Gearslutz thread on EIST, Speedstep, Turbo Boost etc

[valis]

There's a thread on gearslutz worth reading if you use a nehelem (i7 and on) based system and are concerned about low latency performance called C1E, C3, C6, EIST, Speedstep, Turbo Boost, Core parking (which was an outgrowth of another thread called Could this be why the Nehalem Mac's aren't faster?.)

Just in case someone is interested

[siriusbliss]

There's a thread on gearslutz worth reading if you use a nehelem (i7 and on) based system and are concerned about low latency performance called C1E, C3, C6, EIST, Speedstep, Turbo Boost, Core parking (which was an outgrowth of another thread called Could this be why the Nehalem Mac's aren't faster?.)

Just in case someone is interested

Yes, I spotted this post.
A good, educational read.

Thanks

Greg

[Sounddesigner]

Seen this topic also at Cakewalk forums, definitely a good read. I occassionally get a drop-out but i have always attributted that to badly coded vst plugins. I turned off all power-saving services after reading that thread and will monitor things now to see if i notice any improvements. Altho my system is pretty solid now and has been for awhile. When i first got my i7 i was constantly having drop-out problems but i switched to a different asio module on my Project card and they went away. I'm wondering if those problems were related to power-saving services somehow, but either way they appeared to disappear after testing several drivers and switching to the one that worked best.

If those power-saving services really are seriouse problems for many people and many people notice improvements with them turned off then it is bitter-sweet. It's great all get helpfull information on solving such problems but sad one needs to learn and tweak so much just to get a solid computer system. Such problems may have haunted some for quite some time now.


EDITED

[garyb]

yep.

[valis]

Well fwiw the Mac Pro related thread is discussing it in light of the fact that end users on Apple hardware have less ability to monitor & control these things, aside from some utilities originally created for notebook users who had dropout issues (and since the notebooks are still Core2 based and this is a Nehalem issue...)

Also fwiw my Core2/Penryn era Xeon box hovers at an average of 120-130us for my DPC latency when idle, and around 150 under an audio load when all C states & EIST is enabled. No spikes...

[Tau]

I really owe this forum a lot. I read this thread a few weeks ago, thought "interesting", but, since my system was up and running, I didn't change any settings. This weekend I updated my DAW to WIN7 and changed the Mobo. All was working very well, except for some crackles every once in a while. After doing the optimizations, and disabling most visual effects, I still had it.

Then I remembered this thread. I ran Asus AI, a monitoring utility for the Mobo, and noticed that, most of the time, my E6400 3GHz was running at 2GHz, and that the glitches occurred everytime it went into full speed. Going into the BIOS, I disabled Speedstep and C1E (the only options I had) and for sure, the CPU stays at 3GHz, and the glitches have gone.

This was happening in Ableton Live, and especially with heavier plug-ins, like Nebula3 or Reaktor. What's interesting is that in the old MOBO, the CPU didn't behave like this.

I would say, from this experience, that Speedstep and C1E should definitely be turned off. Thanks for sharing this info, Valis!

T

[valis]

Hopefully I can be so lucky as to have to worry about having a system that supports C1E & TUrbo and having to turn it off (though mine might wind up being a laptop as my desktop is still doing fine.)