Sandy Bridge

[Stereodude]

Aren't we still waiting for an Intel chipset that delivers the full capabilities with Sandy Bridge CPUs?

Sort of. The Z68 chipset will allow overclocking + use of the integrated graphics. Currently it's an either or.

 

[time]

Probably a coincidence, but I notice that 10 out of 18 Asus s1155 boards use the P67 chipset, but only 2 out of 9 Gigabyte boards.

Luckily for me, I went with the 78% majority. Unless the advisory changes, of course ...

 

[time]

Scratch that, I checked more reliable sources such as Anandtech and it afflicts all Cougar Point chipsets. The only saving grace is that the 6Gbps ports should be unaffected, so as long as you only need one hard drive and one optical drive, you're sweet. :cursin:

 

[ddrueding]

Meh. Just use a pci-e based ssd and you're set.

 

[Adcadet]

In one of the SB threads somebody asked about Windows User Experience scores. Here's mine:

2600k @ 100 MHz *48 (4.8 GHz), 16 GB RAM at 1600 MHz CAS9, processor is 7.7, RAM is 7.9.

 

[Stereodude]

I found a nice bug in my Gigabyte motherboard. Running the RAM at 1600MHz (it's rated speed) instead of 1333MHz prevents the CPU from dynamically changing it's clock speed as the load on it changes.

The the RAM at 1333MHz the core will dynamically drop the CPU multiplier down slowing the CPU to under 2gHz (if the core is basically idle). With the RAM at 1600MHz the CPU multiplier just sits at whatever the BIOS is set to regardless of CPU load. :cursin:

 

[Stereodude]

ThrottleStop is definitely something to look at if you're using a Sandy Bridge CPU. You can see how / if your CPU is being throttled under load and control it.

 

[Adcadet]

Weird. Did you disable Speed Step or something?

I recently found that my board has some difficulty with 4x4GHz sticks in place. Getting them to work initially required some work, and now if I reboot I'm fine, but if I power off/on I have to hit the "memOK!" button and then reset them to 1600 MHz.

 

[Stereodude]

Weird. Did you disable Speed Step or something?

I recently found that my board has some difficulty with 4x4GHz sticks in place. Getting them to work initially required some work, and now if I reboot I'm fine, but if I power off/on I have to hit the "memOK!" button and then reset them to 1600 MHz.

No, I figured it out though. :idea:

You have to change EIST and all those power saving things to enabled instead of Auto. Apparently it assumes that if you're running 1600MHz memory you don't want them enabled so there Auto = off. With 1333MHz memory Auto = on. :bstd:

 

[snowhiker]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4146/gigabyte-announces-6series-motherboard-replacement-program

Gigabyte announces motherboard replacement program.

 

[time]

Yeah, they announced it the very next day after Intel went public. They've also explained that the two SATA 3.0 ports are okay.

Crickets chirping from Asus, so far.

 

[Adcadet]

Not true - here's a blurb about Asus's response from Feb 1:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20345
http://event.asus.com/2011/SandyBridge/notice/

 

[time]

Good to hear.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, I found something that makes my Q6600 @ 3.0gHz feel slow. BD Rebuilder.

It turns out BD Rebuilder doesn't even use the slowest / most CPU intensive modes of the x264 encoder. Doing a manual encode with x264 outside of BD Rebuilder takes about 24 hours to complete both passes even on my Core i7-2600K at 4.2gHz when set to the highest quality settings.

And, the 2600K is about 2x as fast as the Q6600 @ 3.0gHz. :erm:

 

[ddrueding]

How are the results?

 

[Stereodude]

How are the results?

They seem good.

It took a while to find this, but apparently BD Rebuilder correlates to x264 like this:

BD Rebuilder - x264 preset
High Speed (BD-25) - superfast preset
Good (Faster) - preset veryfast
Better (Fast) - preset fast
High Quality (Default) - preset medium
Highest (Very Slow) - preset slow

There are 2 additional higher quality settings in x264.. slower and veryslow Apparently you can initiate the slower preset by editing the INI file to ENCODE_QUALITY=4. You're on your own for veryslow.