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Really poor production on a AthlonXP 2800+

X

Xemus

Senior member
Hey people, I need some help. I've got an AMD Athlon 2800+ (Barton) that is doing 1 WU a day and I can't figure out why.
I just built the machine and everything else is running beautifully, Antivirus installed, scanned, Ad-aware and Spybot run, system is squeaky clean.
Things I have done and verified:
1.Running CLI (been running 24/7 for almost 2 days now)
2. I have tried both 3.03 and 3.08 of the CLI. No difference.
3.Power options and other settings have been verified as turned off (I reread through the FAQS on Smoke's site.
4. Have completely removed (from the directory and all references to SETI in the registry) and redownloaded.

The full computer stats are in my sig line.
Only thing I can think of is the Dynamic Overclocking ability of this board, but it shouldn't make any difference as everything else is running perfectly.

Any hints?

 
Xemus, since you're running XP, what does Task Manager say about running processes? Is SETI getting 99% of your CPU or is something else stealing its rightful cycles?

Are you running SETI driver so that you can queue up extra work when it does finish a WU or is it spending all its time trying to upload and download. Firewall problems, perhaps?

Nothing else is occurring to me at the moment.
 
Besides what JonB mentioned,

How high an OC are you doing? Maybe step it down a bit and see if that helps. Or turn off the Dynamic Overclocking for a bit to see of that might cause it.

 
do you have your ram settings in the bios set to "turbo" by any chance? ive seen great degredation in speed when that is set to turbo rather than normal/performance.
 
Thanks for the replies:

SETI is running at ~90-99% constantly. Looks normal.
The Queue has been set at 10, and I will increase this when I get it normalized.
Only firewall it has is the WinXP Firewall, and it has no problem connecting and getting WU's, just crunching them.

The board does Dynamic Overclocking and it overclocks itself according to how much it is active, tho it isn't stepping it up because of seti. Normally it runs at 2092MHz, but it has kicked it up to 3200 for a very brief second. Depends on how much stuff is happening.
For the most part, it is running at stock speeds however.

I will check the BIOS settings when I get home tonght.

Thanks guys. Any other ideas?
 
I'm scratching my head now. 🙂

OK, how are you determining that you do only 1 WU per day? From SETI stats? from SETI Driver completion?

Is it possible that it is doing more than you think? I'm not sure where lost WU's would go, but its a possibility.

If you were running SETI Driver (what I'm most familiar with), it clearly shows how many units are queued up and waiting and how many are done, plus estimated completion times, plus it can keep an nice Excel importable listing of WU done and their times.

If you have all screen savers and power saving features disabled, then this shouldn't be happening.
If your computer has screen saver enabled and its a very busy one (OpenGL for instance), then you'll lose a lot of cpu time.

perhaps if we keep going back and forth, we can find the culprit. Until then, happy crunching.

JonB
 
I'm getting my stats from seti driver and seti spy. Seti driver says that the est times to completion is like 20h (it's around that, I'll look when I get home)
Seti spy says the speed is ~68Mflops. I have a 1200 here at work that is doing 232Mflops, so something is wrong there.

It is not possible that's its doing more than I think, as I have dialup and have been watching it transfer when a unit is complete (2 so far).
There is no screensaver on the machine. I have them turned off.

I still need to check the BIOS settings as mentioned earlier. I will do that ASAP.

I've seen the 2800+ have issues like this. There's another thread here with the same thing, only his solution didn't fix mine. (he was running the GUI and various power settings)

That help at all?

Thanks.
 
wow dude that IS majorly whacked out! i dont have any experience with dynamic overlocking but im putting money on that being the issue!
 
Well, is it just SETI? What about DPAD or some other distributed program like Prime?

Perhaps your Anti-virus program (like Norton's "real time protection") ??

Is your FSB speed at 13mhz instead of 133mhz? (that's a long shot)

Mulitplier at 2 instead of 9? CAS latency set at 300 instead of 3 ?

Running your power supply at 220 instead of 110 (or vice versa)? 50 hz instead of 60 hz.

Unmatched sticks of RAM? take one out and try it?

When you find it, we'll all go "Dasm, why didn't I think of that"

 
Not much new, I installed the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers and that brought production to 8 hours (from 24ish previously).
Checked all the BIOS settings and it seems fine. RAM sticks are identical 512 MB pc2700's. (pc2700 should play fine with a Barton, right?)
Only thing that isn't updated is my video drivers (default XP ones) but I'm going to update those today, not that they should matter.

I'm also going to install a game or two and verify that they are running perfectly, tho I'm 99% positive they will be.

I'll keep ya posted. 🙂
 
I didn't scan the other responses carefully, but I wondered if it is possible that L2 cache is turned off in the BIOS. I tend to install SISoft Sandra and benchmark the CPU and memory. This will let you know if the system is performing in line with the reference systems in the benchmark.

I have a board that runs a WU in about 8~9 hours with an XP1800+ and DDR memory. It's benchmark numbers are fine, but for some reason that board sucks at SETI. I replaced it with a Shuttle board and the times are now fine. Weird things happen! 🙂
 
it's possible you have a bad board, one more thing on your bios.
sometimes the settings lie, you have to reset the bios to defaults, then go back over the settings again.

(most likely your slowness is due to one of these 3)
Internal Cache should be enabled
System Bios Cacheable should be enabled
C000 32k shadow should be set to cached (!!not enabled there is about a 50% performance drop when set to enabled!!)

for win2k/xp APIC should be enabled and running mps 1.4

set dram timing to spd auto frequency
burstlength 4q
1t, fast r-to-r and, fast command leave them at defaults (tweak these later with sisoft mem analyzer)

apg mode to auto (to use 8x it will only work under auto configuration)
fast writes disabled
agp apeture size (for your GF3-Ti I suggest using 64 or 128MB)
disable the last 3 settings on the video screen

disable all the power management features

on the pci configuration, the only thing you should change is the primary graphics to use agp (and that doesn't even really matter)

turn off the spread spectrum and make sure your fsb is set properly. (you can manually overclock it later, I'd suggest not using the soft clocking options from msi, they tend to give very flakey performance)
 
Verify the cpu and ram are running at the proper speeds using CPU-Z. Personally, I'd totally disable that "auto-overclocking" feature. What mobo is this? Just manually set your overclock. Do you have the latest BIOS installed? Try running the system for 24 hours in safe mode to be sure no other processes are hogging cpu cycles.

I have a 2200+ running at 2800+ speeds and my wu avg is 2:24.....you should be to that level at least.
 
Thanks guys. I will double verify these settings tonight and let you know.

Much appreciated! :beer:😀
 
Originally posted by: BadThad
Verify the cpu and ram are running at the proper speeds using CPU-Z. Personally, I'd totally disable that "auto-overclocking" feature. What mobo is this? Just manually set your overclock. Do you have the latest BIOS installed? Try running the system for 24 hours in safe mode to be sure no other processes are hogging cpu cycles.
Click to expand...
The complete specs are in my sig line under "My Home Computer". Not sure I can disable the overclocking feature. Didn't see anything on it at least,
It's an MSI KT600- Full board details:
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/product_detail.asp?model=KT6V-LSR&search_text=KT6V-LSR
 
You should be able to go into the bios and set the clock frequency to manual. All decent modern mobos have user selectible fsb in bios, often in 1MHz increments.

It's great when a distributed computing project like SETI can help people identify that there's a problem somewhere, eh? I use SETI to test and burn in every system I build (I build a lot of them).

Good Luck! 🙂
 
The FSB does allow user settings, and I have it set at 166. The Dynamic Overclocking (MSI calls it corecell technology...) isn't my problem tho, I don't think at least.

I haven't had a chance to check the latest settings listed above, but one other thing that possibly springs to mind: the CPU under full load (SETI) runs at 58C. In theory, this is wihtin normal temps for the barton, but could it be reading it as hot and not utilizing the 99% that task manager is saying it is?
I've got a fan and an exhaust fan on order, should be here Wednesday and I'll see what kind of difference they make.

 
I personlly don't like seeing bartons over 52-55C, open your case cover and see if that lowers it below 50C while under full load. if it doesn't you may not have an adequate hsf. my 2500+@2800+ runs 45-47C full load. I had a similar problem 57-59C uncer full load with it running as a 2800+ (very flakey) before I found out my side cooling fan was blowing the wrong way (i was essentially creating a vacuum in my case) I now have 2 fans blowing out 1 psu blowing out, and 3 fans blowing in. (all are the utlra quiet 23db fans mind you...I can't even hear my tower over my laptop.
 
Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
I personlly don't like seeing bartons over 52-55C, open your case cover and see if that lowers it below 50C while under full load. if it doesn't you may not have an adequate hsf. my 2500+@2800+ runs 45-47C full load. I had a similar problem 57-59C uncer full load with it running as a 2800+ (very flakey) before I found out my side cooling fan was blowing the wrong way (i was essentially creating a vacuum in my case) I now have 2 fans blowing out 1 psu blowing out, and 3 fans blowing in. (all are the utlra quiet 23db fans mind you...I can't even hear my tower over my laptop.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this.

Warning to all those that get Power Supplies with Fan at the bottom.

This seem to be a new and common thing now to have "Dual" Fan Power supplies.

If your CPU sits just below the Power Supply your CPU Fan will not get enough air because of the Power Supply fan. It does create a vacuum like Vortex (more like a Tornado) that may sound good and impressive but it is bad.

My CPU temp shot up with thermal runaway and shut down. I placed a barrier between the Power supply and the CPU and all was back to normal.

3200 XP (400FSB) Barton core runs at 162 Watts. HS/Fan keeps it at 52C
 
Well, good news finally.
After a week or so of not having time to play with it, I finally did tonight and guess what?
It's fixed!!

What I did:
FIrst I reset the BIOS to high performance defaults and tweaked to the settings below with FSB 166MHz.
Rebooted and it froze.
Reset BIOS to fail safe defaults, used these settings, then set the FSB to 166MHz and it started crunching like it's supposed to.

:beer::beer::beer::beer: for all. Thanks for the help, and extra thanks to lobadobadingdong.
You guys are great. Another cruncher coming up!!

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong

sometimes the settings lie, you have to reset the bios to defaults, then go back over the settings again.

(most likely your slowness is due to one of these 3)
Internal Cache should be enabled
System Bios Cacheable should be enabled
C000 32k shadow should be set to cached (!!not enabled there is about a 50% performance drop when set to enabled!!)

for win2k/xp APIC should be enabled and running mps 1.4

set dram timing to spd auto frequency
burstlength 4q
1t, fast r-to-r and, fast command leave them at defaults (tweak these later with sisoft mem analyzer)

apg mode to auto (to use 8x it will only work under auto configuration)
fast writes disabled
agp apeture size (for your GF3-Ti I suggest using 64 or 128MB)
disable the last 3 settings on the video screen

disable all the power management features

on the pci configuration, the only thing you should change is the primary graphics to use agp (and that doesn't even really matter)

turn off the spread spectrum and make sure your fsb is set properly. (you can manually overclock it later, I'd suggest not using the soft clocking options from msi, they tend to give very flakey performance)
Click to expand...

 
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