CPU Performance

[NaughtyGnome]

Hello all,

I wanted to throw out a question for some advice on an issue / potential issue I am seeing from my relatively newly built PC.

Details of the PC Specs are in my signature but I've had a few issues with it.

Firstly, when I built the machine back in Feb, the build went pretty well, but I faced an issue with the SATA ports, none of them worked. I tried all different combinations and couldn't get them to recognise any drives. To continue diagnostics, I bought a PCIE SATA card and straight away the drives showed up and worked.

I then installed Windows and the software I needed and tested everything was still working, and all seemed to be good. I spoke with Overclockers support and discussed my options (RMA the board and CPU for testing and if issues were confirmed a replacement would be supplied) but given that it was working with the PCIE card, I wasn't overly thrilled at the idea of not having a PC for a period of time (I reused my case so my old PC was no longer functioning) I decided to leave it. I was told I could re-open the issue and RMA at any point during warranty if anything else happened or I decided I wanted to do it.

Fast forward a few months and a BIOS update or two and I've seen some things I'm not sure I would expect to happen when using the PC. For example when loading certain applications (Photoshop is one or Microsoft Flight Simulator) there are points during the load where the PC pauses, so if I have a youtube video on or a twitch stream they will pause as will anything else going on however This is not consistent, it's only once in a while nothing shows in the event manager at the points it happens and it always recoveres.

As a result, I've recently been testing for overall performance and I've concluded my CineBench R23 scores are possibly lower than they should be.
I've got a friend with a very similar setup (same processor, and a B850-E board instead of a B650-E board) and we both tested using the same version after a reboot of the PC's and he's ~2000 points ahead.

Mine
R7 9800X3D ROG B650E-E Kingston FURY Beast 64GB 6000MHz Multi Core Score 20789

Friends
R7 9800X3D ROG B850-E, 64Gb G.Skill Trident Z5 6000 Multi Core Score 22919

So my question is...
Would the board difference possibly be the cause of the performance difference? I've seen numerous other forum posts stating that people are getting around 22000+ on R23 with a 9800X3D. Do you think the possible issues with the board / CPU are causing the performance degradation?

Any other things you would do to test?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tetras]

Fast forward a few months and a BIOS update or two and I've seen some things I'm not sure I would expect to happen when using the PC. For example when loading certain applications (Photoshop is one or Microsoft Flight Simulator) there are points during the load where the PC pauses, so if I have a youtube video on or a twitch stream they will pause as will anything else going on however This is not consistent, it's only once in a while nothing shows in the event manager at the points it happens and it always recoveres.

Could it be that a drive has suspended and is being woken up? Not sure what other stuff is initialised with Photoshop and Flight Simulator,... USB devices?

Would the board difference possibly be the cause of the performance difference? I've seen numerous other forum posts stating that people are getting around 22000+ on R23 with a 9800X3D. Do you think the possible issues with the board / CPU are causing the performance degradation?

In the sense of the motherboard being broken or something like that, no, very unlikely. A 10% difference for a motherboard is A LOT. Have you tried running something like hwinfo's sensor tab alongside the Cinebench run? It might help you identify if the CPU is hitting the right clocks/power envelope. I assume you don't have any CPU intensive apps running alongside, like a dodgy motherboard/RGB control app that is eating CPU cycles?

Note that not everybody says what their PBO settings are.

 

[Quartz]

but I faced an issue with the SATA ports, none of them worked.

How many NVME drives do you have? On some motherboards using secondary NVME slots will disable the onboard SATA ports. I've skimmed the manual but can't spot anything.

To continue diagnostics, I bought a PCIE SATA card and straight away the drives showed up and worked.

Into which slot did you install the SATA card? If you installed it in slot 2 you cut the primary slot's bandwidth in half - from 16 to 8 lanes. Slot 3 is preferred.

 

[NaughtyGnome]

Could it be that a drive has suspended and is being woken up? Not sure what other stuff is initialised with Photoshop and Flight Simulator,... USB devices?


In the sense of the motherboard being broken or something like that, no, very unlikely. A 10% difference for a motherboard is A LOT. Have you tried running something like hwinfo's sensor tab alongside the Cinebench run? It might help you identify if the CPU is hitting the right clocks/power envelope. I assume you don't have any CPU intensive apps running alongside, like a dodgy motherboard/RGB control app that is eating CPU cycles?

Note that not everybody says what their PBO settings are.

Thanks for the reply

It could be the drives, it's certainly worth checking on that, it would also explain the randomness to it potentially. MSFS loads a lot of data on load from an SSD, I don't believe Photoshop does but it has plugins and modules so it might be those)

I did the cinebench run a few times, closed all apps I could, though I did have iCue running, but so did my friend, will try it without.

My PBO is off, I didn't confirm if my friends was off, will check.

 

[NaughtyGnome]

How many NVME drives do you have? On some motherboards using secondary NVME slots will disable the onboard SATA ports. I've skimmed the manual but can't spot anything.



Into which slot did you install the SATA card? If you installed it in slot 2 you cut the primary slot's bandwidth in half - from 16 to 8 lanes. Slot 3 is preferred.

I currently have 3 NVME's (the 4th slot shares bandwidth, so I didn't use it), but I tried it with 0 as part of the diagnostics, so I don't think it's that.

Slot 3 for the PCIE card

Cheers for those ideas

 

[NaughtyGnome]

Thanks for the reply

It could be the drives, it's certainly worth checking on that, it would also explain the randomness to it potentially. MSFS loads a lot of data on load from an SSD, I don't believe Photoshop does but it has plugins and modules so it might be those)

I did the cinebench run a few times, closed all apps I could, though I did have iCue running, but so did my friend, will try it without.

My PBO is off, I didn't confirm if my friends was off, will check.

I actually lied upon going into the BIOS PBO was on auto..... I thought default was off for PBO but I guess not.

So my scores
PBO on 20789
POB off 20539

During the PBO off run I monitored the CPU with HWInfo and all cores sat at basically 5.15 through the whole thing and temps hit about 84C and stayed there.

Thanks