AMD Athlon 64x2 driver

[Gagh]

What exactly is this useful for? Ive been having issues with a system based around an a64x2 4800+, made a thread in the tech help section here regarding that here. I was told to go and install that driver (which i hadnt even known existed till it was mentioned here), but after i did, the problem i had with the fps in games stuttering (jumping from high fps 200+ to low fsps ~50, every other second) only got worse. Prior to the install the system would only do that after having been used for a while on something and then going into a game. After the install it was doing right off of a fresh reboot, and the jumps were worse. Leads me to believe that theres something up with the cpu, seeing as how this driver made things worse. Yet it runs prime95 without a hitch (ran for 9 hours before i stopped the test).. any ideas?

 

[Furen]

Did you do a clean install? If not I'd do that. It only takes like an hour but can solve most problems... The X2 driver adds a parameter to boot.ini, I think, so you could just edit that out.

 

[Gagh]

I am now.. is it worth installing that driver at all? Or just installing the current nforce drivers and leaving it at that?

 

[Furen]

If you have problems after doing your clean install, I'd install the driver. Some people have fixed their problems by doing just that. I also like cool and quiet, but you could always use rightmark or something instead.

 

[Markfw]

Yes, it is a known issue with many games that you either have to install the X2 driver, or set affinity.

 

[Duvie]

I would say the best thing to do whenupgarding to an X2 and using winxp home is to..

a) clean install
b) load X2 driver
c) load all chipset drivers
d) load video chip drivers
e) then load the games
f) then load all the patches...

now play...

 

[Gagh]

Did exactly that, and im still haveing problems. Still getting the exact same jerkiness in eve online (only game ive tested sofar, and one i get the problem in consistantly). I really dont know what to do now.

 

[evilharp]

Hi Gagh,

The stuttering problem is caused by "Cool and Quiet" (CNQ).

As I understand it, CNQ works in an "on demand" fashion. If you load your CPU, the speed will go to 100%, if not it throttles back.

I have an X2, and I noticed the stuttering in games such as BF2. I turned off CNQ, and the stuttering disappeared.

You turn on CNQ by changing your power scheme to "Portable/Laptop" or "Max Battery".
You turn off CNQ by changing your power scheme to "Home/Office Desk".

It only takes a second to turn it on or off, but it makes a huge difference in gaming.

As for the driver, boot.ini and affinity there are other issues with the X2 and games. Rest assured, the X2 is not buggy, rather games don't know what to do with the chip. XP will try to "Load Balance" games, and divide the workload over both cores. This division of workload leads to weird errors in games that were not designed to work in multi processor environments. Similar problems happened when Intel introduced Hyperthreading a few years ago.

In short, here are some solutions to know X2 issues:

Stuttering: turn CNQ off
Superspeed: set program affinity to 1 core
"Delta Time Error": use the X2 driver and set affinity to 1 core

There are some affinity programs out there (Runfirst, RunOnProcessorExplicitly 1.00, etc..)

Search the forum for X2 and Gaming and you'll find others who had problems and found fixes.

 

[Gagh]

Just tried a different game on the system (wh40k dawn of war) and it runs just fine. Have to try out some other games to see how they respond.

As for cool n quiet, ive got that disabled in the motherboards bios. What really gets me though is that i didnt have the problem i do right now, 2 weeks ago. Id get the stuttering issue in eve (and ground control 2 for that matter) only after having been playing something else for a while beforehand, and was solved by a reboot. Over the past week though, its gotten more common in eve, and with installing that amd a64x3 driver i get the stuttering issue right off the bat soon as i reboot.

I have another pc i had been using for years before i built this one based on an HT enabled p4 2.8c , and never had any sort of problems at all.

 

[Gagh]

Hm , just tried the affinity deal for eve, and it seems that did the trick. Downloaded runfirst, but i havent a clue how to use it, and it doesnt come with any sort of instructions.

 

[Gagh]

Ok, i managed to get ROPE working to automatically set affinity to eve-online for the first cpu core and it works ok. But in the span of 5 or so hours i got 3 BSOD, talking about what i think is a memory dump, right before it auto-reboots. Not sure whats causing this.. only thing i can think of would be the mem voltage being too high at 2.8 (lowered it now to 2.65), the audio drivers not being up to date (didnt upgrade past the cd version to try and avoid a shutdown issue i had with them), the affinity thing causing problems in the long run.. or the amd drivers just flat out causing instability. Gonna run prime for the rest of the night and see what happens.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[plion]

Hey there got 2 questions
1. Isn't there a way to set affinity for all the windows processes to one core and set the games to the other, because I'm assuming this would improve performance? I wanted to do this but you can't change affinity for some processes...

2. Isn't the X2 driver the same as C'n'Q, so won't it cause a problem for someone overclocking? Or does setting the power setting in windows to home/office solve this?

 

[stevty2889]

Disable automatic reboots so you can see what the blue screen says. List your full system specs. Have you run memtest at all? I did a clean install of windows, used the X2 drivers, and haven't had problems with any games so far, and haven't had to set affinity.