Cryptik!
This idea just crossed my mind while I was testing a 1Mhz FSB increase (478->479) to make sure it would be stable before changing in bios, and came up with this small experiment! Reason for testing, Raid5 on ICH9R is damn ficky, if you crash the system you can be up for a 5hr long array verification! Gah The ICH9R is horrible for Raid5 when it comes to rebuild/verify. Using 4x320Gb sata2 drives thought it would be fun to try out.
Check these linpack results out. I found them extremely interesting! What I think you'll find the most important is the variation in Gigaflops of processing done for the tests of the run. For 478MHz which I spent a good few hours fine tuning to perfection the processing work done for each problem are +-1GFlop of each other. Then I set the FSB only 2MHz higher and suddenly they are all out of whack! Seems like a fine example of how critical tuning the Vtt and GTL References can be. At 478MHz the performance appears to be right at the edge of peak performance, where as 480MHz it drops significantly.
See next post for methodology, data and results.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks