P4C800-E Deluxe - Very Slow File System and Memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff Givens
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J

Jeff Givens

Brand new board, here are my problems:

Had a P4T w/ 2 identical HD's, 120 GB WD's. Took my working XP Pro on one
and ghosted to the second, kept the first as backup.

Connect to mobo video (Radeon 9800), single HD as old ata and CD.

Try to boot and of course bsod. Run Windows repair installation and this
gets me going. In the process of installing the chipset drivers I notice
the machine very very slow, chugging away. After getting a lot of time on
this I get all mobo, video drivers and win updates (not sp2) in place.

Boot is agonizingly long, >10 minutes. I had been running a single stick of
256M kingston (samsung) with a second one not installed. I put it in and
next boot is downright zippy.

Problem is in the disk accesses/file system - still awfully slow. I turned
the RAID off in the BIOS (even tho not being used) and this led to a major
improvement, but still slow.

As a test I took a 200M reference file and copied it and timed how long in
windows it took to copy the file. On the p4c800 it took 55-65 seconds to
make a copy of this file. I then took my spare disk, put it in the old p4t
to boot, and had the other disk with the p4c800 boot as a secondary. When I
got windows to fully load I did the same test on the p4c800 drive (now in
the p4t) and the same file copied in 11 seconds.

Back in the p4c800, I installed the non-raid version of the IAA and that
knocked maybe 10 seconds off the copy time.

Something is very much amiss here and this is really frustrating. I have a
top shelf bit of hardware here and it can't get out of its own way.

Some numbers:

HDTach: 14 mS, 39.8 MB/s (in both old and new machines numbers essentially
the same on the same drive)
SANDRA: Mem. bandwith 2800 in new machine, file system 26 MB/s in new
machine and 32 MB/sec in old one.

Looks like two problems - why such terrible file system performance and why
such low mem bandwidth? I am in the blue slots and told I have 512M ddr on
boot. The big indication is the 5x longer in time to copy a 200M file on
the p4c800 vs. the p4t.

Anyone have any ideas for me?
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:[email protected]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."
 
Jeff Givens said:
Brand new board, here are my problems:

Had a P4T w/ 2 identical HD's, 120 GB WD's. Took my working XP Pro on one
and ghosted to the second, kept the first as backup.

Connect to mobo video (Radeon 9800), single HD as old ata and CD.

Try to boot and of course bsod. Run Windows repair installation and this
gets me going. In the process of installing the chipset drivers I notice
the machine very very slow, chugging away. After getting a lot of time on
this I get all mobo, video drivers and win updates (not sp2) in place.
Click to expand...

Sounds like your drive image didn't copy over as planned. Might also be that
the drive was left as "slave" or that the cable is loose or damaged when you
swapped the drives.

Try the original drive and if there's a difference I'd reimage. If still
bad, run diags on the slow drive.
 
Sounds like your drive image didn't copy over as planned. Might also be that
the drive was left as "slave" or that the cable is loose or damaged when you
swapped the drives.

Try the original drive and if there's a difference I'd reimage. If still
bad, run diags on the slow drive.
Click to expand...

Are the disks running in PIO mode for some reason ? That will
make any computer wheeze.

Also, check the BIOS settings for the PATA/SATA ports on the
Southbridge. For WinXP, you can use "Enhanced". The mode should
be "SATA", even if you aren't using the SATA ports. The other
choices while using Enhanced, are known to cause the IDE ports to
run at less than UDMA5.

In fact, the default values, as shown in the picture in section
4.3.6 "IDE Configuration" of the manual, are the ones to use. Since
I don't believe you are doing RAID with the Southbridge, the "No"
setting for RAID would be appropriate.

Paul
 
Jeff said:
Brand new board, here are my problems:

Had a P4T w/ 2 identical HD's, 120 GB WD's. Took my working XP Pro on one
and ghosted to the second, kept the first as backup.

Connect to mobo video (Radeon 9800), single HD as old ata and CD.

Try to boot and of course bsod. Run Windows repair installation and this
gets me going. In the process of installing the chipset drivers I notice
the machine very very slow, chugging away. After getting a lot of time on
this I get all mobo, video drivers and win updates (not sp2) in place.

Boot is agonizingly long, >10 minutes. I had been running a single stick of
256M kingston (samsung) with a second one not installed. I put it in and
next boot is downright zippy.

Problem is in the disk accesses/file system - still awfully slow. I turned
the RAID off in the BIOS (even tho not being used) and this led to a major
improvement, but still slow.

As a test I took a 200M reference file and copied it and timed how long in
windows it took to copy the file. On the p4c800 it took 55-65 seconds to
make a copy of this file. I then took my spare disk, put it in the old p4t
to boot, and had the other disk with the p4c800 boot as a secondary. When I
got windows to fully load I did the same test on the p4c800 drive (now in
the p4t) and the same file copied in 11 seconds.

Back in the p4c800, I installed the non-raid version of the IAA and that
knocked maybe 10 seconds off the copy time.

Something is very much amiss here and this is really frustrating. I have a
top shelf bit of hardware here and it can't get out of its own way.

Some numbers:

HDTach: 14 mS, 39.8 MB/s (in both old and new machines numbers essentially
the same on the same drive)
SANDRA: Mem. bandwith 2800 in new machine, file system 26 MB/s in new
machine and 32 MB/sec in old one.

Looks like two problems - why such terrible file system performance and why
such low mem bandwidth? I am in the blue slots and told I have 512M ddr on
boot. The big indication is the 5x longer in time to copy a 200M file on
the p4c800 vs. the p4t.
Click to expand...

If I'm reading this correctly, you took a P4T HD, installed it into a
P4C800-E Deluxe and ran Windows repair to get it going. If that is
correct, then I'd forget about trying to figure out what went wrong,
format the drive and do a fresh install of Windows.
 
KDragon said:
If I'm reading this correctly, you took a P4T HD, installed it into a
P4C800-E Deluxe and ran Windows repair to get it going. If that is
correct, then I'd forget about trying to figure out what went wrong,
format the drive and do a fresh install of Windows.
Click to expand...
Yes.
The chances are that it is one of more of the old chipset drivers, still
trying to load, and timing out. This type of 'upgrade', sometimes works,
but as often, ends up in a real mess.
You can however possibly recover the situation. There is a registry
setting in XP, which forces a full hardware redetection, as if the system
is being installed for the first time. Use the tool on the install CD,
'sysprep', to tell the system to re-install. Look at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q302577
use 'sysprep -reseal'. This will reset the device manager list to the
'clean install' state, and force a full hardware redetection. You will
also need to re-activate the system.

Best Wishes
 
If I'm reading this correctly, you took a P4T HD, installed it into a
P4C800-E Deluxe and ran Windows repair to get it going. If that is
correct, then I'd forget about trying to figure out what went wrong,
format the drive and do a fresh install of Windows.
Click to expand...

Exactly. The thought of having to do a clean install has been lurking in
the back of my head but I have been hoping that this would indeed be
suitable.

Roger has suggested doing a special reinstall that effectively cause a
re-enumeration of everything. I will give this a try and maybe even make a
test xp install on another drive, although it doesn't have the performance
as the two WD's I am using.

I had tried deleting the enum keys but I wasn't allowed. I was under the
impression that the repair install (not from the recovery console)
accomplished the same.
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:[email protected]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."
 
Are the disks running in PIO mode for some reason ? That will
make any computer wheeze.
Click to expand...

As I remember, UDMA 5 and I think (?) PIO 4. I just flashed the BIOS with
1017 and now I am not getting the status screen telling me what everything
is. I am not sure if it is actually in PIO mode though.
Also, check the BIOS settings for the PATA/SATA ports on the
Southbridge. For WinXP, you can use "Enhanced". The mode should
be "SATA", even if you aren't using the SATA ports. The other
choices while using Enhanced, are known to cause the IDE ports to
run at less than UDMA5.

In fact, the default values, as shown in the picture in section
4.3.6 "IDE Configuration" of the manual, are the ones to use. Since
I don't believe you are doing RAID with the Southbridge, the "No"
setting for RAID would be appropriate.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is how I am setup as well.
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:[email protected]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."
 
Are the disks running in PIO mode for some reason ? That will
make any computer wheeze.
Click to expand...

Device manager reports the boot drive as udma 5, and 'n/a' for the slave
drive.
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:[email protected]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."
 
OK, to follow-up myself, some discoveries.

First, there was a contributory I/O problem, i.e. Idiot Operator. In the
process of checking and rechecking stuff I realized that the low file
system performances I was getting from Sandra were skewed by not having
write caching enabled, by choice. On a whim I enabled the caching and did
the 200M file copy test and bingo, was way less than 15 sec. I then ran
Sandra and performance on file system went from 27 MB/s to 32 MB/s.

But then why did the p4t file copy testing give good results? I know I had
write caching disabled there, I always do on all my PC's. So I hook back up
the p4t, boot and check........sure enough write caching is ENABLED there
as well. Thus, the drastic difference in performance between the two file
system checks is explained. But how did the cache get enabled? On the p4t
there is no option in the properties, just something about it being enabled
and it is grayed out. I seem to remember having this happen before and I
don't know how I got the caching disabled (it was at one time). I think
this is related to IAA or something like that.

Anyway, it seems the file system performance has been explained. I still am
having (possible) memory bandwidth shortages.

The best I can get using Sandra (and I get numbers all over the place - but
it seems after running it several times in a row the numbers start staying
pretty close from run to run) is maybe 4300. I am using mid-grade Kingston
512M (2x256). SPD kicks it in at CAS 3, I've played with overclocking in
the BIOS (keeping the FSB/Mem ratio at unity) and am not getting much
bandwidth improvement, maybe 4000 to 4300 (delta +300). I've taken it all
the way down to CAS 2 and no real difference. Note: For some reason while
changing the mem freq to 400 Hz from auto in the BIOS it dies and tells me
I have a bad overclocking setting. Turns out that if I make ram CAS less
then the 3 SPD says, when I change the ram freq it faults.

So here is what I'd like to know:

Can anyone give me some numbers (or point me to a compilation site) of
typical file transfer speeds in Sandra for this install (xp pro, p4c800-e
dlx, 3.0 prescott, WD 120G 7200 8MB, 2x256 cas 3 pc3200)?

And how about mem bandwidth from Sandra? That program as a reference lists
5000 MB/s under intel 875p PC3200.

Thanks all for advice.

Oh, one other thing for the archives. Norton Ghost. I love the program but
on the p4t such problems I have had with it. It used to run great then one
day it crashed in mid imaging. The freeze would happen at any place. I have
4 HD's, all combinations of them between the 4 possible locations made no
matter. Even my notebook over tcp would hang and that too used to work
flawlessly. I could not for the life of me figure out what had happened.
Symantec was, of course, useless. Only way I could get Ghost to work was to
use the -fdx switch(es) which took things down to a real low level on the
controller. Problem is that what once was a 60 minute or so imaging process
was now at almost 8 hours. Symantec's response: "We are glad you have
solved your Norton Ghost problem, thank you very much."

When chipset driver updates are done, or IAA loaded, or whatever, is there
any sort of firmware code updates that are done as well that possibly
affect the controller in some manner in an environment outside of Windows?
Even booting to DOS as ghost does caused it to fail. I even tried rolling
back to an earlier BIOS to no avail.

But it works just great on the p4c800 so at least my Ghosting problems are
gone, for now anyway.
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:[email protected]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."
 
So here is what I'd like to know:

Can anyone give me some numbers (or point me to a compilation site) of
typical file transfer speeds in Sandra for this install (xp pro, p4c800-e
dlx, 3.0 prescott, WD 120G 7200 8MB, 2x256 cas 3 pc3200)?

And how about mem bandwidth from Sandra? That program as a reference lists
5000 MB/s under intel 875p PC3200.

Thanks all for advice.
Click to expand...
My system is similar but not exactly like yours::

P4C800-E Deluxe
3.0 Northwood
WD 80g 7200 8 MB
2 x 512 cas 2.5 PC3200

Sandra Results:

File System Benchmark: 48 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth: 4578 MB/s

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
 
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