Slow amd opteron 148 performance

weaksauce

Regular
I've got an nfroce4 motherboard and 1gb ram. What's most anoying is that windows xp doesn't "float", it often doesn't recognize when you press a button or move the mouse over it, or try to make a window active, etc... Just plain bad, jerky performance in windows. I've go all the drivers. It also only rates at "2,65ghz" on sytemrequirementslab, altough it should be faster than a 3200+, it's an fx-51 ffs!

What's the problem?
 
My guess would be bad ram or a dying hard drive. Try a disk scan and check for bad sectors too while you're at it (schedule for a scan on the next boot-up, then go watch a movie)
 
Olright, the rig now looks like this:
MSI K8N NF4 platinum
4GB DDR400 kingston hyper X
Amd Opteron 148 (with zerotherm nirvana cooler, chassi has otherwise good ventilation)
7800GT ("Ultimate", an oc ed from asus)
Connected to HDTV through HDMI at 1920x1080.
Newly installed Vista ultimate, latest nvidia motherboard and gpu drivers from website...
(And a new 500gb sata drive)

Should this computer be able to play 720p smoothly? Would you be able to make it run 1080p well? What would you do, and why can I do neither?

Overclocking the CPU to anything worth mentioning has not gone well, can it be because of the motherboard, and may that also be the cause for the overall slower than atleast what I expected performance?
 
According to microsoft

Optimum Configuration
(to play 1080p video with 5.1 surround sound)
Windows XP
Windows Media Player 10
DirectX 9.0
1.8 GHz Intel Core Duo or higher processor (or equivalent);
3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or higher processor (or equivalent)
512 MB of RAM
128 MB video card
1920 x 1440 screen resolution
24-bit 96 kHz multichannel sound card
5.1 surround sound speaker system
 
Olright, the rig now looks like this:
MSI K8N NF4 platinum
4GB DDR400 kingston hyper X
Amd Opteron 148 (with zerotherm nirvana cooler, chassi has otherwise good ventilation)
7800GT ("Ultimate", an oc ed from asus)
Connected to HDTV through HDMI at 1920x1080.
Newly installed Vista ultimate, latest nvidia motherboard and gpu drivers from website...
(And a new 500gb sata drive)

Should this computer be able to play 720p smoothly? Would you be able to make it run 1080p well? What would you do, and why can I do neither?

Overclocking the CPU to anything worth mentioning has not gone well, can it be because of the motherboard, and may that also be the cause for the overall slower than atleast what I expected performance?

When I had my Opteron 185 (2.6GHz) with the 7900GT i could play anything on it with highest quality. 720p, 1080p, h264, mpeg2/4, VC-1 etc etc. Even on the CPU alone I never broke 85% on the most taxing. Well dunno I had a 40mbit mpeg2 video and it did only 7-15% on the system resources!

Even my A64 3200+ with the 7900Gt did the above with spare power.

My bet is that you might....

1) Install AMD optimiser driver to sync CPU cores

2) Disable any AMD power saving feature

3) Do a virus check

4) Check software installed, some AV/HIPS/FW software can cause delays in response

5) Do a hardware check, function, settings, BIOS, temp, if caps are leaking or infalted

6) I assume the OS is legal right? Some crack drivers or "pre-OS load BIOS hack" cracks can create serious problems.
 
your opteron is a dual core though, his is a single.
I have a 65nm sempron, 1.9GHz/256K L2 @ 2.4GHz (that should perform similar to the stock opteron 148), it plays 720p H264 with no problem (w/ a little bit of ffdshow processing). but maybe high bitrate 1080p H264 would kill it.
 
I made a typo there, this computer actually has a 9800gt, not 7800gt as I wrote. And it should have this all new amazing "PureVideo HD", which should offset some of the work from the CPU to the GPU, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't. I don't even know where this "PureVideo" is, how to turn it on and adjust it.

And also, how come it overclocks so poorly? It seems like I'm the only one who has failed to get it over 2.8ghz or something. I mean really I can barely go 216 on the fsb and then there's no noticable difference at all.

MAybe I should mention that even regular xvid rips get "fps drops". Although I do have the option "drop frames to sync audio" turned on, it shouldn't have to do that.
 
I just read opteron needs registered memory. What does that mean exactly? That it won't work well as in my case or that it won't work at all which is not my case and thus it doesn't actually need it? I also read it's like, what, 46 bit? This bit thing, is it only about how much memory the computer can have?

Also, read that purevideo is only for xp and not vista, where you should have powerdvd. Gonna try that. The DXVA support for mpc looks awesome too. There's hope!:smile:

4800+ is cheap as hell now though, if you can get it. Too bad it has only got half the l2 cache per core.
 
I just noticed the strangest thing. The gpu has taken one gb from the ram, so the gfx now has over 1900mb. This seems unneccesary, but I can't find anywhere to change it. The only thing I found close to it was some pci-e option I don't remember the name of, something with "payload", set at 4096mb, which I changed to 128mb (the smallest possible), but nothing changed.

By the way, I've now tried mpc-hc, and it's amazing. I fiddle around with a lot of different codec packs (coreavc, vista codec pack, cccp etc) and ac3filter, but in the end, it seems as if just the mpc-hc (x64) can run anything on it's own, and the cpu load rarely even surpasses 30%, even in 1080p. Although, even when the cpu never gets fully occupied, there is still some slowdowns, or jagging of the image (audio is always kept synched (without the option)). Is it the video, or can you do something about it?

Ok, being a slow thinker as I am, I just realized this slowdown in HD movies and regular SD videos is the same - not caused by underperforming hardware. I do think it has got to do with the data stream, althought not directly by the harddrive, as it is a new SATA disk from samsung. Can it be the motherboard, or it's disk drivers? Maybe it's the memory as there already something fishy with it? It scores quite low in the vista benchmark (memory operations), 4,0 (the computer I am sitting on right now has memory at the same speed but with higher latency, and it gets 4,5 (a64 3200+)), and sometime ago it underperformed greatly in comparison with similar memory in the SiS Sandra bench. Might this also be the motherboard or it's software? Anyone find this familiar?
 
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There is a performance penalty for using registered memory. Each read or write is buffered for one cycle between the memory bus and the DRAM, so the registered RAM can be thought of as running one clock cycle slower than equivalent unregistered DRAM
 
There is a performance penalty for using registered memory. Each read or write is buffered for one cycle between the memory bus and the DRAM, so the registered RAM can be thought of as running one clock cycle slower than equivalent unregistered DRAM

Great, so that also means I made the right memory purchase. It's got two sets of these:
http://www.kingston.com/hyperx/products/khx.asp
KHX3200AK2/2G 2GB 400MHz DDR Non-ECC CL2 (Kit of 2 - 1GB)

Registered memory is insanely expensive.
 
registered DDR1 memory is for socket 940 opteron ("real" opteron), and also for early Athlon FX which were rebranded Opteron ; but not for socket 939 opteron which are rebranded Athlon 64 w/ 1MB L2 or Athlon X2.
see, there's some weird branding! the current sempron with 512K L2 would warrant the Athlon 64 name too.

In the end, a s939 opteron only is a cherry-picked, good cbip (like the current low power athlon X2 series), and that's why overclockers would pick them.
 
registered DDR1 memory is for socket 940 opteron ("real" opteron), and also for early Athlon FX which were rebranded Opteron ; but not for socket 939 opteron which are rebranded Athlon 64 w/ 1MB L2 or Athlon X2.
see, there's some weird branding! the current sempron with 512K L2 would warrant the Athlon 64 name too.

In the end, a s939 opteron only is a cherry-picked, good cbip (like the current low power athlon X2 series), and that's why overclockers would pick them.

I and my $550 Opteron 175 purchased in November of 2005 take offense to your suggestion that it is not a "real" Opteron just because it is not SMP-capable and doesn't need slower RAM. Ok, I don't own that CPU anymore but it really was an outstanding chip for its time. 2.6-2.7GHz on air was nice.

;)
 
My (153$)opteron 165 runs at 2.7ghz constantly@1.5 vcore with 1200 HT:D
love my asus A8n32-sli, reportrs say the board is stable up to 1300HT, not sure the point since it doesn't matter performance wise but still cool. I got that board as a replacement for my MSI neo4-f, board really wups the MSI but it should since it used to be a 200$ board or so. My only complain lies with the SATA ports- they dont AHCI like pretty much all AMD boards and also the secondary SATA controllor spits the channals up to 1 ESATA and one SATA, yet suppports raid..explain that one...
 
also the secondary SATA controllor spits the channals up to 1 ESATA and one SATA, yet suppports raid..explain that one...

I can do better,
building a pc asus mboard single brand new sata drive, windows xp cd wouldnt recognise the hdd
even after making a floppy with the drivers on
the bios would come up with press f8 to set up raid message which I ignored of course because i wasnt setting up raid.
but out of desperation i pressed it selected set up striped arrray (because it seemed the safest option) I expected to see an error message about only having 1 hard drive but instead I got a progress bar which completed. After that i rebooted and xp found the drive.

explain that one... :D
 
Ok, I fixed the memory problem, the full 4gb is recognized as system memory and it scores 4,6 in the windows bench so I'm pretty satisfied with that. The only problem now is the poor overclocking and the frame drops in movies, but I'm gonna order an a8n32 from hong kong and maybe that will solve it.

But I still have to ask, don't you think it's strange that I am able to see 720p faultless on a 3200+ (that's 2ghz, 512kb l2), an nforce 430 mobo, 1 gb ram and a nvidia 6200 (which doesn't do any decoding), and I'm doing it with wmp11 and CCCP. Seriously, what the fuck's wrong?
(ok, the only difference is that this one is using vista 32bit, but the other one never worked well in XP either)

I just noticed, that I can extract and move 3gb files at the same time as I am wathicng an 720p movie on my 3200+, and the movie keeps running in perfect motion. The windows inteface sags a bit though, but the movie stays unaffected. Explain that one.
 
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your hdd is definately in dma mode ?

ps; you say you have non registered dimms ?

from techreport
http://techreport.com/articles.x/5885/1

"Next, the Opteron 146, 148, 246, and 248 chips in our test results all come from systems with DDR400 memory, while the Opteron 140 and 240 setups use DDR333 memory. AMD has been a little fuzzy on DDR400 support in the Opteron line, but the company has now decided to endorse DDR400 officially for the x46 models and above. Of course, Opterons still require registered DIMMs, whatever the speed."
 
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your hdd is definately in dma mode ?

ps; you say you have non registered dimms ?

from techreport
http://techreport.com/articles.x/5885/1

"Next, the Opteron 146, 148, 246, and 248 chips in our test results all come from systems with DDR400 memory, while the Opteron 140 and 240 setups use DDR333 memory. AMD has been a little fuzzy on DDR400 support in the Opteron line, but the company has now decided to endorse DDR400 officially for the x46 models and above. Of course, Opterons still require registered DIMMs, whatever the speed."

I haven't chekced the status of the dirive actually, but it scored pretty well on the vista bench, over 5, about the same as on the 3200+. I'll check it later, right now I don't have access to that computer.

About the memory, Blazkowicz already answered that in this thread.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1248337&postcount=14
 
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