TH7 IIR Nice board, crap performance?

[Drifting]

I bought this board after many recommendations.

1.7Ghz P4, 256,PC800, 2 x 40GB IBM Deskstar. Raid Striped. WinXP, Creative Nvidia 2 DDR, nice Antec case, cooling fan's galore!

So far I have found the benchmarks (Sisoft) to be right for the processor,but the Raid side of things, performance is always down! Tried the Madonion system test thingie and the processor was ok, but the disk perf, was mediocre.

Tried drivers, Bios 2.31(Even a hack'd one to match latest driver 2.31 by Tmod) reformatting with different sector sizes, you name it I have tried it. Currently running 16k sector size.

The problem is this, whenever I am in a game eg C&C or Renegade, the damn thing chugs!! Turned off all I can think of AV, etc. Radom reads seem to cause it issues

My old 1Ghz PIII MSI with Promise raid ****ed all over this crap Abit board.
Now I am willing to accept that something is amiss (I think the mainboard is faulty) or I am missing some magic setting somewhere, just wished I new where it was!

One weird thing which I hope someone can clarify for me. If you go to device manager and click on disk drives, then go onto device drivers, make a note of the drivers, then go to SCSI controller and make a note of the driver there, do they match? cos mine don't! the Disk device drivers are MS, the SCSI Highpoint 2.31.


So now the choice? do I just sling it? buy a new board that uses DDR? or stick with this board I have no faith in? To be fair, the board is stable, but so damn slow in use.

All comments welcome.

Sorry for the second post, Twit that I am posted it to a thread, rather than a new thread!

Paul.

 

[saytan]

seems like a drive thang


have you tried running 3dmark2k1

 

[Cooler666]

the hard disk benchmarks from Sandra are often completely wrong, just so you know. Get a better program for this.

 

[shadow]

INF drivers

do you have the INF drivers installed?

maybe you don't need them with XP...

 

[MrNatural]

Which bios have you flashed and what OS are you running? If you are running XP, then XP has HighPoint drivers which are the pits. You need to make sure you install the latest XP drivers from HighPoint which is meant for your HighPoint bios version.

 

[Drifting]

Thanks for the replies.

The bios is a 38 Mod for the 231 Highpoint, I also have the highpoint latest raid drivers 231 etc.

Annoying part is that these 'ere IBM drives used to fly with my old board. Beginning to think either the drives or the raid controller are faulty.

Just about to reformat and partition the drives, to see if that makes any difference. Any suggestions on the optimum sector size? Currently set to 16K, last reformat it was on 32k, may now try 64k for the hell of it!


Wonder if a quick Flash of your Bios Mr Natural will make any difference? Have to admit I am not a OC'er but considering it more every day

 

[MrNatural]

Thanks for the replies.

The bios is a 38 Mod for the 231 Highpoint, I also have the highpoint latest raid drivers 231 etc.

Annoying part is that these 'ere IBM drives used to fly with my old board. Beginning to think either the drives or the raid controller are faulty.

Just about to reformat and partition the drives, to see if that makes any difference. Any suggestions on the optimum sector size? Currently set to 16K, last reformat it was on 32k, may now try 64k for the hell of it!


Wonder if a quick Flash of your Bios Mr Natural will make any difference? Have to admit I am not a OC'er but considering it more every day

Well, the 39c has the 231. One thing that may also be causing your problems is the use of only 256meg rather than 512. You'll find with XP 512meg will do you far better than the 256 and you can increase you Raid 0 performance big time by having 512meg or more mem and setting you Sysme memory to Caching. Here's a couple of pics to should you what I mean.

This is my Raid 0 test under Sandra with out using the System Memory Caching scheme of XP.

This is my Raid 0 test under Sandra with the Sysem Memeory Caching scheme of XP.

Big difference huh?

This btw is not a bug. ATTO will do the same thing.

 

[Drifting]

WOW! What a difference!

Don't tell me I need not have formatted!! Sitting here on my portable, surfing whilst a new install of XP is going on my main machine!


I see what you mean ALMOST..

OK, will get some memory, what's this about caching? and where is the setting?

Cheers Paul.

 

[MrNatural]

WOW! What a difference!

Don't tell me I need not have formatted!! Sitting here on my portable, surfing whilst a new install of XP is going on my main machine!


I see what you mean ALMOST..

OK, will get some memory, what's this about caching? and where is the setting?

Cheers Paul.

If you install 512meg of memory then here's all you need do.

Before System Cache is enabled (XP Default setting)

After System Cache is enabled.

 

[Cooler666]

I enabled caching and i get exactly the same performance on my IDE and SCSI. I have 512 RDRAM.
does this only improve performance for RAID?

 

[batboy]

Sounds like a Highpoint controller/driver problem or maybe you need more memory as was suggested. I don't think it's a mobo problem though. Even with the TH7-II's bugs and faults, it's still the best P-4 overclocker available.

 

[dood_dk]

Everybody says drives or memory...i dont want to rag on the people that say this but i have 512mb samsung and 2 Seagate Barracuda IV`s and had the same problem. I ended up going back to a single drive system instead of the raid, it was faster!

 

[zzzz]

The segate baracuda drives don't perform well under raid 0.

 

[dood_dk]

That was my point...i had them on a Supermicro P3TDDE with a promise chip and it was fine......there doesn`t seem to be a common denominator,
D.

 

[ICEePC]

Did you guys read the front page it looks like an OS issue. I tryed system cache as well about a week ago trying to find a fix to no avail. I have a TH7 II-raid but my raid is running of My rocketraid133 pci card Plus I have 2 Maxtor 80GB ata133 drives Raid 0 that perform like a single ata 100 drive under sisoft. High point 2.31 bois and drivers.

Life sux....

 

[MrNatural]

That was my point...i had them on a Supermicro P3TDDE with a promise chip and it was fine......there doesn`t seem to be a common denominator,
D.

Seagate drives have a bug that Seagate has known about for several years. When placed into Raid 0 arrays the Seagate drives will crap out on the throughput and give worse performance than a single drive on the same controller. It happens on all controllers and under all OS systems. You may have seen better performance on the promise but it for sure wasn't what it should be. So like I said, it's an issue with Seagate drives of which Seagate knows about and has yet to resolve it after almost 3 years. Their SCSI drives work fine in Raid 0. It's just their IDE drives with the problem.

 

[batboy]

ICE beat me to this, but as of today, we have a blurb on the homepage that might cover this problem.

The SCSI (and RAID) X(P)-Rated Saga Continues A lot of people are getting slow disk performance under XP when they use SCSI or any form of RAID. This Storage Review forum post (search for the post from leokor, dated Sat Apr 06, 2002 8:47 pm, about 60% down the page). This fellow said that he had been in touch with MS and that they believed the problems stemmed from an OS issue. Let's hope so; people are pulling their hair out over there.

 

[ICEePC]

Seagate drives have a bug that Seagate has known about for several years. When placed into Raid 0 arrays the Seagate drives will crap out on the throughput and give worse performance than a single drive on the same controller. It happens on all controllers and under all OS systems. You may have seen better performance on the promise but it for sure wasn't what it should be. So like I said, it's an issue with Seagate drives of which Seagate knows about and has yet to resolve it after almost 3 years. Their SCSI drives work fine in Raid 0. It's just their IDE drives with the problem.

Thats right when it comes to IDE seagate does not put anywhere as near effort as they do for there scsi drives. There scsi drives take about under 5 seconds to produce each one and are put through more than double the stress tests than there IDE line.

 

[ICEePC]

ICE beat me to this, but as of today, we have a blurb on the homepage that might cover this problem.

The SCSI (and RAID) X(P)-Rated Saga Continues A lot of people are getting slow disk performance under XP when they use SCSI or any form of RAID. This Storage Review forum post (search for the post from leokor, dated Sat Apr 06, 2002 8:47 pm, about 60% down the page). This fellow said that he had been in touch with MS and that they believed the problems stemmed from an OS issue. Let's hope so; people are pulling their hair out over there.

I was talking about the same thing

 

[dood_dk]

Sorry about kr*pping all over this thread, but while i`m here, are there any reccomendations for ide drives to use on raid 0 or is it anything but seagates?
sorry again,
D.