Aquamark? Any News

[GFreeman]

Hi Martinx! Nice to have you back too! Anyway i just got BF2 a while ago. I don't play it everyday, but i must say, very sweet game! I'm running on 1200x1024 on high quality + 2x alias as well! (jep it's my old sucky P4 rig) A while ago i upgraded my vid cooling. This was a good decision. I'm fully stable now at 365/776 playing any game. (with 16 pipes enabled as well)

So you guys must think... why didn't this dude go A64 Venice??! Well i like to upgrade don't get me wrong haha! At least i'm happy what i have right now. I know my P4 rig is a little outdated haha!

I'm still interested in overclocking, and i must say i'm impressed with the technologies going so fast. Interesting, cool to learn something more about that!

Sillysider i'm very curious what you get out of this old rig. To bad your motherboard died. Maybe you did some torture testing with Prime while you where running badly high HTT speeds? Or perhaps a little to much voltage on the board? Well sometimes overclockers take big risks, i'm sorry to hear that i didn't work out with this motherboard. I'm impressed what you did with your A64 Venice!

Martinx, Game maybe we could play a few rounds of BF2 if you like hehe! I'm sure i will get killed, i'm not really good at it yet hahhaa! It's great to see some fellow Aquamarkers around!

[Martinx]

Hey Gordon!! Long time no see, i missed your P4 skillzz

Yeah sure, it would be damn fun to play with you two, or any other aquamarkers. How do you suggest we plan our little BF2 meet-up?

By the way gordon, i've been having some difficulties with my P4 lately (3,2ghz prescott incase you probably forgot). About 2 months ago or less aquamark suddenly outgrayed (or however you say that) the "Intel Hyper-Threading Technology" option in the video settings. So I'm getting about 8,5k cpu score instead of like 10,6k. At first i thought that HT probably only was disabled in aquamark, so i tried another benchmark to make sure, but unfortunately i still got a lesser score.

According to Everest, Sisoft Sandra, and my BIOS it IS enabled. I'm not really sure i am experiencing worse performance in games though, but when it had just happened i thought i felt a little performance dicrease. Though I am able to play BF2 at high details and 2x AA, with a steady 60fps+, but they do drop to around 30 in 64 player servers, when there's lotsa people at the screen at once, and lots of effects.

I did contact Swie about it, and i thank him for the help, but for some reason he stopped replying.

I think I've learnt to live without HT, if it really is disabled

[GFreeman]

I'm most chases this low cpu score is caused by memory running on to low frequencies. Verify if you are running your ram in sync with the cpu (1/1). How about your temps? It also could be that your system is overheating. Sometimes it's really helpfull to remove some "dust".

Verify if you have a memory accelerator option in your system bios. If so enable. Enabling PAT may also give you a little boost!

Do some memory bandwidth testing. Post some results on that.

EDIT:

Is this cpu score (8,5k) a stock brench?

[Martinx]

Yeah, it's on stock, but i'm supposed to get above 9k on stock, so 8,5k just doesn't do it. It's with HT disabled. I don't have PAT in this bios, i only have memory acceleration, and it's on "enabled". How can my memory run on too low frequencies? I do remember changing the virtual memory swapping file (not sure if it's called that) though. Original size is at 1536 and the maximum size is at 4000. I think game told me to do that. It can't be that though.

[GFreeman]

I'm sorry i didn't explain very good. Your ram could be running on 5/4 ratio. (DDR333) This means it runs on 200 (fsb) x 1,66= 333 Mhz instead of 400 Mhz like it should be on stock speeds. 8,5K is pretty okay for stock speeds without enabling the memory accelerator option. But yeah you should be close to the 10K cpu barrier at stock speeds!

Be sure you run your ram set to DDR400 (1/1 ratio in other words in sync with the cpu) so your ram speed will be 200x2= 400 Mhz.

Maybe it's also an idea to look at updating some chipset drivers etc.

Also check out what your processor load is when you're running idle in windows.

If that's not helpfull too... then i need to know some specs about your motherboard. Can't really remember what hardware you got. Will read some manuals then. Then i could do some suggestions about the way to configure it, so you will get your old scores back.

EDIT:

A very simple way to verify if HT is enabled is just to start the task manager. (CTRL + DEL) Look at the Performance tab. You should see two fysical cpu's.

[Martinx]

Okay. That 8,5k cpu score is with memory acceleration enabled, but the fsb is at 200. I should get about 9,5k like that. So if it is at 5/4 ratio, how do i change it back to the normal ratio? I seriously doubt that, because i'm pretty sure you can't change the ratio in this bios, and i would never touch that since i have no idea what it is. I have flashed my bios to the newst version, and i have updated to the newest motherboard drivers aswell. Maybe there is a new one at guru3d now though.

My processor is at between 0-1% load when it's idling. My motherboard is a P4P800-X, Intel P4 Prescott 3,2 ghz, Tagan TG480-U01 PSU, Leadtek 6800GT, 1 gig kingston ram running dual. My stock aquamark score should be around 61k.

[GFreeman]

Okay here we go. Let's verify a few options you've set in your system bios. Just to be sure you are using the right configuration. Use the configuration as suggested below.

[Jumperfree configuration/Advanced]

- AI Overclocking Tuner: manual
- CPU Frequency: should be 200 at stock speeds. You can change your fsb here. Default value= 200
- Dram Frequency: DDR400
- AGP/PCI Frequency: Auto(Means this is set to fixed to improve stability while overclocking)

[Jumperfree configuration/Chipset]Advanced Chipset Settings

- Configure DRAM Timings by (Default Value=SPD= 3-3-3-8) Tightning these timings a bit means you get for about 5-10% extra performance
- Memory Acceleration Mode: Enable

Good luck!

[Martinx]

The taskmanager only shows cpu usage and memory swapfile usage.

EDIT: Thanks G! I'll make sure i have that in my bios.