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Joule
Guest
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 Posted:
Fri Mar 12, 2004 5:43 pm |
Anyone with an Athlon64 running cool-n-quiet? If so, are you having any issues?
I just built 2 shiney new athlon64 systems. One for me, one for a friend. My friend was upgrading from an old celery 300a @450 on an Abit BH-6 with a TNT vid card  Yeah, I don't know how he survived this long. Anyways, he is still hooked on the original UT since his old rig couldn't do anything more.
I enabled cool-n-quiet on both machines. I mean, the idea is stellar so why wouldn't you?
I installed UT. Fired it up to set the basic configuration. Played a bot match to test it out. Something isn't right here... When you are alone (no bots in sight) the game runs along at normal speed. When a bot or two come into view the game jumps into turbo mode. Unplayable. Like 2-3x the regular speed. Hummm.
So I installed the UT2K4 demo. While it played *mostly* fine, I noticed that the manta firing rate was slow. A few other things were odd but I really didn't think about it, nor did I do a side by side with my old rig. But something was a wee amiss.
Next I build my new machine. Same exact config (except drives). When I installed the 2K4 demo I was really surprised that the default visual settings were all really low. Huh? Well whatever, I kicked everything back up and all was good. Or so I though.
Curious about the behavior of UT, I did a wee bit of thinking.  Maybe cool-n-quiet was to blame? Theory: A game has to set the change in clock time (dt) per game tick so that one second on my end is the same as one second on your end. So what if UT does this once during loading. If a cool-n-quiet processor then kicked it up to full speed, the dt would be wrong and the game would run faster.
I had assumed that a game like one of the UT variants would put enough of a load on the system to keep it at full speed. This turns out not to be the case. Even with UT2k4 cool-n-quiet keeps my processor jumping around between 800MHz and 2000MHz (3000+).
So to make a long story longer, is anyone using cool-n-quiet and if so, how's your gameplay? I am not a game designer but is my theory only half- or is it full-baked? If I am fully baked, then c-n-q should pose problems for all sorts of games.
On a side note, if you *are* using cool-n-quiet remeber to set your power management to "Minimal" as noted in the AMD docs. I forgot this last step and my machine was fixed at 800MHz which is why 2k4 set all visual settings to low. Needless to say I have disabled c-n-q for now.
-j |
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Tycho
Wanna-Be Webmaster
Joined: 17 May 2003
Posts: 1041
Location: Grand Rapids, Michigan
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| Posted:
Mon Mar 15, 2004 12:41 am |
Holy Shit!!
Joule!!
To all of you people in here wondering who this guy is, he is a former Unreal Ops clan member.
I better see your ass around here more mister! |
_________________
In the Immortal words of Socrates who said, "I drank what?" |
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Joule
Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Mar 15, 2004 2:37 pm |
Tycho... I keep an eye on you guys 
FWIW I got UT1 installed on my machine *without* coon-n-quiet enabled and it plays fine. Well it actually plays like I am on crack or something because while it is consistently pegged at 85fps (with vsync on) it is jittery as hell. Dunno what the deal is there.
The bigger news is that there are people still playing UT1! I jumped online for some nostalgic fragging and it brought a tear to my eye...
I'm about ready to start looking for my Unreal CD.
So lesson here is that cool-n-quiet as it stands right now isn't much use to gamers*. I'm sure a lot of you hardcore o/c'ers are laughing but you just wait. You'll get old like me and desire stability and quiet operation over that 10% boost.
Now I am just waiting for EB to send that magic package.
-j
* Disclaimer - this opinion is based on my experience with my K8V deluxe BIOS rev. 1005. Other experiences may vary. Consult your doctor before reading. Serious side effects may ocurr. |
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