I recently received an Asus Maximus III Gene motherboard to test out. All was well and for an LGA 1156 board, this thing was a rocket. For reasons I don’t even know, it never occurred to me to check the board BIOS to see if there were stability/OC enhancements in the newer revs. About a week ago I finally did look it up and there it was, a brand-spanking new BIOS promising better OC stability and CPU compatibility. Having hit a sub-4GHz wall (Lynnfield i7 870 native at 2.99GHz) on air cooling I jumped at the possibility of eeking a bit more out of my CPU.
The update went well, I have ASUS updater installed so I don't even have to boot to DOS (yes I said DOS, we all know that's what it is....) to run the BIOS update. Everything seemed to be fine but I wanted to be sure so I ran a Prime95 load test to be sure. About 30 seconds in, by system BSOD's. This is the same system that ran a full-blended Prime95 torture test for 8 hours the Venomous XR-T article without a hitch.... Something was amiss.
My first troubleshooting step was to return the system to BIOS defaults for the CPU and memory. This successfully stopped the BSODs but the system was running poorly, even for stock standards. I'm currently running 4GB of Patriot's DDR3-1066 memory and while old by today's standards it had been running fine in my nVidia chipped EVGA 790i Ultra for over a year so I was dubious to blame it outright but I did have some new memory coming soon. In a rare spot of patience I decided to wait until it arrived to tinker any further... Enter the newest player in our drama: Starcraft II.
Still in my patient place and completely oblivious to the root cause of my recent drop in performance, I installed Starcraft II and TRIED to run it. Load screens took forever, rendered cutscenes were choppy, audio was out of sync and, when playing in windowed mode, if I did anything else the system would bust hammer the hard disk in a read/write paging frenzy. Essentially it was unplayable and I was quickly being evicted from my patient place.
Seeing and hearing the hard drive in a constant read/write state first led me to believe that the page file needed to be set. This is a fresh install of Win7 x64 and while I had left the page size at default in the past I went about enforcing a 1x RAM minimum/2x RAM maximum to my page file on my fastest drive: 4GB and 8GB respectively. I rebooted and gleefully awaited my chance to kick some Zerg butt, I would be disappointed.
Upon rebooting the system was running even worse. My HDD activity indicator could have been a power button because now it was on constantly. I had previously lamented to a friend that perhaps it was time to move to a Solid State Drive to improve performance, thinking that my "old" mechanical drive was partly to blame for my recent reduction in performance but this could not be just the HDDs fault so, before breaking out the hammer and administering some percussive maintenance, I did the one thing I should have done at the beginning of this little adventure: check Task Manager and Sys Monitor and see if there was something else going on.
In life it’s said that it’s the little things that hurt and more often than not, your worst troubles can be caused by the smallest things. Looking back, given my experience, I should have caught this in the first 5 minutes. Windows was seeing 4GB of memory still but only utilizing 2GB max. I was puzzled at first, played around with system performance settings, wiggled and swapped memory sticks around and poked at every possible BIOS setting with zero change to the memory seen by the BIOS or Windows so I went to ASUS’s site to look for updated documentation. I downloaded and read the latest addendum for my motherboard’s manual and I discovered that there are differences in how you install memory, depending on if you have a Lynnfield or Clarkdale CPU. Yes boys and girls, not only did I feel like a total hardware rookie for not checking System Monitor in the first place, this whole escapade could have been avoided if I had just RTFM.
I have since installed the memory in the appropriate location and am back to having 4GB of usable memory in Windows. In my defense, I have *never* had a desktop motherboard (Servers? Yes) that cared which slots you put the memory in as long as you populated adjacent channels.
Ah well, lesson learned. I guess the moral is: If it's not broken Don't fix it and if fixing it breaks it RTFM. I’m off to assist Jim Raynor in his campaign against Coalition oppression and the deadly Zerg.
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