Performance Enhance to Standard?

[jrboddie]

Hello. I am very glad to find this forum for Gigabyte support.

I just completed a build of a GA EP45-DS3L system and am in the process of testing its stability before switching my main use to it. The system uses an E7200 with 2 GB of DDR2 Corsair 4-4-4-12 (2.1V). After flashing to F7 BIOS and passing Memtest86+, I installed Vista-SP1 (32b).

The Vista install was not smooth. There were numerous black screen, blue screen and green screen failures in booting the OS while installing the updates to the OS and drivers. However, since the latest video driver update, the system has booted reliably for the past couple of days (only about 6 attempts though).

The only BIOS tweaks that I have done are the memory timings and voltage per the specs. I see that there are numerous threads here that recommend setting the RAM Performance Enhance parameter to 'Standard' instead of the default 'Turbo'.

Can anyone elaborate on this advice? Have you experienced significantly better stability? Is there any perceptable performance penalty? Do you have any other advice for increasing stability?

Finally, would there be any advantage to updating the Intel INF Installation listed in the drivers for this MB?

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

Yes, Standard is better for sure. But likely if you are not overclocking at all then you can leave it alone if it is working for you. Main thing why that is said often is because overclocking or not most users set their own timings, which you have partially done. So you may have less errors on standard as Turbo will make changes above and beyond what you set things at.

Yes, you should always install the latest Intel Inf Installer >>>
Download Software, Drivers and Utilities Filters

If you would like a full set of suggested timing ranges let me know your full specs and what you are running your cpu at now and what you would like to try and I will post you some settings

[jrboddie]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

Thank you for the reply.

As for updating the Intel INF Installation, I am not sure that I did it correctly.

1. I downloaded the file for vista from the Intel site.
2. I extracted the file using the command line with a -A option.
3. In the device manager, I seleced one of the Intel named devices under System and in Properties clicked update driver.
4. I browsed to the folder with the extracted files and clicked update.

After a successful update, I can see that the driver for the selected device was updated but I see no change on the others. Do I have to update them all? How do I know the installation file was updated?

I thought this installation file somehow managed all of the chipset drivers. What gives?

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

No, that is not how you need to do it. Download and install the .EXE file and double click it, that is it. Then reboot

The file is named >> "infinst_autol.exe"

[jrboddie]

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

Ya, you likely will not see much differences. It updates many things also not seen in device manager.

The Have disk method is for the NON exe driver package, which you do not need since the full exe will install them all. The only reason to use the have disk method and the other zipped package would be if you wanted to ONLY update one of the many drivers included in the package. Which I doubt anyone ever would, but I suppose if something was giving you a issue you could use that to manually install them one by one to see which one was giving the error.

But basically most all users only need to download and install the exe package to update all included drivers

[Octopuss]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

So what exactly does each of the three options do? I was googling for quite some time and didn't find any serious and definite answer.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Performance Enhance to Standard?

It changes the tRD (Static tRead Value) setting whenever it wants and makes it varied and depending on your overclock and other settings normally makes things fail. This setting is best set by the user, the tRD one that is, and performance enhance option set to standard.

The tRD setting is one of the most influential settings on performance, and should be manually set to the lowest possible stable number by the user not the Boards Own thoughts on it all.

It does changes some other settings that you cannot manually change, but as said above if you are overclocking at all it is best to leave on standard so you have control of what is set on what