Benchmarking in Win7 Vs Win8

[Dead Things]

Have you disabled core parking in Win8? If not, try disabling it and see if that accounts for at least some of the disparity between the two.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Dead Things

Have you disabled core parking in Win8? If not, try disabling it and see if that accounts for at least some of the disparity between the two.

Worth a try, but shouldn't that have just the opposite effect?

I was under the assumption that win8 was supposed to be smart enough to know how to use each individual core before using shared resource ones.

[Dead Things]

That is the intended effect of Core Parking. Unfortunately, it couldn't be further from the truth. Natively managed core parking in NT6+ Windows is too aggressive, often leaving required resources un- or under-utilized. Prior to W8, simply changing power profile to High Performance would alleviate the issue for the most part. W8 requires a more direct intervention via reghack. Core Parking has an especially negative impact on the performance of post-Thuban AMD chips.

Core parking is evil.

[fortkentdad]

Originally Posted by Dead Things

That is the intended effect of Core Parking. Unfortunately, it couldn't be further from the truth. ..... Core Parking has an especially negative impact on the performance of post-Thuban AMD chips. Core parking is evil.

OK, I'll have to see what I can google but I have to say I've never heard of Core Parking. I would have thought that was what you did when you went downtown and tried to find a place to put your car.

Where can I find a step by step on what I need to do to see if this works. ....

And is my A10 APU one of those "post-Thuban AMD Chips" that are especially negatively impacted.

[AkG]

Yes. Yours is indeed a post Thuban chip (think 1090T). Its when AMD went from 4/6 'real' cores to 6/8 quasi cores that are more like "3/4" cores.

[Dead Things]

Originally Posted by fortkentdad

Where can I find a step by step on what I need to do to see if this works. ....

Easy-to-use GUI reghack for disabling core parking: Disable CPU Core Parking Real-Time - No Reboot

[fortkentdad]

I didn't find parking, or unparking made any difference in my scores. Should have posted that earlier.

[fortkentdad]

Been tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking.

My dearly beloved asks me why? "Well Dear, you see, um, frankly I don't know why. Because I can?"

Anyway I found out a few things about my system, don't know if one can generalize to other AMD APU A series like my A10 systems but what I found out was that Dual-Graphics mode (APU & one of my GPU's) works better than Xfiring two HD6670 in Win7 and for some games (eg Cliffs of Dover). And until today the Dual-Graphic - Win7 configuration produced better NovaBench scores than Win8. Win8's best scores came with the two HD6670's Xfired. No idea why Win7 scores when 2 HD6670's are Xfire'd are less than Dual-graphic while the Win8 is the opposite. I've done lots of tests and this contradiction seems to hold. Odd? There's probably a technical explanation about how the to OS's work differently but I have no idea.

Perhaps more useful information for other AMD Catalysts users is this discovery; The AMD Overdrive option that's in the Performance section of AMD's Vision Control Centre (catalyst) does not help my performance, it appears to hinders it. At least in Nova Benchmarks. Anyone else experience this problem with the so called "Overdrive'? I've not really done any real world testing using FRAPs for example. But should. Will post results when/if I get around to it.

I also discovered that ASUS Tweak does not work on ASUS's own HD6670's. When I used Tweak the minimum clock setting it would allow for the HD 6670's was 2000. The default is 800 and AMD's max recommended is 1000. When I applied 2000 the system just shut down, duh.

Then someone on this forum was saying MSI's Afterburner is a better GPU Tweaker than ASUS Tweak. So I tried it. And it works. Even though my cards are both made by ASUS, the MSI utility recognized them better. In the options I chose to override the max limits set by AMD. And tweaked away. Curiously, now when I open AMD's VCC and look at the Graphics Overdrive section, it return the values set in Afterburner and has a new max setting of 1300 for the Memory. Interesting no?

Curiously using this Afterburner I was able to coax a better score out of Win8 than Win7, setting a new high water mark in my Nova Bench scores. Blowing past my old Win7 score of 1080.



BTW I've signed up to beta test a new Nova Bench that will be coming out soon.

[sourthings]

I gave Win8 a spin and had too many issues with it, so shelved it and went back to Win7.

First my activation broke and MS couldn't fix it remotely, had to reinstall. Second I had issues installing video codecs. Then I started getting BSODs on a rock solid system under Win7.

At that point I went back to 7 :) I have been hearing win8 is more responsive when on the desktop though.

[fortkentdad]

Set another high water mark in Win8. Liking this Afterburner utility