Saturday, January 10, 2004

SPF Gains Traction

The SPF anti-forgery (a.k.a. reverse-MX records in DNS) seems to be gaining traction. AOL added an SPF entry into their TXT records at the end of the week for testing (but took them out for the weekend... assuming they'll put them back next week).

Now if I could only get register.com to fix their DNS system so I could add the SPF information to my records.

posted by Wuphon's at 4:19 PM

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

PCMark2002 Benchmarking

Older test results:

List of benchmarking software
Old game machine scores
Scores for my RAID5 server
Asus A7N8X w/ Athlon XP 2600+ CPU

So these are the scores from last February... I should see similar scores since I'm re-running the same tests as before. (Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, 1Gb PC2700 DDR, 128Mb nVidia Ti4600 AGP, Athlon XP 2600+)

CPU: 6300
MEM: 4116
HDD: 442

My old Athlon XP 1800+ game machine:

CPU: 4500
MEM: 3000
HDD: 550

Scores from this test:

CPU: 6125 (Athlon XP 2600+)
Memory: 4353 (single-mode)
HDD: 998 (using a single 160Gb ATA/100 5400rpm 2Mb cache)

If I switch the memory from single-mode to dual-channel mode (moved the sticks to slot 1 and 3), I get the following values:

CPU: 6160
Mem: 4351
HDD: 910

Odd that... pretty much identical scores. MemTest86 shows that dual-channel mode is active (1182MB/s vs 734MB/s in the single-channel configuration). But I have seem rumors that the nForce2 chipset doesn't get much of a boost from DDR mode.

Labels: Benchmarks

posted by Wuphon's at 12:07 AM

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Asus A7N8X DDR

Well, that's interesting... the memory stick (B) that I thought was bad survived 9 hours and 34 passes of the default MemTest86 tests when it was the only stick in the computer (in slot 1). The test that failed was configured as 1/B, 3/A (slot 1 had stick B, slot 3 had stick A). I'm now testing stick A (in slot 1) to see if that memory stick is as good as I thought (it worked fine through 2 passes).

According to the manual, to do DDR, you put sticks in slots 1/3 or 2/3 if you want DDR with 2 sticks of memory. I don't know if it means anything, but on my motherboard, slot 1 is made of black plastic while slots 2/3 are made of blue plastic. That might be a clue that it's better to fill slots 2/3 if you have two sticks of RAM.

So I put memory in configuration, 2/B+3/A, and ran MemTest86. It went through two passes with zero errors, so I gave it a boot-up into WinXP. Well, it only took an hour for SC4 to start crashing every 15-30 minutes, so apparently that memory configuration is no good. (The second crash reset the PC.) So now the question is... is one of my memory modules bad and I just haven't found the problem yet? Or is there simply a problem with trying to run this particular brand of memory in DDR mode? (FYI, a link to the Asus approved memory list for the A7N8X motherboard.)

Ran configuration 1/B through 9 hours of MemTest86 without any problems. Going to configure as 1/B+2/A (both sticks on the first memory channel, non-DDR configuration) to see if possibly it's an issue that the memory simply won't work in a two-channel setup. If this works, I'll be happy with the extra memory, but sad that I won't see the 60% performance boost (estimated) from running dual-channel.

Well, setting up both DIMMs in DDR channel 1 didn't work either... so now I'm going to patch the BIOS to the latest (I have the v2 motherboard, but the 1001G revision of the BIOS) which is version 1007. Then I'll fire up SC4 on a large city and see if it runs a few hours without crashing. If that works then I'll put them back into a dual-channel setup and test again.

Update: Well, the box has been up and running a SimCity4 city for almost 24 hour straight without a crash. So the memory is good, but the BIOS needed to be updated. Gonna benchmark the single-channel setup, switch to dual-channel DDR mode and re-benchmark later.

Labels: Benchmarks

posted by Wuphon's at 8:42 AM