P771-DM1-G BIOS tweaks

Hi all,

I'm in the process of optimizing my P771-DM1-G for music production. It has a modest 16GB RAM (single chip) and a non K i7 6700. It also has a 980M but I don't think that's too relevant for this.

Using a non K CPU I'm obviously not too interested in OCing, though I would like to prevent significant throttling.

I have two main goals:
1. Keeping temperatures reasonable without running the fans at max or needing to throttle significantly.
2. Tweaking for lowest DPC latency.

Number 1 I've so far seemed to manage with a little advice and some poking around Throttlestop - I have adaptive undervolting of - 120mV (CPU and cache) and have been able to stop TPD throttling safely by unchecking "clamp" somewhere. I would like to move these settings to the BIOS but everything looks a little different and I'm not sure where to enter these settings safely. I also don't know if BIOS and Throttlestop undervolting are cumulative? IOW do I need to remove Throttlestop first?

Point 2 is a tricky one. Using Latencymon, I've found a few things that add "significant" DPC latency. I'm not sure all of them can be solved and definitely not all in the BIOS, but I don't fully understand all BIOS settings so I could really use some advice before I break anything.

Things that seem to add latency:

- WiFi and LAN (but only the odd bump), it goes away if I disable the adapters in Device Manager though so that's ok.

- to a lesser extent The Realtek audio driver, I can disable this in the BIOS if it proves too annoying.

- the NVidia 980m driver. It mainly gives lots upon lots of hard page faults. I don't fully understand what those are but with the LatencyMon meter spiking all the way into the red I'd like to understand what it means and preferably solve it. I'm running the latest drivers with stock vBIOS.

- C states and SpeedStep. This is where I'm a little in the dark. Clicking around in TS I can see a difference but I'm uncertain how safe or sensible it is to disable any or all of these. In several fora, "EIST" comes up as a possible source for DPC latency but I have no idea what that is.

- Worryingly, the touchpad driver seems to add about 80 microseconds whenever I touch the touchpad. It shows up as wfd01000.sys which is some Windows driver management component but I can see DPC latency go up by about 80 microseconds as soon as I touch the pad.
Not sure how to solve this one. Disabling the touchpad with function key makes no difference, interestingly - touching the pad still pushes up DPC latency.

I realize this is getting pretty specific but hopefully someone with some experience has a few pointers.

 

There might be somewhere in your bios where you can enter in your offset voltage settings but I have never seen the Clamp option in any bios. If your computer uses this, the only way to disable Clamp is by using ThrottleStop.

Here is everything you wanted to know about page faults.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askperf/2008/06/10/the-basics-of-page-faults/

More memory can help the cause but it is usually just a poorly written driver. Try a few different versions and see if that helps.

There is no reason to disable EIST (aka SpeedStep). You can get an i7-6700 to run at full speed without having to disable SpeedStep. Make sure you are using the Windows High Performance power profile with the Minimum processor state set to 100%. Most users doing music production disable all of the C States in the bios. If there is not an option in the bios to do this then you can disable all of the C States except C0 and C1 with a simple Windows registry mod. The CPU will be in the C0 state when it has something to do and will go into the C1 state when it has nothing to do. There is very low latency when the CPU needs to transition from C1 back to C0. Open up the ThrottleStop C States window to see what C States your CPU is using when idle. You can use ThrottleStop or probably your bios to disable C1E.

My original laptop touchpad driver was beyond horrible. When switching from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, there was a significant improvement but it is still not great. The driver is sampling the track pad at WAY too high a rate which causes latency. For music production, disable the track pad and try using an external mouse instead.

Bios and ThrottleStop undervolting are not cumulative. Use one or the other so they don't interfere with each other. If you set a voltage in the bios and you have checked, ThrottleStop - Unlock Adjustable Voltage, the ThrottleStop offset voltage setting will over ride your setting in the bios. If you want the bios to handle this, do not check Unlock Adjustable Voltage in ThrottleStop.

If you need some help, post some screenshots of your bios or of ThrottleStop.

 

Hi, thanks, that helps!

- I guess the NVidia driver is wonky then because even if I disable the page file altogether I get spikes of hard page faults. I may try Prema's vBIOS and a few different drivers. Kinda lame, I know it's been succeeded but it's still an expensive card.

- I can definitely set C States in BIOS, C1 and C3. I'll experiment with turning those off. I guess it's a power thing mainly then and shouldn't be unsafe to turn off?

I'll have to see what happens with throttling if I leave the "clamp" thing untouched in Throttlestop but set everything else to not throttle. Ideally, I would set up everything in the BIOS and get rid of TS altogether.

That's a bummer about the Touchpad. I wonder if I could get it to use a generic Windows driver or something. I already tried installing the latest driver and switching off some features but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

 

I just realized you wrote Throttlestop by the way! Kudos, what a great piece of software! My Clevo came with XTU which looked flashy but was awful, half the things didn't work and I couldn't autoload a profile.

I like TS, I just prefer having my setup as clean as possible so if I can get there through the BIOS that would save a background program.