SOLVED The more I overclock, the lower my disk performance.

[h4rm0ny]

(I'm using PassMark's Performance Test currently, for what that's worth.)

I'm slowly cranking up the OC on my new 8350. I haven't got anywhere serious with this so far, but as I creep up the clock frequencies, I can see the performance score on my processor rising, but the performance on my disk scores is taking a real beating.

I took the 8350 up from its stock 4GHz to a simple 4.6 with just raising the multiplier and feeding it voltage. CPU scores went up a reasonable amount, Memory scores went up a bit, disk scores dropped by around the same amount.

Wondering about the relationship between this and the base frequency, I lowered the multiplier and raised the frequency to get very nearly the same CPU speed. CPU mark increased a very small amount, memory performance jumped quite a bit (cool) and disk scores plummeted. Not only compared to stock, but they're about 32% lower score than almost the exact same frequency but just using the multiplier.

What's causing this? And is there a way to OC without causing this effect? Disk performance is important to me.

Rig in the Sig.

-H.

 

[redduc900]

What's the model of drive, and what controller is the drive connected to, the SB950 or the ASM1061?

 

[h4rm0ny]

What's the model of drive, and what controller is the drive connected to, the SB950 or the ASM1061?

I'm going off the overall "Disk Mark" score from Passmark's Performance Tester which just uses my C drive for testing. (I have six in total).

The C drive is a 120GB Corsair Force GT. It is connected to one of the brown SATA III ports on my motherboard. I don't fully understand your question but the motherboard manual lists two of the SATA ports as being connected via ASMedia. It is not connected via either of those. Hopefully that answers the question.

 

[EarthDog]

He wants to make sure you are plugged in to the AMD SATA ports as they are faster. The ASM1061 is the Asmedia ports and are NOT the AMD ports...

One thing to note about benchmarking an SSD, if you repeatedly pound on the drive (for example, raise overclock bench, raise overclock bench), you can get lower and lower results until TRIM runs. If you have an application with your SSD that forces TRIM, you may want to run that before your benchmark and see if it improves things.

That said, MEH on Passmark in the first place. I recall results being not consistent, but maybe that has changed. I just know that few people (here) use it.

 

[h4rm0ny]

He wants to make sure you are plugged in to the AMD SATA ports as they are faster. The ASM1061 is the Asmedia ports and are NOT the AMD ports...

One thing to note about benchmarking an SSD, if you repeatedly pound on the drive (for example, raise overclock bench, raise overclock bench), you can get lower and lower results until TRIM runs. If you have an application with your SSD that forces TRIM, you may want to run that before your benchmark and see if it improves things.

That said, MEH on Passmark in the first place. I recall results being not consistent, but maybe that has changed. I just know that few people (here) use it.

Yep, according to the motherboard manual, I'm plugged into the right ones. I'm not sure how I might manually try to trigger TRIM. Results for the drive did go down with each successive test up until I started adjusting the frequency rather than multiplier at which point they jumped up again, but some automatic TRIM thing could have happened between those. If you let me know how to do this automatically, I'll do a few tests at the same settings and see if they're consistent or they degrade.

Thanks both of you.

EDIT: N/M - worked it out. I'll try re-running the tests now.

 

[EarthDog]

Could have, but you or I do not know.

You want to MANUALLY run TRIM between successive benchmarks. I do not know how to do it manually with your drive. You can go to the Corsair website and see if they have a tool to do it.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Could have, but you or I do not know.

You want to MANUALLY run TRIM between successive benchmarks. I do not know how to do it manually with your drive. You can go to the Corsair website and see if they have a tool to do it.

I have Windows 8 so it's pretty easy. Just right-click on the drive and select Properties. It's under Tools->Optimize. By default it's scheduled to run weekly but I just triggered now and it said: "Trimming..." and appeared to be doing stuff. I did re-run afterwards but it didn't appear to make a large difference, just a small one. But I need to do more substantial tests at different overclock settings to re-check how they affect things now that I know about this.

Thanks.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Well I ran Crystal DiskMark with what I currently have (4.7GHz, combination of multiplier and frequency) and then back at stock. It was close to the same except 4K random reads and writes with a queue depth of 32, which is much improved on stock 86/109 read, 115/144 write (overclocked/stock respectively). Don't know why that is, but I'm inclined at this point to suspect that Passmark's disk assessment is influenced by other factors unduly. Crystal DiskMark did seem significantly the more sophisticated software for this.

So I'm going to write this off as "don't use Passmark for disks" and thanks for the responses. I've learnt from this at least. Marking solved!

The more significant problem I have now is that I think I just destroyed some of my memory. My computer just blacked out and restarted and when it came back on it only reported 8GB of RAM in both BIOS and Windows. CPU-Z however, tells me I have 12GB. I was playing around with overclocking it. I guess maybe it got burned out?

 

[EarthDog]

Im sure the memory is fine if its seeing it in windows. Did you try resetting the bios and see if that clears it up?

 

[h4rm0ny]

Im sure the memory is fine if its seeing it in windows. Did you try resetting the bios and see if that clears it up?

My computer keeps failing during windows start-up. At one point it showed 12GB with 1.6GB in use and 6.4GB available (!!!), the other times it merely showed 8GB memory.

Settings are now back to normal but the failures continue to happen and BIOS reports 8GB of RAM even though CPU-Z reports 12GB (when Windows stays up long enough to run it).

EDIT: Annnnnnnnd no sooner have I said that, than things seem to be back to normal. I did find that I hadn't set the voltage on the memory back to normal so I did that. BIOS is reporting 12GB and Windows is too. I feel like a UFO abductee - "it happened, man, it really happened".