Basic guide for performance boosts and solid programs

I am making this as a basic guide for generic solid 3rd party programs and performance improving "tweaks" or whatever you want to call it. I added a section for battery saving techniques would anyone want to make a new thread just on that?

Please let me know if there are any other threads worth noting on performance. Also as this grows it will advantually just link to several threads that cover cpus, gpus, harddrives/SSDs, and drivers/software. This will help it not be a cluster F ^^

Some tweaks have the potential to damage your computer....you have been warned

Performance "tweaks"
Note:Check driver and software section for solid software for overclock and monitoring.
Software to overclock your graphics card.
Nvidia nTune I believe NTune has been discontinued and added into the newest drivers install. I think it's under control panel and you select performance to open overclocking feature.
ATI Overdrive
Overdrive is also built into ATI Catalyst Control Center

This has helped some people with the responsiveness of the i7 (some i5s are affected too. I do not know about the i3)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/486478-fix-win7-i7-sluggish-performance.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...pll-pinmod-overclocking-methods-examples.html "Sometimes the PLL registers that setFSB and similar programs need are locked, this thread is about unlocking a PLL so that setFSB could be used to overclock. It also has examples on how to permanently change the FSB without using software." -Moral Hazard

Throttle Stop is one of the main programs you can use to overclock many different CPUs ranging from Core 2 Duos to Core i7(maybe Core Duos too???). It also has a feature that allows you to manipulate multipliers on the 920XM/940XM that is not allowed on any other i7 CPU. Links below provide further information on overclocks and the various other programs.
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Need both to gain all benefits of overclocking
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SetFSB Home Page
i7 quad cores can only be overclocked by setFSB method. The i7 Extremes can be overclocked by a couple other methods as well. These methods include multiplier manipulation and TDP/TDC adjustments, which can be done by ThrottleStop above.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/499768-m15x-fsb-overclocking-not-only-920xm.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/495203-how-oc-m17x-r2s-920xm-940xm-using-setfsb.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/476426-m17xr2-overclocking-guide.html This link also have GFX overclocking in it too.


Thread for improving CERTAIN core2 Duos.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...c-acceleration-ida-both-cores-core-2-duo.html



How to unlock multipliers for Core2 extreme
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...unlock-core-2-extreme-multiplier-windows.html


Important drivers and software I am looking to put all current drivers here. So this can be an easy source for people to find any driver they may need. Remember that the bottom link on thread to the Windows free programs is a great source for more programs.
This website tells you what all the programs in Vista do so you can pick and choose, which ones work and dont.
http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/services#diag


New Intel RST Drivers. These drivers have helped many people improve SSD performance. People have reported 1-2 second decrease in boot times from the previous IRST drivers.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...20325-new-intel-rst-10-0-0-1043-beta-out.html
CrystalDiskInfo
CrystalDiskMark

HWinfo
SpeedFan
HWMonitor
CPU-Z This allows you to see info on your CPU and motherboard
GPU-Z Allows you to see the freqs and temps and other info on GPU.
RealTemp

Nvidia drivers
ATI Drivers
Anyone recommend a good Nvidia/ATI drivers that are third party? I know there is omega and tweakforce?(forgot name) Also which is better. Nvidia’s newest drivers or an older "tweaked" 3rd party?



Copper mod and other ways to cool your laptop
This thread shows you how to help reduce your temps in your laptop for extra overclocking ^^

Forge's copper mod

Soviet Sunrise's copper mod


Hints for optimizing your hardrive
HDTune pro (allows you to set the AAM, which raises or lowers seek time)
Is there an alternate program that is free? My external is defaulted at a crappy setting. With HDTune pro I get 14.3ms without it I get 18-19ms :/

Way to activate a Win7 Feature to optimize your OS files
http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/429792-defragmenting-boot-files-under-win7.html

Note that one of the biggest benefits of putting important files especially OS files on the outer part of the drive is that it gives you the lowest latency of the drive too. Reason for this is that smaller files will load faster with lower seek times, which is important for OS start up. Screen shots showing this posted below.
Source that further explains what I am talking about.
One way to optimize certain files is to make different partitions. The first partition is on the outer part of the hardrive and the other partitions work their way inwards. So if you want to optimize your OS you can make two partitions for your OS drive. If you got a 320gig hardrive make the OS partition first and have it be 50gigs and make the second one 270gig. This will keep your OS on the outer part of the platter. I also have a 1TB external. It has 130MBps on the outer part and 70MBps on the inner most part. I will make a partition that’s 400gigs for my games and 600gigs for my movies/music/iso files. This will allow my games to perform around 100-130+MBps and movies from 70-100MBps. Now if you need your media files to be faster for encoding/coding or whatever all you need to do is the exact opposite.

Screenshots showing the difference in performance of the inner and outer platter.
http://img541.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=internallol.png

Note:Ignore the flat line in HDTune Pro. It is inaccurate. This link explains my findings on HDTune/HDTunePro Also note my external in the HDTune Pro tests has AAM at performance. I will post another picture when I get the chance showing it with quite setting on AAM. That will show the differance in latency in a hardrive with performance or quite settings in AAM.


How to improve your SSD performance
Many people have reported poor SSD performance on the PM55 and HM55 chipsets. This link below tells you how to fix it. This has been reported to help other chipsets too.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-intel-series-4-5-965-chipsets-jjb-tweak.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-series-4-5-965-chipsets-stamatisx-tweak.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...sd-performance-tips-underperforming-ssds.html

Ways to save battery
This could easily be a separate thread. Would anyone want to make a thread that is all about saving battery life? Or is there one already made?

www.batteryspace.com has a forum with all sorts of DIY info. Also if you post your own DIY they will give you a ~$10-30 gift card or something like that.
Rebuilding Your Battery
If your battery is no longer holding a charge a cheaper and better way is to replace the cells. You can go to www.batteryspace.com for replacement cells. Make sure you buy the highest capacity cells. They should actually give you more battery life than your old battery. Plus nanowire batteries are just coming out into the market. I know of only one type of nanowire battery cell being sold currently but batteryspace.com has told me they are working with suppliers to become a reseller of even more nanowire batteries. I will update this as soon as i get more info. As soon as these babies come out all my electronics will be replaced with these ^^ Laptops, cellphones, flashlights you name it. It'll have them ^^ Check this thread for more info about them. http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...batteries-just-around-corner.html#post6886321

Build Your Own Battery Backup
You can go to www.batteryspace.com and buy the parts to build your own battery back up. Ranging from one to fit in your backpack or one to power your house! Let your dreams come true....if your wallet can handle it lol. I mention later in post about nanowire batteries coming out. These will have several times the battery life of current batteries so powering your cell phone, laptop, desktop, or even your house will be even easier. But back to the point, you can make any size, shape, or power output you want that fits your needs. Once nanowire batteries come out i plan to make a battery pack that fits in my laptop backpack lol. It'll be like the size of a book ^^ That'll give me hours of battery life without limitations. It'll think that i am plugged into a wall so it won't even throttle....mobile gaming for hours!!!

Undervolting
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...arket-upgrades/235824-undervolting-guide.html


Other useful links
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-ever-growing-free-windows-software-list.html

I would like to give much thanks to all the authors of these threads and others who have contributed to making all these efforts possible.

Throttling
Throttling is a major problem with some laptops that kills their performance. Some manufactures resort to throttling their laptops for several reasons. One is that they are too cheap and give you a weak psu and another reason is to limit the amount of heat your computer generates in an effort to keep the temps down. Throttling can be insignificant to very troublesome. Luckily people like unclewebb have come up with ways to beat it. His program called ThrottleStop has solved many cases of throttling. Ranging from Dells to ASUS and to Alienware. There are many threads about throttling and different laptops that do it. Feel free to check my sig out and look at how it affected my laptop. You can try some of the tests that we did to see if throttling is a major issue for your laptop. If you find your laptop has throttling than quickly post on the forum asking for help on how to fix it.

***Can someone make a new thread for throttling that I can link...I really don't know much about it***

Been very busy i will update this more when i get a chance...if you got any edits or suggestions plz post them i'll add

 

Unlocking the multiplier is only available for Extreme CPUs (at least going upwards, any CPU can be set at a lower multiplier).

 

thx what about the IDA does that work for extreme core 2s?

 

So Throttlestop won't work unless I have an 'extreme' edition CPU?

 

no it works for many different kinda of cpus from core2s to i7s i dont know if it works with core duos though

 

To tweak ATI graphics you can use ATI Overdrive, which is built into CCC.

 

Thanks, I'll check it out. Hopefully it's easy to use and doesn't require too much mucking about.

 

comon guys i need some help here ^^ any other good thread on performance? Also what about third party drivers for graphics cards? Also what are important drivers that windows doesn't auto update?

 

Not true. I have my 2nd core IDA unlocked (P8600) and both set to run at a 150mhz overclock thanks to Throttlestop. It's because I have a Dell though. Supposedly this ranges from not as easy to do to not possible on other manufacturers.

There are a very few amount of i7 cores TS will work with but it's only those models. Intel has not released the specifications of the Arrandales to allow software developed that can modify the voltage. I don't know what singles out these few i7s though. It may just be a brute force overlay of the program.

The thread in the original post on the "Unlocking dual IDA multipliers in C2D" or however it's titled has all this info in it. The guy who wrote Throttlestop, unclewebb has been hugely helpful to anyone with questions and is VERY knowledgeable on CPU sleep states and how these things can be manipulated.

 

nice thread dc. +1
sent you a pm on some suggestions.

 

I've found that disabling as many services as not needed to be the biggest performance mod for me, aside from the dual IDA thing. My Dell won't allow overclocking on CPU or RAM so I'm stuck with things as is.

I had this in my bookmarks. It's far from complete but gives a decent starting point. Any service you Google will come up with results and you can decide if disabling or leaving alone is best for you. I have over half of the Windows services on my computer either set to manual or disabled. The OS is totally stable and have no issues with anything.

Another thing about Throttlestop. It is intended to take the place of RMClock. You can't undervolt with RMC and then do the IDA mod with TS. But with Throttlestop, you don't need RMC anyway because the key to getting it to work is disabling Intel Speedstep in Bios so you only have your highest FID multiplier and then your sleep states, that's all. TS also won't do anything to core i3, i5 and most i7 processors.

Good luck with your thread.

 

look into the PLL overclock. i think that thread tells you how to by pass it so you can over clock

 

Why do you need free software that can change AAM?
Just use the trial of HD Tune Pro and set the AAM the way you want it...
Not like it's going to undo the changes if you uninstall it or when the trial runs out...

 

it does actually. The AAM resets once HD Tune Pro is closed :/ I don't know why

 

So you need to keep it running all the bloody time? That's pretty useless then.

 

not with a 20ish% increase in access times lol. plus the app minimizes to tray very nicely and doesn't use much resources.



EDIT: Just not worth 25 bucks ^^

 

You do understand that services consume zero processor resources until the event that they service is actually invoked? Even the memory they "consume" is released when they are not in use. So there is really very little to be gained by disabling them. They do slow down the initial boot up of the machine a very small amount as they initially load and register their events with the OS, but after that they sit dormant until the correspnding OS event occurs. If set to manual, that event may cause a delay as the service is started. For some services there is no issue with that, for others that delay can be a bad thing.

Now that is not to say that you should never disable or set any services to manual. But there is litltle to be gained by doing so.

Gary

 

Try HDDScan. It's free. It has AAM settings too and other features and tests.
Although, after changing the AAM from 128 to 254, I'm still getting about 17.5ms.
HD Tune pro doesn't let me change it...it says error setting it. So maybe HDDScan isn't actually changing it either.
Anyway. Look into HDDScan, it's free...

 

Can't edit posts........

HD Tune pro says my drive doesn't support AAM, which makes sense I guess sense it's not able to change it. But...It's a Seagate 7200rpm ST9320423AS, I figured all current drives support AAM nowadays?

 

alright i'll check it out but yea you would be getting alot better seek times than that if it worked. also for me the crystal mark info AAM doesn't work but the hdtune pro does. i'll add that app to list after i try it

EDIT: i don't know why your drive doesn't work. thats a good question

 

Taking Windows from 70+ processes down to 52 has made the startup noticeably quicker. I'm also OCD like that, I don't want things running that I don't have use for but others may not mind.

However I don't understand how if say a pop filter software for the built in mic is running and using 2.5k of memory, how and when is that 'released'? I don't find that it is. The program isn't prioritized (maybe it roughly is above SVCHost or stuff like that?) and it's running until the user tells it not to. It will also start every time with Windows unless the user says otherwise. If something is running, even as a background service, it uses memory. My Avira mail scanner isn't scanning anything now but still uses 766k. Could you explain a bit more please?

 

though that little bit of memory is trival...unless your on a netbook lol. i would definitely say that would help with boot times.

 

As I said, the services loading at boot time will indeed have an effect (albeit small) on the load time. But the background services are, just like all other apps, able to be paged out as memory is needed by active apps and services. Take your Avira mail scanner for example, it registers itself at boot time with the OS to be notified to run when a particular event occurs and then goes dormant. At that point the OS is free to page it out if the memory is needed. When the assigned event occurs, the OS pages the service back into RAM and triggers the service to run. When the service is done it goes dormant again. The memory management in Vista and Win7 is much improved over the previous versions of Windows, to the point that there is little need to really be concerned about these services.

Sure there are exceptions to this. There are some services that you just don't need. (Hello Apple, I don't own any of your overpriced hardware but I do have iTunes, so I don't need your stupid service that monitors my system to see when an iWhatever is attached.) And sure services do take an extra couple of milliseconds to initialize at boot time. But after that, the difference in having them loaded and not having them loaded is negligible. I had a link to some empirical test results that showed how little they affected performance, but I'll be damned if I can find it. I'll look on my office machine tomorrow. But it was eye opening. This was very different in WinXP days and a lot of the myths about services stem from the memory management under WinXP. And thankfully we don't have that anymore.

Gary

 

so damn true ^^ stupid apple. Side note. don't get me started on how mac pros are 800 bucks over priced....buy a dell or asus or whatever and by the mac os for 40 bucks lol.

though I do remember quite well in xp days with its awesome memory leaks lol. Ever have GMT.exe decide to take 99% of your cpu? I had that problem forever...i had to keep putting it on the lowest priority setting to compensate :/

 

Alright i added a couple new things. I put info on how to rebuild your old battery and how to build a battery back up. Also put info about nanowire batteries as well. Anyone else got some good ideas or things for me to correct. I hope to start working on this again after ignoring this for so long.