M17X Poor performance, High CPU usage (interrupts) - SOLVED.

Hi All,

A few months ago I picked up an Alienware M17x with 8GB RAM and 2 x nVidia 260M for the purposes of being able to game while I’m travelling for work. After a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64, the latest nVidia drivers available on Dell’s support site, updated SLI profile, and other basic tools I decided it was time to get Everquest II loaded on it. To make a long story short, the performance was attorcious – severe choppy graphics, poor load times… essentially it was unplayable. After a few quick searches I noted multiple people with this problem (as it related to other games, and due to high interrupt / CPU usage – covered below), so I thought I’d post up my solution.

A check of performance metrics in task manager indicated my CPU cores were pegged. After shutting down EQ2 I noticed that CPU 0 maintained a steady state of 60% consumption without any applications or noteworthy background services running. No processes were consuming this CPU, and after delving into perfmon it became evident that CPU 0 was being dominated by interrupts. A quick peek at Windows Process Explorer confirmed that interupts were silently dominating my CPU usage (and killing performance). The Windows system event log indicated no notifications around failing hardware.

My initial suspect was the nVidia drivers (v8.15.11.8664); uninstalling them and running the base VGA drivers resulted in the interrupts ceasing (but of course you’re not playing any 3D dependant games with base VGA drivers). Reinstallation resulted in a steady stream of interrupts. Before I sought out other video drivers or [worse] decided to replace the nVidia cards with ATI cards – I decided to identify the cause of the CPU utilization using the command-line Xperf tool (available in the Windows Performance Toolkit).

The information was exceptionally useful at identifying the key problem. Pictured below you can see the % Usage of CPU 0 as almost a steady 60% due to interrupts:



Drilling into the summary table view of the high interrupt make-up revealed that the offender was actually RIXDPX64.sys, constituting 22.74% of the total duration spent on the CPU:



This driver turned out to be responsible for the Ricoh xD-Picture Card Controller (pictured below):



Once I disabled this device, the CPU immediately free’d up and both cores flatlined to roughly 0% utilization. A test of launching EverQuest II resulted in flawlessly smooth performance at Balanced and High Quality setting. All resources were behaving perfectly and the SLI really made a difference in comparison to my single video card setup. I hope this posting helps a few of you out there who I found essentially complaining about the same problem (high unexplained CPU, lots of interrupts, etc).

Good Luck!

 

Cris THANK YOU. I couldn't figure out for the life of me what my issues were, and I concluded they were related to the latency issues pointing to a BIOS upgrade solution. Wrong, wrong, wrong! My experience was so dreadful, I was ecstatic about my new M17X running dual MTX 280M's, only to find out that the first game I install on it (Dragon Age: Origins) was SO completely choppy and unplayable right from the opening title screen! I didn't even run into that much spiking/choppiness with my desktop 8800GTS 512!! So I knew something was up, but after finding no plausible solution I was ready to give up on her.

Thank goodness I ran across your post, and it's unfortunate but I believe that a LOT of other people are encountering the same issues with their video performance.

I hope more people stumble across this and more people generate new threads/solutions. Thanks again!

 

That was about as good as a first post as you will ever see, folks.

Good job and +rep

 

Agreed.

+1

 

when you said you "replace the nVidia cards with ATI cards" does that mean you bought a new card or had one laying around and then opened the computer and installed it? thats a pretty drastic fix for this problem, maybe i am misunderstanding what your solution was.

 

Please read the entire post.

 

great post
++rep!

welcome to the forum!

 

well i had never experienced issues like this but hey - thanks for posting, anyway it could be useful. +rep

 

community 100 - dell 0

 

Isn't this something that Dell could fix with a driver update or patch?

 

Dell has proven that a quick profit is more important than selling quality products. No Dell will not solve any issue unless Dell faces a collective lawsuit. Dell only care about profit-maximizing. Sad that Alienware was sold to Dell...

 

Yes this is driver related issue

@ crisbenge
I was wondering why on your device manager it shows only the Richoh xD-Picture Card Controller and not the rest of them like mine:
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/6609/devop.png

I also get these errors if I deactivate the device:
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/3676/ric.png

I don't know if they affect the system in any way. I have to find out

 

I am wondering if the OP had/has the RICOH driver installed from Dell's website or if he is running the one that Windows provides?
(the windows provided one could be the source of the issue)

Maybe that is the discrepancy in yours (stamatisx) and his (OP's) screenshots of Device Manager.

I know before I install the dell provided RICOH driver I only had one listed but have the 3 now.

I will be doing a fresh install in ~30mins once my data finished backing up and I will double check to see if this is the case.

D.

 

Just disable it in the bios, should be easier.

 

Yes that seems to be the case and if true then the problem with the increased interrupts would be the usage of the wrong driver.

What exactly disable in the BIOS?