Must-Read: SetFSB O/C Game Problems FIXED

TO ANYONE THAT USES SETFSB FOR GAMING LAPTOP OVERCLOCKING

and that's a lot of us

I recently discovered a problem with SetFSB causing 'timing issues' in games when overclocking. After a certain point, it becomes very noticeable that your games are out of sync; ever run an older game without a frame limiter and had it go in 'turbo mode'? Well, this is the same thing: even modern games can run 'too fast.' When overclocking my core i5, my character in Crysis would be running 50% faster! This is highly undesirable, and I have been searching for a fix for a week or so now. Apparently the issue hasn't been discussed much, but someone unexpectedly graced me with a solution!

Thanks to Unclewebb, the awesome, highly knowledgeable developer of the (IMHO) must-have overclocking utility 'ThrottleStop' (ESPECIALLY necessary for those of us with Core i 3/5/7 series CPU's in our laptops!!), I have found a solution for the game timing problems. Please read this post that he replied to me with, explaining the Why's and How's of it all:

Again, huge thanks to Unclewebb for figuring this out and taking the time to reply to me.

I am now running a constant 3.1 Ghz overclock while gaming, and my games are perfectly 'timed/syncd.' Awesome!

Also, if you want to achieve maximum Turbo Boost under load or push your laptop's performance to the max, ThrottleStop is a must-have.

For reference and context, please refer to this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu.../568525-setfsb-game-timing-problem-g60jx.html

 

I guess this helps those with an extreme cpu oced under windows after it has booted to desktop as well?
I have to check it out.

 

You only have this problem when using SetFSB or a similar program that changes the bus clock speed. When you overclock an Extreme processor like the X9000 by changing the multiplier, it doesn't screw up the internal clocks so everything should be OK. You can run the WinTimerTester program, links above, for about a minute to make sure that your clocks are in sync.

 

A note for some people with dual HDD:

if you have a separate boot manager (linux, mac etc) you will need to either take out that hard drive and then do this, or just use a bcd editor.

 

Thought this can help as an added info.
As you can see i own an X9000 on my xps m1730. First is oced to 3,4ghz thru bios as dell have a setting for it, then its oced to 3,8ghz using your little gem,TS.

Now i ran the utility for 60-100 seconds and it wasnt really linked 1000:1, it was constantly little less, like 0.987. After the command line edit it reaced 1000:1 after 20 seconds and stays there all the time, so effectively this edit does something on xtreme cpus as well, at least on my side.
Now im aware that 0.987 and 1000 are nearly the same thing, but since the edit made instantanely difference, it may be worth to add it as well as a "side effect".

 

Bumping this so others can see it

 

Kingpinzero: When I originally discovered this issue, I didn't get a lot of feedback so I appreciate your testing. Most desktop owners do the majority of their overclocking in the bios so this was not really an issue for them.

In theory, when Windows first boots up, it is supposed to sync these timers so they both run at the same rate. I'm not sure why your laptop does what it does.

I originally did some testing on a desktop QX9650 which has an adjustable multiplier. Changing the multiplier didn't have any affect on the timers so they continued to run in sync at 1.0000 : 1 like they are supposed to.

 

Thanks to you for your awesome support.
If i get time to spare ill double check my m860tu with the x9100 as well.

 

Dufus posting something similar few months back, here is the link to his post, he even made a program to check whether you running on HPET or not

 

Dufus is the one that originally told me about this fix so I wrote WinTimerTester to test for this issue.

I couldn't remember his name here on Notebook Review to give him credit. He goes by the name somebody on XtremeSystems and he has also helped me with many of ThrottleStop's important features.

 

Thank you so much for this thread. I used SetPLL to bump up to 180 and couldn't understand why my FRAPS and in-game FPS counters were going down instead of up, while other benchmarks increased.

Input that one entry into the command line and I'm back to normal!

Edit: ALTHOUGH, I do notice now, that when I do this and change the FSB with SetPLL, that ThrottleStop doesn't change it's MHz listing for the CPU. For instance, if I boot up at 180MHz and then use SetPLL to clock down to 167 or 133, the indicator in ThrottleStop still shows "180Mhz," even though benchmarks show a notable decrease in actual speed. Odd.

 

You're welcome. Hopefully more people see this that wanted to overclock but couldn't because their games were getting all squirrelly.

 

You need to press the BCLK button to detect the new clock.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I figured that out after re-reading the ThrottleStop guide. It just caught me off-guard because I didn't have to until now.

 

As DavyGT mentioned, after you use SetFSB, you will need to manually click on the BCLK / FSB button to get ThrottleStop to recalculate your new bus speed. I'm kind of anal when it comes to applications that sit in my system tray 24/7 so I decided to make ThrottleStop as efficient as possible.

If you want this to be taken care of automatically and don't mind burning up some CPU cycles then try adding this to the ThrottleStop.INI configuration file.

AutoUpdateBCLK=1

This will check your bus speed every 6 seconds and if it has changed by more than 1 MHz, it should recalculate it for you. I added this option for Nando4.

 

@unclewebb
sir i just want to say that this is a great fix you found. and your tool is very usefull, i stopped using setfsb because i thought it is slowing my system. and i never thought that setfsb is messing the timing bigtime. now i use setfsb and seeing its true performance result.

 

We can all thank Dufus on NBR. He's the guy that clued me into this timer issue and how to fix it.

There are a surprising number of programs that ignore this problem and don't try to correct for it, including FRAPS. When SetFSB screws up the main Windows QueryPerformanceCounter function, many benchmark programs and games can't accurately measure time anymore so their results can't be trusted.

I hope this thread gets stickied someday because both users and programmers need to know about this.

 

I hope if you have time you could add a feature in your WinTimer program to have an option to minimize it in the system trey like your throttlestop(which is a great program too, mainly used it for monitoring).
Also if i let the WinTimer to just run does it uses a big amount of cpu processing? btw my ratio stable at 1.00 after around 30+ seconds which i think its great.

 

There's no reason to run WinTimerTester for more than a minute or two so I never added an option to minimize it to the system tray. Your timers are either running in sync or they are not running in sync. If you use SetFSB and your timers are not running in sync and you are running Windows 7 then do the fix that is outlined in the first post, reboot, test again for a minute or so to confirm that you fixed the problem and you are done.

After that there is no need to ever run WinTimerTester again. Once fixed, the QueryPerformanceCounter function will measure time using a counter that runs at a fixed rate regardless of whether you are overclocking or not. The problem caused by SetFSB is permanently fixed.

It should be extremely efficient for anyone that wants to run WinTimerTester for a longer period of time but there is no reason to do this.

 

yeah i notice that when you use the setfsb the time is out sync, ratio will go above 1. Thanks for the infos sir.

 

This should be a sticky. Yay after months of switching profiles backwards and forwards i can finally play my games with cpu overclock. So glad to find this thread. Thx Uncle.

 

I agree this should be a sticky its just fantastic I was hoping I would not have to splash out and get a 920xm but was just about to when I saw this thread and it works like a dream and fixed all my gaming problems when o/c

Im now running my 720QM at 1.93 - 3.2+ ghz and the timing is spot on.

Very simple and straight forward instructions the only problem I had was that command would only complete the change when ran as admin.

Many thanks

 

Is there any downside to the fix? Otherwise, might as well just do it without even testing..

Edit: When I enter the command it says "The boot configuration data store could not be opened. Access is denied."

 

I was wondering the same thing is there a reason not to do this or to go back if you have already done this?

 

None that I can think of. Never have any problems since I changed it. Make sure you run command prompt as an administrator and try again

 

Does anyone know how much you have to increase your bclk before this is an issue?

Thanks,

StevenX

 

/facepalm Yeah, I should have thought of that thanks..

At a whopping 159 mhz I'm already getting a ratio of 1.19

 

159 MHz / 133 MHz = 1.195

The amount of error is exactly equal to the amount you overclock the bus speed.

As soon as you overclock using SetFSB or a similar program by 1 MHz, you are introducing error into the high performance timing function that many Windows programs including games and 3D benchmark programs.

I can not think of any reason why a person would not want to fix this problem with the simple solution posted. I like to test first with WinTimerTester just to confirm that you have this issue. There's no need to apply this fix if you don't have this problem and your timers are always running in sync.

All you are doing is telling Windows to base its high performance timing function on a fixed counter that won't be affected by changes in the bus speed. Most users don't use SetFSB so Windows thought it would be a good idea to base its timing function on the bus speed. It sets this up at boot time but never updates it when Windows is running so it does not correctly deal with changes made by SetFSB. I guess the theory was that basing time off of a 133 MHz bus speed would be more accurate than basing it off of a 14 MHz or 2.04513 MHz fixed counter. Nice theory but that theory goes out the window when a user decides to use SetFSB and changes the bus speed without Windows knowing about it. A 2 MHz counter is going to be able to accurately measure time to 1 / 2,000,000 of a second (0.0000005 seconds) which is plenty accurate enough. There was no need to base this timing function on the faster bus speed to increase accuracy.

 

thanks for the reply I will try this and see if it helps

 

If you try this and don't like it, the first post shows how to go back to the way Windows 7 shipped.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft based timing off of a fixed rate counter so this was never a problem when using SetFSB. I'm pretty sure the early beta versions of Windows 7 continued to use a fixed rate counter but when the retail version of Windows 7 shipped, they went back to using the bus speed for high performance timing purposes which causes big problems for SetFSB users.

 

Im running 154 Mhz and my ratio stays at 009.998 and flicks down and up and does not go anwhere near 1.19?

All I can say is that its working fantasticly for me and my overclock is giving me the exact results I was looking for.

 

Sorry to bring this back up, but I can't seem to use the command in the OP. I've opened CMD Prompt as an administrator and it still doesn't work. Any ideas?

Edit* think I found my problem

going to try now.

That was it. Thanks.

 

Make sure you are running command prompt as administrator

right click run as..

If not it wont work unless you have turned off UAC.

 

I'm now running 146.316=1902.1, not too bad.

 

Hmm very interesting. But since i sold my oc C2D laptop and bought a new one i am not affected by this anymore. Well, i try now to figure out how to OC my Toshiba L650-1mt can be oced.
CLG is ICS ICS9LPRS3197 but it isnt supported by SetFSB or any other software.
ThrottleStop can take control over the i3 380M multiplicator somehow. Not perfectly but i can underclock it how i wish and sync works.