Legit Reviews

Was toying around with my system last night, as usual.
I ran Sandra and as usual got the PCI latency warning. so after much research and a little digging i came up with a program that lets you change the latency for all your devices.

http://www.audiotrack.co.kr/spboard/boa ... 1&go_cnt=0

I changed my video card from 255 to 96
RAID controller from 96 to 32
sound Card from 32 to 64
Network Controller from 128 to 32

I have to say that so far not a single problem and everything seems to be running much smoother and faster. One thing i do have to say is that i have yet to find any "recent" news or opinions on PCI Latencies....everything is rather old. I am wondering what the optimal settings are for each individual component, good luck asking the companies, but has anyone else toyed with their system this much?

I was wondering the same thing...... :D The NF7 has a general setting in the Bios for that and the default is 32. I haven't messed with it much cause everythong has been working pretty good.

After changing the latencies, Far Cry and Doom 3 fly!
Noticeably smoother and faster system. Try that utility and check out the settings for your setup. There is one setting that is adjustable on most boards, and usually it is set at 64 or 32, but i think that is for the chipset itself, not the whole system. i think you'd be surprised at some of the default settings and how the affect performance

I have never seen or heard of that utility before, so I downloaded it and it is very basic to use. Below is a screen shot of the utility on my personal system.



You said you changed your video card from 255 down to 96 and noticed a performance difference in DOOM 3. Can you do me a favor Capper and run some benchmarks (timedemo's) on DOOM 3 set at 255 and 96 to see the difference made by just that change?

To run a time demo in DOOM 3 you just hit ctrl+alt+~ to bring down the menu. Then just type "timedemo demo1" and hit enter. This will run the time demo. If you can run the benchmark at 640x480 to help eliminate the video card bottleneck. Throw out the first score (allows the game to cache) and then record the second score. [If you knew all that sorry, but better say it now than later]

I'm interested to see what if, if any, difference the change makes.

Max/Default are video card settings. Max is Optimal settings. All tests run at 640x480 on a non OCed card.

PCI Latency-96
Max 71.0 FPS
Default 108.4 FPS


PCI Latency-248
Max 71.2 FPS
Default 108.5 FPS

No changes there at all, but i have to add that the system feels faster. Everything loads fasterand there are no "audio artifacts". just feels like a much smoother system....not that it was bad to begin with.



A couple of other things i have done was to load BV's "Gamer"registry patch. Change the network bandwidth to "0" reserved and alot of other tweaks. should have started with a fresh install and documented everything as i went