CPU mark composite average 45%+ lower than others

[College Smart]

It's an ASUS P5N-D. My BIOS is not up to date, but I don't see any notes related to RAM in the last 3 or so updates I don't have. I'll check out the timing and such on my ram, though I believe it is all set to stock.

I've tried swapping ram out 1 stick at a time to no avail. I actually have 3 sticks of Kingston Value that came from the manufacturer and 1 Crucial stick I got on Newegg. I'll try it again and do more thorough testing.

[David (PassMark)]

Try with 2 matching sticks at a time in the same coloured sockets on the MB, otherwise you won't get the benefit of dual channel. Is this all DDR2 800 RAM or better? I note that the Qualified Vendors List (QVL) for RAM on the ASUS site claims that some RAM doesn't support 4 sticks for two pairs of dual channel RAM (and using sticks from different vendors isn't the best for dual channel performance).

[College Smart]

Okay, I've made some odd discoveries.

Using CPU-Z, I got these results for timing with all 4 sticks inserted:


Looks like it was adjusting to the odd RAM, which was 5-5-5-15. Also note that it says single channel rather than dual.

Here's what it looked like with only 2 sticks in the same colored DIMMs.


Now it says dual channel. After looking at my MB user guide, it appears that my KVR does work in dual channel if you have either 1 or 2 sets of matching RAM.

Test results with this 2GB config were about the same.


Oddly enough, when I ran Black Ops, I was getting 60 FPS on average (up from about 35). Adding the third KVR stick which put it into single mode put me back down to 35 average. I'm really not sure how that works.

A friend of mine suggested that I manually adjust the tRAS in my BIOS to something like 15, as it appears quite high.

[wonderwrench]

Can you post screen shots of the SPD tab so we can see the specs for each module. BTW it does seem strange that the tRAS is at 31. I see you are using the latest version of CPU-Z. I wonder if the newer versions report incorrect info on Nvidia based boards? It looks like the board is down clocking the memory from 800 to 667 when more than 2 modules are installed. This is not uncommon but not preferred.

Bill

[College Smart]

Here are the screens from the SPD tab. There are 3 sticks of the Kingston RAM and 1 stick of the G-Skill RAM (I previously mistook this for Crucial brand memory). Clearly they're different timings. Perhaps this is causing it to say single channel?

Would it be possible and/or safe to manually set the timing in my BIOS so they're all the same? And if so, which timing would you recommend?

Kingston:


G-Skill:

[David (PassMark)]

I was getting 60 FPS on average (up from about 35). Adding the third KVR stick which put it into single mode put me back down to 35 average. I'm really not sure how that works

When running with just the 2 sticks in dual channel mode, did it also fix up the low PerformanceTest benchmark results?

There really shouldn't have been such a large difference in frame rates (nor in the CPU benchmark test) between using dual channel or not. Maybe the 3rd stick is just bad in some way. The memory test charts above only test out to 512MB of RAM, so abysmal performance in the 3rd stick might be missed. An interesting test might be to just boot the machine with the suspect 1GB of RAM.

[College Smart]

When running with just the 2 sticks in dual channel mode, did it also fix up the low PerformanceTest benchmark results?

There really shouldn't have been such a large difference in frame rates (nor in the CPU benchmark test) between using dual channel or not. Maybe the 3rd stick is just bad in some way. The memory test charts above only test out to 512MB of RAM, so abysmal performance in the 3rd stick might be missed. An interesting test might be to just boot the machine with the suspect 1GB of RAM.

Yeah, it was weird because the tests didn't show any improvement. I tried testing each stick on its own and they all got the same results. I also tried using different paired combinations of the KVR ram to see if FPS would change and it stayed the same. I didn't check my FPS, but when running the G.Skill stick with one KVR stick, it was in single channel and my test results were identical to the others.

[wonderwrench]

Running 3 modules even matching ones will hamper performance some what because dual channel will be lost or at least hampered. You can try setting the timings manually. Use the timings from the stick with the bigger numbers. Start with the memory at 333 mhz/DDR 667 5-5-5-15-20 timings as shown in the SPD tab going from top to bottom. If that works you can try 400 Mhz/DDR800 6-6-6-18-24 timings. If both work DDR 800 may or my not be faster than DDR 667. This is because DDR 667 runs at 1 to 1 FSB/DRAM ratio. DDR 800 runs 5 to 6 FSB/DRAM ratio. There is a penalty when running the front side bus and memory at different speeds aka asynchronously.

You may need to increase the last number (tRAS) to get one or both manual settings stable. Your board sets tRAS to 31 on auto. I recommend downloading Memtest86+ and booting from it to test stability. This way you can't hose your OS if its not stable. If you have a floppy drive download the floppy version. If not get the ISO version and burn it to a CDR. Windows 7 pro has built in support for burning ISO files, just double click the ISO to bring up "windows disk image burner".

Boot from the disk you made to make sure it works. You may need to change the boot order in your bios to boot from the disk you made aka cdrom or floppy. Memtest will run all by its self with no intervention if you successfully booted from the disk. Esc will exit Memtest and reboot your PC. Once you have the boot disk working try setting the memory manually from the bios, save and exit. Once again boot from the Memtest boot disk. Let it run for several passes, it takes a while. Memtest will show memory speed and timings plus memory performance. If memtest shows no errors it should be safe to boot into windows and see what PT says.
http://www.memtest.org/

Bill

[College Smart]

Okay, I tried all 4 sticks at 5-5-5-15. Memtest checked out fine so I booted Windows. CPU-Z detected my entered timings just fine but said it was still single channel. I ran Performance Test and got the same results as before. Then, I tried 6-6-6-18 with just 2 sticks of KVR. Memtest checked out, CPU-Z showed my timings, but Performance Test still gave me the same results.

I'm wondering if maybe I should pick up a couple gigs of higher quality ram and sell what I've got. If my games run fine on 2 gigs I don't mind so much, and some quality RAM might alleviate this problem.

[David (PassMark)]

Would be good if you could borrow some to test before spending the money. While there is a fair chance it is RAM related it isn't 100% sure. Could still be BIOS or MB.

I did some more research and found a few other baselines (with the same MB) that have the same low results. For example Baseline numbers BL285667 and BL247088. In both cases they seem to have unmatched RAM and lower FSB speeds.

[College Smart]

Would be good if you could borrow some to test before spending the money. While there is a fair chance it is RAM related it isn't 100% sure. Could still be BIOS or MB.

I did some more research and found a few other baselines (with the same MB) that have the same low results. For example Baseline numbers BL285667 and BL247088. In both cases they seem to have unmatched RAM and lower FSB speeds.

Good point. I'm almost positive a friend of mine uses a DDR2 RAM, so I'll have to check with him.

[wonderwrench]

Yes testing different memory without spending money upfront is a very good idea. Its possible this problem is related to the Nvidia chipset so it would be nice to know there is a fix before spending money on ram.

BTW did you take note of the memory performance differences in memtest? Oh and the big thing is getting matching modules. I have used KVR in several builds and it has worked flawlessly for me. Money being no object I like Corsair and Crucial best.

Bill

[wonderwrench]

If you end up buying new ram go for two 2 gig modules if you want 4 gigs total. If your in the US Newegg has a 4 gig kit of Corsair for $80 with free shipping. $70 after $10 rebate. I use this exact memory in two of my three PC's and find its rock solid.

Bill

[College Smart]

Okay, a friend lent me 2, 2GB sticks of Buffalo premium RAM. I got some interesting but disappointing results.

First, the Performance Test results were a better, but overall still underperformed compared to other machines with identical CPU/Motherboards (not taking into consideration over-clocked processors).

Here are the CPU results:

CPU - Integer Math: 1249.9
CPU - Floating Point Math: 1919.4
CPU - Find Prime Numbers: 700.0
CPU - SSE: 7.1
CPU - Compression: 4345.5
CPU - Encryption: 12.4
CPU - Physics: 137.3
CPU - String Sorting: 1749.0
CPU Mark: 3158.2
PassMark Rating: 1358.0

So it's better than before, yet still lower than comparable machines.

Here's the graph for write results:


Again, these look better than before, but perhaps not as good as they could be?

And the Memory and SPD tabs in CPU-Z:



So I haven't really changed the timing on the RAM. The sticker on it says CL5 so perhaps I could change the tRAS to 15?

Also, my FPS is identical to using just 2 sticks of my KVR.

[David (PassMark)]

So it's better than before...

Indeed. Previous results, with mismatched RAM in single channel,
CPU - Physics: 67.0
CPU - String Sorting: 1028.0

Results with new matched RAM
CPU - Physics: 137.3 (105% improvement)
CPU - String Sorting: 1749.0 (70% improvment)

Plus the advanced memory test also reports better write speeds in main ram (at the 8MB block size). Maybe double what it was.

So this is a victory !

But I totally agree that something else is going on as well. All your CPU results, across the board, are now down a bit on where they should be. It also doesn't explain some of the other stuff you noted above.

Are you defintely running on 4 cores. Also check the edit / preferences window in PerformanceTest. The PT result almost look like you only have 3 cores available. Each result is now almost exactly 75% of what I would expect the value to be. Where has the 25% gone?