high cpu utilization in hd tach

A

aznkid83

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 14, 2001
Messages
158
i have two mobo's that use the kt133a chipset with the 686b southbridge. one is the abit kt7a v1.3, the other is the msi k7t turbo-r limited edition. in both computers, running windows xp pro, i used hdtach 2.61 and get about 30% cpu utilization and about 66 MB/s burst. after tweaking the pci settings in the msi board i got it down to 20% cpu utilization and hitting 70 to 75 MB/s burst rate. i saw the same improvement using the built in promise ata100 controller. all drives are 7200 rpm with 8MB cache and are ata/100 and ata/133. i also installed george breese's pci latency patch version 0.20 build 21 just before i started tweaking the pci settings. i saw very little improvement. if anyone has any insight on this, please help me. thanks
 
i had the same problem with that motherboard. i have a feeling that it's just the VIA PCI latency issue causing problems.
 
Originally posted by dewhite
20% seems relatively good for using onboard controllers...
Click to expand...

It's unfortunately quite typical but nowhere near good. For example the IDE controllers on my old P4T533-C i850e (2.4a/533mhz) mobo and the SATA controllers on my Asus P4S800D-E Deluxe (2.8C/800mhz) show CPU utilization in the 2-4% range. The CPU utilization is not only affected by the controllers themselves, but also various latency issues, FSB speed and CPU speed given a constant controller overhead the more work done by the CPU the lower the percentage of that total work that is dedicated to the controller overhead.
 
i had a promise card one time and it too gave similar results. but is this percentage indicative of real world cpu usage? glad i'm not the only one seeing 20% numbers
 
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