have one of those psu's where you can plug in extra cables, I just plugged another cable in with a fitting taht would fit the gfx card, and it worked. I'm thinking that -either the first cable was not the correct voltage/amp for whatever reason, or -the cable itself is faulty, or -it actually didn't fit and I failed to notice for some reason.
Not too sure, but at least it works now though

 

[Kryten]

I agree, it's a pain in the arse at the best of times, Window's handling of a HAL isn't ideal in my opinion but works for the majority. Start fiddling around with laptops on docking stations or multiple configuration systems and things get a lot more complicated and less stable, even with so called "hardware profiles".

Hopefully an entire reinstall will sort it out, if not give us a poke, sure something can be sorted out :/

Might be worth resetting bios to factory defaults if all else fails?

 

[TdC]

cheers mate I actually did flash the bios of the gigabyte P35C-DS3R to the latest one I could find (last week's offering iirc), in a vain hope that could possibly help sort things, but the mobo is made to support quads and so I was clutching at straws I guess. anyway,the BIOS hasn't been tweaked too much, other than going in to see if it detected everything correctly.

before I flashed it, I did have to tell it to run the cpu's FSB at 266, and match the ram up or it wouldn't go to 1066MHz, but after the flash I didn't have to tell it that again, and there are actually more functions available to me now, for when I try to beat Jupitus and Cyradix at overclocing the cpu

 

[Kryten]

Fair play
Set up my brothers system on the same base - P35-DS3 and a Q6600, had to upgrade the bios on that first too just to be on the safe side, but it worked flawlessly afterwards - that was on an entirely fresh windows installation though.

 

[TdC]

yeah, I expect this one to do the same after a fresh install. I dunno, perhaps it was asking a lot of windows to survive a switch from an Asus nForce4 based mobo / AMD fx57 cpu to a Gigabyte Intel based mobo / Intel quad core cpu, I do realise that, but when it did start up, XP did detect all the changes, and installed everything needed. It was only after the reboot that stuff went pear shaped

 

[TdC]

yay, as expected, it now works perfectly. my evening will now be filled with installing stuff. as is, the system seems faster than Wij running to the loo after an all you can eat curry fest!

 

[Chronictank]

Ok, so what benchmarking do you want to use? Mine will probably be slower atm as I am sure I have lots of unnecessary processes running

Personally my box of tricks includes
CPU and Memory
CPU-Z - get the settings and check your changes have gone through
CPUID
Orthos - Quick tool when incrementing to check for stability and temperatures
techPowerUp! :: Download Orthos Stress Prime 2004
Prime 95 - Stability test for CPU, remember to run 4 instances of this you basically just assign one instance to each of the 4 cores and run them at the same time to give the cpu a good hammering when you are done tweaking, 8 hr prime is usually what is considered stable
Prime95 - 24.14 Download - EXTREME Overclocking
Intel Thermal Analysis Tool - check for stability and temps, designed to shoot your cpu temp up quickly
techPowerUp! :: Download Intel Thermal Analysis Tool

Throttlewatch is also a good program to make sure your CPU isn't throttling because you exceed the temp limit

When you get to memory tweaking

memtest - to check for errors when playing with memory before you even get into windows
Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool
SuperPi - benchmarking to test for performance gain when playing with the more detailed memory settings
SuperPI - 1.1e Download - EXTREME Overclocking
SiSoftware Sandra - benchmark memory bandwidth to give a before and after picture to see how much you have improved the settings
SiSoftware Zone

graphics card
Graphics wise because i am on vista 64 its a bit limited
GPU-Z - check gfx settings have applied properly
techPowerUp! :: Downloads
Rivatuner - overclock the gfx card
RivaTuner
Ati Tool - to check for gfx errors
ATITool - Overclocking utility for ATI and NVIDIA cards
Crysis Benchmark Tool - benchamark gfx on something more demanding than 3dmark, if it doesnt crash on crysis maxed out it is unlikely to crash
Benchmark tool: Crysis Benchmark Tool 1.05 Final download from Guru3D.com
Crysis SP Demo: Crysis Single-player Demo download from Guru3D.com


General use, checks both cpu and gpu
3dmark06 - benchmarking tool for gfx and cpu
Futuremark

 

[Kryten]

Nice little compilation, some useful apps there, most are vital for day to day reporting - CPUZ/GPUZ are certainly a pair of apps I refer to daily.

3DMark as we all know is generally best avoided unless you just want a Yoda/Vader penis-saber fight.

Crysis, as shit as the game might be will stress even the best system beyond limits and is a great benchmark - certainly one I'd trust over the likes of 3DM.

I think SuperPi is probably the most invaluable tool for processor overclocking, theres a patched version for multiple core processors I believe - or are we still having to run it with affinity?

Either way, great post - +rep provided

 

[Chronictank]

I think SuperPi is probably the most invaluable tool for processor overclocking, theres a patched version for multiple core processors I believe - or are we still having to run it with affinity?

Either way, great post - +rep provided

I am not too sure, i am still running them manually so i am sure its being done properly , unfortunately i dont really have the time to redo things because of buggy versions so i didn't bother this time around.
I may have a dig about when i go quad core though as 4 super pi compares is a bit much as their site is dog slow lately lol

 

[TdC]

nice list there mate. I knew some, but tbh that frontend bench to the crysis demo may well be a decent standard. As Kryt says, 3dmark seems to have devolved into a "my epeen is 0.0000000003mm bigger than yours" fest

 

[Ch3tan]

You don't need memtest as Orthos can stress memory or cpu only. Super Pi mod is the version for dual core I believe.

 

[Chronictank]

You don't need memtest as Orthos can stress memory or cpu only. Super Pi mod is the version for dual core I believe.

Orthos is nowhere near as accurate as memtest to be fair

 

[Ch3tan]

Meh, when I was overclocking and putting my system together it was recommended by the guys on the ocuk forums. It stressed my memory fine, and showed the faults. I'm not sure how it can not be accurate. It simply tests if the memory gets the math right.

 

[Chronictank]

Meh, when I was overclocking and putting my system together it was recommended by the guys on the ocuk forums. It stressed my memory fine, and showed the faults. I'm not sure how it can not be accurate. It simply tests if the memory gets the math right.

I didnt say it wasn't accurate , if it was inaccurate noone would use it
But its nowhere near as thorough(sp?) as memtest
I had some memory running in a old a64 and it was 8 hrs orthos stable, yet it failed memtest because the memory was undervolted so when it reached a certain level of power needed it would fall over
Orthos is fine but if you want to say with some commitment that you have a stable setup a orthos test alone is not enough to verify it
However orthos is very useful if you are using that memory tweaker (like the a64 one when opterons were all the rage), i would add it to the list but i cant find it on my pc or remember its name

 

[TdC]

heh I've been fiddling. the cpu is now running at 3Ghz, with everything else about as standard as I can get it.

 

[Kryten]

Nice.
I still find it amusing that 2 bios options can produce an overclock from 2.4ghz to 3ghz without changing anything else at all.
Gotta love these chips

 

[TdC]

600Mhz for free eh. I'm semi convinced that it can go further, but I'm not that pressed to find out. I'm not after the last 3% I can get out of it, whereas an insta-25% jump is indeed worth the effort tbh

 

[Cyradix]

Got my new machine up and running too.
The Corsair 4GB DDR2 1066 kit seems to be in very short supply here in Belgium at the moment, so I've installed my old 2 GB DDR2 667 memory until it arrives.

It can already handle anything I throw at it at high details except Crysis
Runs fine for a while but runs out of memory and starts to swap to disk.
The memory upgrade should fix that I hope

Haven't done any OC'ing except for the Asus AI suite thingy. It adjusts FSB and multiplier on the fly depending on load.
When idle it sits at 1600 mhz (266 x6) and on heavy loads it overclocks to 2600 MHz (about 290 x9)

 

[Kryten]

Don't hold up too much hope for stopping the swapping in Crysis - it's not your machine being pants, it's the game. It looks pretty but that's it's only plus - a pretty looking system stresser. No game, not particularly well put together, buggy - but naturally it will help having some more ram.

 

[Panda On Smack]

Do you guys use SpeedStep?

currently my machine goes between 6 and 9 multiplier depending on load