50% slower

[Matt Sugden]

I have three newish PCs with dual core P3.4 chips, all with identical hardware and as far as I know software, we are talking very clean installs here, only max, vnc and vray installed on them.

 

Problem is one of them has started inexplicably running at about 50% the performance of the other two (in terms of render times). Any ideas?

 

There aren't any issues in terms of crashing, and the system seems stable and is seeing the full complement of RAM? Any ideas what might be causing such a radical drop in performance?

 

Cheers

[olbo]

Hi Matt,

 

well I guess you checked it already, but I've to ask anyway.

 

Did you check the processes in the taskmanager, maybe something eats

up one core of the CPU? And what comes to mind next, does the node render

with as many buckets as it should? If so, did you check if 3dsmax is running

on ~99% or just on 50%?

 

And somehow I do remember vlado mentioned that, if you use 3dsmax 9,

it asumes that you have just one core or something like that and it was

needed to push max to use all cores ... dunno if this is still the case with

all the updates lately.

 

Hope this is a start, ... hehe! ;o)

 

 

 

take care

Oleg

[Matt Sugden]

Thanks for your comments.

 

both buckets are rendering, and I am currently only using version 8 on max. and all is correct in the task manager.

 

The first thing I always think of is what has changed in the system, and the only thing I can think of is I swapped all my CPU fans to none oem ones not long ago, to get the noise in my office down.

 

So as soon as I can, I am going to try and see if I can re seat the fan, and see if this makes a difference, as I guess if it is not working effeciently it could hamper performance..... but I would have thought if my fan was not fixed properly I would be running into crashing issues?

 

So I'm still open to other ideas.

[olbo]

Erm, ... hold on, you're saying that during rendering 3dsmax has ~99% CPU

usage but the PC is still 50% slower then the other two PC's? *wondering*

 

 

take care

Oleg

[Matt Sugden]

That's exactly right, and it's got me wondering too!

 

Any more ideas from anyone?

[Hazdaz]

Woah, that is an interesting problem.

 

In Task Manager are there any other processes running on that slower PC? Any anti spyare/anti virus running on that PC?

 

How does it perform in other CPU-intensive applications? Does it only seems slower when rendering? What about modeling?

 

Have you done a check of your RAM chips? Maybe one is ready to die? What about harddrive space? You said these are clean installs, but maybe defrag the harddrives just for the heck of it.

 

Also, are they running XP or Vista?

 

I wish I could offer up more things to look at, but I am honestly stumped by this.

[shaneis]

'Tis an odd problem, but seeing as we're guessing/ suggesting - my money is on a faulty CPU or mobo. I'm pretty sure it's not a RAM issue - it would crash your app. Wouldn't be surprised if it's a BUS issue - that would explain the cores appearing correct, but actual data transfer being slow.

 

You could try a different app to benchmark - winRAR is free and only a couple of MB, and will use all your CPU. Try RARing/ ZIPing a large file...about 50MB+ should do it...check if that's slower on the suspect machine. If so, we can rule-out a corrupted program file.

 

Check the BIOS to make sure you haven't tweaked it/ tuned-off a core, underclocked it somewhere by accident. If you're not sure, reset the BIOS to default and then re-do he settings as you have them on one of the good machines. Failing that, if you're feeling game, grab a tube of thermal paste and swap your slow CPU with a known good one. If you find you've got the same issues, then you can return your faulty mobo, if the problem now exists on the (previoulsy) good machine, your CPU is the culprit.

 

Oh, and back-up your data and settings onto another HD- just in case.

 

Good luck, and let us know when you've flushed-out the gremlins

[Matt Sugden]

yep, swapping components with working machines is a good idea, and something i might try. At least that way I may be able to isolate faulty hardware.

 

To be honest, I've been a little disappointed with the performance generally with these intel dual core machines, my amds always seem to return better performance for the money, though clearly I can't blame the chip manufacturer for this complaint, definitely a real issue somewhere.

[Matt Sugden]

well how bizarre!

 

I swapped my cpu fan, as that was the first thing I knew I had changed on my systems recently, and pow! back to normal performance!

 

That really is quite shocking, I assume my old fan must have had an error or wasn't running at full speed, and so the bios must have been protecting the chip and slowing down in performance.

 

Either way, glad to have the old proc back in action. Thanks for all your help and comments.