Improve your high-end disk performance in Win2K by 30%!

[LocutusX]

By performing the IOPageLockLimit and LargeSystemCache tweak. I just did and got results very similar to the author of the following articles (about a 30% improvement in High-End Disk Winbench 99):

http://arstechnica.com/tweak/nt/cache.html

http://arstechnica.com/tweak/nt/IO-1.html

These tweaks are exclusive to the Windows NT kernel FYI, and they have been around since NT 3.1. There's also another tweak, changing DisableExecutivePaging to 1, but I have tested that extensively and found that to give no improvement (it gives plus or minus 2% which should be within the margin of error for High-End Disk Winmark).

Another thing... you will really only see a I/O performance improvement if you have 128MB of RAM or greater. I did this a year ago on NT4 in a 64mb system and got a neglible performance increase. Nothing like the 30% I got now.

BTW for a 256MB ram system, I find the best IOPageLockLimit is 32768, although I will be trying 16384 shortly. And contrary to popular rumour, IOPageLockLimit did not mess up my OpenGL games, Q3A timedemos as fast as it did before. In addition, I burned several CD-Rs using NERO and that worked as well as it did before too. If you want to read more about the "issues" with this tweak see http://web.ukonline.co.uk/cook/Memory.htm although I can say that none of them affected me through several days of hard usage and about 50 runs of HE WinBench 99 and HE WinStone 99.

DISCLAIMER: I will not be responsible for people's hard drive's melting down and blowing up in their face or nuking entire cities as a result of the tweak mentioned above. 😉

 

[GL]

^bump

Just picked myself up an Asus CUV4X per your advice and I couldn't be any happier. I've finally got my cheap, last generation Celeron running stable at 541 (6.5 x 83). Previously, games would stall my rig, but now they run really nice. My memory bandwidth sky rocketed too with the new mobo...now it's time to try this HD tweak.

-GL😱😀

 

[LocutusX]

Since it's a VIA motherboard, make sure you do a search here using VIA as the search term to prevent any problems before they start. 😉 There are a lot of patches available for VIA systems, which once applied will make your system run really well... BTW I found this tweak to actually be most effective with people with 128 to 192mb of RAM. With 256mb of RAM, only the LargeSystemCache tweak has any effect.

VIA tweaks that come to mind include the 4-way memory interleave and other chipset register tweaking (viahardware.com) ; use WPCREDIT. There's also the Win2K AGP fix, and I think VIA released new versions of the AGP GART driver (4.04e?) although I use 4.03d I believe which gets the job done. Another thing is make sure you use Win98SE's and Win2K's built-in IDE controller, VIA's IDE busmaster controller is for Win95 only apparently.