Got a problem with your OCZ product....?
Have a look over here
Tony AKA BigToe
Tuning PC's for speed...Run whats fast, not what you think is fast
I think any test showing no gain from tri-channel is going to be wrong.
Intel isn't magic, but they are far from dumb![]()
Are you absolutely sure? From various sources I've heard (and seen) that the difference in performance between dual and triple channel is close to nothing. Actually, I am not quite sure yet, because the extra channel should be adding much more bandwidth than the 500MB's I've seen (DDR3 @ 933MHz, exact same system settings). It's either Lavalys Everest that screws up, although I'm not likely to believe that, or something in the bios/motherboard design of the Intel reference motherboard is making the triple channel run at dual channel, which also would surprise me.
What are the possible underlying causes that make people report a lack of performance gain going from dual channel to triple channel? Software/hardware?
Where courage, motivation and ignorance meet, a persistent idiot awakens.
I always said that Core 2 Quad does not need much mem Bandwidth, so, on real application, if memory is not important, you will see very little from Mem Bandwidth.
In the mean time, on application like SETI, Rosetta, folding@home, you got to feed 8 threads, the bandwidth will come handy. If you do H264 with profile level 4, you ll go and see 16 frames in both directions, this will get handy too.
Just remember, to keep 8 threads happy, you ll need the bandwidth, it is just a matter of time before the software use it 100%.
I heard people telling me that nobody will use MMX, it was so hard to use ... Today, you can t boot most of the OS without it.
and yes, I am very sure that 3 Dimms goes faster than 2 Dimms. (on mem test) If it does not, the proto is broken
Last edited by Drwho?; 10-31-2008 at 07:36 PM.
DrWho, The last of the time lords, setting up the Clock.
One hundred years from now It won't matter
What kind of car I drove What kind of house I lived in
How much money I had in the bank Nor what my cloths looked like.... But The world may be a little better Because, I was important In the life of a child.
-- from "Within My Power" by Forest Witcraft
Who knows -- Sandra VII did not work right with AMD's split memory controller in Phenom, and memory scores were overall incorrect. It took Sandra VIII to actually report correct numbers for Phenom....
The client market never has had a 192 bit mem bus to the CPU, at least not one that was mainstream/popular. It could be that testing mem BW with today's utilities are only doing single cycle 128 bit read and writes ... so it would not matter if the third stick is there, you will always only see roughly the performance of a 2 stick -- conjecture on my part. However, if I am right -- who is to say Windows or any other App makes good use of the 192 bit channel anyway... it make take some software revisions across the broader market to access the added BW of a 192 bit mem bus.
Or, it just could be that 3 channels is not really needed at all, and the BW measurements are saturated by the speed of the CPU. We will need CPUs in hand to test this thoroughly, and I do not trust 90% of the HW review sites out there to get it right anyway.
One hundred years from now It won't matter
What kind of car I drove What kind of house I lived in
How much money I had in the bank Nor what my cloths looked like.... But The world may be a little better Because, I was important In the life of a child.
-- from "Within My Power" by Forest Witcraft
Thanks for the reply.
If I understand correctly, we should all notice the difference between dual and triple channel, but it's very likely that if we use non-multicore applications that the difference will be very small. The bandwidth that is added because of the extra channel is to provide enough bandwidth to fully cover the 8 threads, but is 'overkill' when using in single/dual threaded applications.
Now, that only leaves the everest bandwidth problems. As far as I know, the Lavalys Everest program is quite accurate when it comes to calculating the memory bandwidth and latency, but in tests I've seen the difference still is only 500MB/s:
Maybe this is the problem:
Lavalys Everest 4.60 new features & improvements:
- Asus EPU and Gigabyte DES support
- Enhanced hardware monitoring capabilities
- Optimized benchmarks for Intel Atom and VIA Nano
- Preliminary support for Intel Core i7 and X58
- Support for the latest chipset and graphics technologies
Only two tests actually show the difference between dual and triple channel, which probably is the correct performance scaling.
Where courage, motivation and ignorance meet, a persistent idiot awakens.
i don't see how it's bad because tri-channel is slightly faster than dual channel i7 in every graph....
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Bring... bring the amber lamps.
That's why. Single channel to dual channel made a huge difference when it was introduced on the NF2 platform (1500MB/s -> 1900MB/s = 26% increase) and it still does in memory hungry applications, such as Lavalys Everest. The fact that the difference between the two technologies is so small, makes many of us wonder why it's that low (in the contrary to those who are only out on bashing the technology).
Where courage, motivation and ignorance meet, a persistent idiot awakens.
That's one possibility, although I don't see why anyone should be tweaking the triple channel functionality as it's one of the key features of the new platform. Surely, you'd expect the Intel X58 motherboard to be able to show the correct performance difference between dual and triple channel, no?
There are some newer biosses available on the Intel restricted area website, but there are no changelogs available, so no idea whether the bios updates would help. I hope so, though.
Another weird/funny effect I've seen people reporting is that overclocking the BCLK frequency has little to no effect in performance, which means that running 133x25 or 166x20 will not make any difference. Next to that, people report that underclocking the QPI frequency (lowering the QPI multiplier) has no effect on the BCLK wall, so decreasing the QPI multiplier will not allow people to go high in BCLK frequency?The wall itself would apparently be a CPU issue, not a motherboard problem ... kinda like the FSB wall we know now.
I'm re-reading every PDF on the Intel page at the moment, maybe I missed something.
//EDIT: No, I didn't.
Last edited by massman; 11-01-2008 at 05:17 AM.
Where courage, motivation and ignorance meet, a persistent idiot awakens.
but if general public has to invest serious time to try and gain a bit more performance would it really count for anything
most of these systems....are going to non-tweakers and overclockers alike
tripple channel RAM configuration will also add a new hurdle in overclocking. we've already seen the the recent greek magazine review posted here that tripple channel was giving the guy headaches so he went down to two sticks to be able to get OCs/figures he was after
...having said that i know both of us look forward to the challenge...we love the smell of new silicone and all the head scratching until things start kick some serious arse
tripple channel should eventually be able to give us what we need for SuperPi heheh i know how lame some would say but i am pragmatic...if it aint working for SuperPi i call it broken.....i cant wait to squeeze CAS, TRCD & TRFC for the first time, feel my first heart race & see the magic unravel
eeeeek
![]()
Single channel: 64-bit.
Dual channel: 128-bit. 100 % increase from previous.
Triple channel: 192-bit. 50 % increase from previous.
Now, triple channel would yield half the increase from going from single to dual channel, than in case where the memory bandwidth demand exceeds the max. bandwidth capable with tri channel. No wonder it yields no big differences.
Though, TC and tight timings would yield better results than max. bandwidth.
Last edited by Calmatory; 11-01-2008 at 05:30 AM.
u got it Dino, if it dont play well with spi and 2k1 then![]()
Where courage, motivation and ignorance meet, a persistent idiot awakens.
Well, NF2 was back in 2002, 6 years ago. Memory bandwidth demand has increased quite alot from those days, and thus the comparison from NF2 is quite much worthless IMO. Besides, I only saw sub 15 % improvements, though, the RAM was cheap kingston and FSB was sub 166 all the time.![]()
What it boils down to is that most of today's client applications do not produce a demand that exceeds even modest memory bandwidths, aided with a strong cache structure. Increase in BW either by clocking up the bus or increasing memory clocks gives minor improvements, in most cases -- some exceptions are WinRAR's internal benchmark which all it does is read/writes random data to memory while executing it's compression engine... it shows significant sensitivty to BW. I have also seen noteable sensitivity with Mainconcepts H264 encoder.
So, in what Dr. Who? is saying, at 12 GB/s + memory bandwidth is not really going to impact what you observe in real life -- not because the BW is not real, but because the applications used for desktop never deman throughput that exceeds the capabilities.
You will see the BW play an important role in 2S servers, where those applications are more throughput oriented as opposed to client side which are really just task based.
One hundred years from now It won't matter
What kind of car I drove What kind of house I lived in
How much money I had in the bank Nor what my cloths looked like.... But The world may be a little better Because, I was important In the life of a child.
-- from "Within My Power" by Forest Witcraft
There is nothing weird or funny about this, pretty much expected. QPI in a single socket desktop is now simply servicing the chipset which acts as nothing more than a multiprotocol network switch, shuttling to different IO standards, USB, SATA, etc. there is not part of this that is critical in the computational equation to performance overall -- the QPI link will service higher BW than any periphrial will yield, hence ... 25.6 GB/sec or 12. GB/sec (lower QPI BW) will have little to no overall effect, considering SATA can do 300 MB/sec... QPI will neither speed up nor slow down a HD transfer, for example.... this is just intuitive.
All this means is that Intel has done a good job making QPI very robust such that it can scale much higher clock if/when needed. Where and what creates the BCLK wall is irrelevant, there will always be a wall with some component, the weakest component of the chain will be the limiter -- this is not surprising ... perhaps it is the CPU NB frequency, who knows ... or it could be QPI, and it simply is before the multiplier... who knows. What we do know is there is a whole new set of fun knobs to turn.
One hundred years from now It won't matter
What kind of car I drove What kind of house I lived in
How much money I had in the bank Nor what my cloths looked like.... But The world may be a little better Because, I was important In the life of a child.
-- from "Within My Power" by Forest Witcraft
USB, SATA, etc. are connected to the ICH10. The ICH10 is connected to X58 via a DMI link. So whatever you plug into any USB or SATA will have the limitation of the DMI link, which is much slower than the QPI. Raising the QPI speed won't make any differencies for pheripherals. You don't need more for that anyways.
Friends shouldn't let friends use Windows 7 until Microsoft fixes Windows Explorer (link)
![]()
Bookmarks