Windows 7 - WEI video #'s seem wrong

[WT]

I built a Win 7 beta rig from spare parts and ended up using an eVGA 8800GTS ACS 640mb (G80 core) for video. Not a top performer in this day and age, but FAR from a casual gamer card also.

Now I understand that the Win 7 WEI index is nothing but a confusing test of each hardware component that doesn't even average out, but will max out at the lowest number of your systems bottleneck point. But here's where it makes no sense to me ....

My WEI score on Gaming graphics is OK at 5.5, but my desktop Aero performance is a measly 2.9 ! Now how can this card score that low for the Aero fluff ??? I've already tried to find an updated driver (nothing) so I then tried the newest Nvidia driver (181 series released in January), albeit for Vista 32 bit, and that locked up the PC.

So Win 7 is using the pre-release WDDM 1.1 driver, but now that I think about it, I'll bet that my board is actually the culprit (Asrock 775Dual VSTA running the PCIe slot @ 4x).
🙁

Anyone else able to confirm my suspicions on this one ?

 

[Bateluer]

Shrug, not sure exactly. I wouldn't put too much stock in the WEI scores. Does Aero run smoothly? Do your games run decently smoothly? If yes, then meh.

On the Windows 7 x32 that I have running on my Sager 5720 laptop, it lists good scores for the RAM and graphics, but gives the hdd performance a 2.0. Its a 7200rpm drive that scored a 3.3 or 3.5 under Vista. Not sure why its score dropped.

I would expect the Windows 7 drivers to improve much before its release though, so that may balance out your disparity.

 

[Big Lar]

The WEI is not a good indicator of performance IMHO. For instance, for the HDD test it spit out a 5.5 on a WD 7200 500gb, and only a 5.9 on the 2x15k drives run in Raid in my sig, something wrong there.

As to drivers, I am running the second latest WHQL drivers for Vista x64 on my Win7 x64 installation here with no problems. they are the 181.20 not the 181.22 off the Nvidia site. Win7 also took my NIC drivers for Vista x64 and accepted x64 drivers from Server 2003 for my Perc4e Scsi Raid card. Seems to accept quite a few Vista x64 drivers so far.

Larry

 

[WT]

Bateluer, whilst researching my video score anomaly, I ran across a fix for your hard drive scores:

Win 7 WEI HD fix

Big Lar, I agree and posted as much, as I had run into a similar scoring issue on a Vista 64 Ultimate build.

I'm curious if anyone else is using an Asrock 775 board for a Win 7 build, so I may post in our ridiculously long Asrock thread over in the MoBo section.

 

[Hyperlite]

Originally posted by: WT
Bateluer, whilst researching my video score anomaly, I ran across a fix for your hard drive scores:

Win 7 WEI HD fix

Big Lar, I agree and posted as much, as I had run into a similar scoring issue on a Vista 64 Ultimate build.

I'm curious if anyone else is using an Asrock 775 board for a Win 7 build, so I may post in our ridiculously long Asrock thread over in the MoBo section.

wouldn't that disable the buffer on the hard drive?

 

[WT]

Yea, same thing I thought, but it was posted as a 'fix' at this point, so I guess a benchmark before and after would be appropriate.

 

[Scotteq]

I stumbled onto a blog containing (an) answer why we are seeing this:

Microsoft changed the way WEI is testing the discs, because they were finding that the way some were handling random I/O was less than optimal. This also seems to explain why enabling/disabling write caching has the effect on the score that it appears to. As explained below:


From: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archi...-experience-index.aspx


Key quote:

With respect to disk scores, as discussed in our recent post on Windows Performance, we?ve been developing a comprehensive performance feedback loop for quite some time. With that loop, we?ve been able to capture thousands of detailed traces covering periods of time where the computer?s current user indicated an application, or Windows, was experiencing severe responsiveness problems. In analyzing these traces we saw a connection to disk I/O and we often found typical 4KB disk reads to take longer than expected, much, much longer in fact (10x to 30x). Instead of taking 10s of milliseconds to complete, we?d often find sequences where individual disk reads took many hundreds of milliseconds to finish. When sequences of these accumulate, higher level application responsiveness can suffer dramatically.

With the problem recognized, we synthesized many of the I/O sequences and undertook a large study on many, many disk drives, including solid state drives. While we did find a good number of drives to be excellent, we unfortunately also found many to have significant challenges under this type of load, which based on telemetry is rather common. In particular, we found the first generation of solid state drives to be broadly challenged when confronted with these commonly seen client I/O sequences.

An example problematic sequence consists of a series of sequential and random I/Os intermixed with one or more flushes. During these sequences, many of the random writes complete in unrealistically short periods of time (say 500 microseconds). Very short I/O completion times indicate caching; the actual work of moving the bits to spinning media, or to flash cells, is postponed. After a period of returning success very quickly, a backlog of deferred work is built up. What happens next is different from drive to drive. Some drives continue to consistently respond to reads as expected, no matter the earlier issued and postponed writes/flushes, which yields good performance and no perceived problems for the person using the PC. Some drives, however, reads are often held off for very lengthy periods as the drives apparently attempt to clear their backlog of work and this results in a perceived ?blocking? state or almost a ?locked system?. To validate this, on some systems, we replaced poor performing disks with known good disks and observed dramatically improved performance. In a few cases, updating the drive?s firmware was sufficient to very noticeably improve responsiveness.

To reflect this real world learning, in the Windows 7 Beta code, we have capped scores for drives which appear to exhibit the problematic behavior (during the scoring) and are using our feedback system to send back information to us to further evaluate these results. Scores of 1.9, 2.0, 2.9 and 3.0 for the system disk are possible because of our current capping rules. Internally, we feel confident in the beta disk assessment and these caps based on the data we have observed so far. Of course, we expect to learn from data coming from the broader beta population and from feedback and conversations we have with drive manufacturers.

For those obtaining low disk scores but are otherwise satisfied with the performance, we aren?t recommending any action (Of course the WEI is not a tool to recommend hardware changes of any kind). It is entirely possible that the sequence of I/Os being issued for your common workload and applications isn?t encountering the issues we are noting. As we?ve said, the WEI is a metric but only you can apply that metric to your computing needs.

 

[Cardio]

Originally posted by: Big Lar
The WEI is not a good indicator of performance IMHO. For instance, for the HDD test it spit out a 5.5 on a WD 7200 500gb, and only a 5.9 on the 2x15k drives run in Raid in my sig, something wrong there.

As to drivers, I am running the second latest WHQL drivers for Vista x64 on my Win7 x64 installation here with no problems. they are the 181.20 not the 181.22 off the Nvidia site. Win7 also took my NIC drivers for Vista x64 and accepted x64 drivers from Server 2003 for my Perc4e Scsi Raid card. Seems to accept quite a few Vista x64 drivers so far.

Larry

Right click the drive in question in the device manager and under "Policies"tab uncheck "write caching"
Run the test again and you will see your score more reasonably evaluated. Same with 32 bit and 64. Report results again after you try this.