The New Hotness

Literally.  It's like 66C up in there.

With dialog bubble.  Because G+ Creative Kit.

Sound card straddled by two GTX 570s.  HOT.  Literally.

But the crashing is gone with the replacement card.  And performance is much better with dual GTX 570s.  Now, I can move on.

New GTX 570 = No More Skyrim Issues

Well at least the whole system reboot/black screen of death thing.

I got a new GTX 570 in the mail today, installed it and also tidied up the cables in the system.  So far so good.  Still a little nervous, half expecting the system to crash, but nothing like that so far!  Skyrim had a few issues, but nothing I couldn't recover from.  Which brings me to an interesting observation.  With the previous video card, I never saw Skyrim (the program) fail.  I would only see the whole system crash.  Now, I see the crash to desktop (rare) and the occasional video driver crashed thing (also rare).

One scary thing - about an hour into play, I heard a loud grinding.  Turns out the sound card was touching the fans on the GTX 570.  I couldn't do much more to separate them, so I ended up removing the sound card and switched to onboard audio.

See how close the sound card (top) is with the video card?  Yikes.

When I get the 2nd GTX 570 in, it will be really crowded in there with the sound card.  I'm thinking of gerry rigging some kind of wedge between the sound card and the video card, but in the meantime, I'll give the onboard audio a try.

It's been almost a week and so far so good.  Now if only the 2nd GTX 570 gets here soon...

Skyrim Lag Over Time (PC) [Solved, Sort Of]

Skyrim has this, uh, feature that depending on how you play (what spells you use, what items you have, what order things are done, which butterfly flutters it's wings, etc, etc), sometimes your game will start to experience lag.  Specifically, input lag.  For me, it's barely noticeable, but I still do.

Anyway, if this happens to you, just do an "ALT-TAB" to go back to Windows and then ALT-TAB back to Skyrim.  You may need to do this a couple of times before the game actually comes back, but when it does, you are good to go.

"LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGG!!!!!!"

Skyrim Update

Interesting thing happened when playing last night - at one point, just outside of Whiterun, I ran into an old Orc who wanted to "die a good death" and after I started to grant his which, the screen froze for 1/2 second, the sound started to stutter and it seemed like the start of a black screen/reboot crash, but then it recovered and no issue for the next four hours.

So what happened?  I think the game started to change all kinds of variables based on that decision to engage the Orc and that caused the stutter as things were loaded and changed.

I think if *THAT* situation happens AND there is a auto-save at the same time, things go downhill really fast and the whole system crashes.  Since I disabled auto-saving, then it didn't crash.  Sound reasonable?

I shouldn't say nothing else happened the rest of the session - after a period of time, I noticed a slight "heaviness" to the whole game.  Seemed a little jerky vs the normal super smooth.  It's barely noticeable.  But I saved the game, exited to desktop and restarted Skyrim and loaded the game and it was back to smoothness (this only took about 20 seconds for me).  I think this is just the engine having too much garbage (memory leak anyone?) in memory and reloading the program cleared it out.  Next time this happens, I will try just saving to a new save file and then loading it to see if the heaviness is lifted.

Anyway, that's my latest update.  And here's a puppy:

Skyrim Crash/Rebooting Fix: Disable Core Parking?

If you've read this blog before, you'll know that I've been having some issues with Skyrim on my new system.  Namely the problem was that Skyrim would cause the system to reboot intermittently.  It was very frustrating.  I had tried many, many things and the one that worked was disabling Speedstep.

However, this "solution" bugged me: it was not ideal and didn't explain the millions of other systems out there with Speedstep enabled that wasn't crashing.  In other words, it was not elegant or clean.  Of course, there are enough Internet posts that talk about the crashing, but certainly it is not as widespread as it should be if the problem was Speedstep.  Another problem was that my system was using power like it was still the 1990s!  This certainly goes against my green tendencies.  And then two days ago, I got yet another reboot in the middle of Skyrim.

So, I kept on searching when I stumbled across a series of posts and articles related to "Core Parking."  Having either never heard of this or assuming it's the same as Speedstep, I was surprised to learn that this was something that was found only the latest Intel processors (like mine) and is only found in the latest Windows OS (like mine).  I read through many many articles and it seemed this was indeed a likely culprit.

My theory goes like this: Skyrim's engine, the "Creation Engine" is not really new.  In fact, many others on the Internet postulate that it's simply built on the old engine, Gamebryo.  Gamebryo had some issues with Skyrim's predecessor, Oblivion.  Some research shows that the Creation Engine and Gamebryo share similar configuration files and in fact, the same behaviors.  Anyway, there's a lot to be said about Gamebryo vs. Creation that could fill pages and pages, but in short, I believe that "Creation" is a "new" engine that was built on the old one.  Gamebryo had problems with multi-core processors and it seems the Creation Engine also has at least some version of these problems.  Namely, not effectively using multi-cores and being single threaded.  In fact, some websites have shown that Skyrim does not run that much better with a quad-core vs a dual-core.  Something like 50% more performance from single-core to dual-core but only 3% from dual-core to quad-core.

Core Parking is essentially Windows deciding that if a core is not busy, it will power down that core to save energy.  If that core is needed for something, it wakes up in milliseconds.  My disabling Speedstep effectively prevented cores from being parked because they were running at full speed all the time anyway (although no load - it's quite possible that Core Parking relies on Speedstep to lower the core ratio/frequency and/or core voltage before deciding that the core is ready for 'parking').  At this point it's probably best to describe each:

Speedstep - this is a power-saving technology that reduces the frequency ratio of a core (mine goes from 34x to 16x @ 100MHz base, so 3.4GHz to 1.6GHz.  Additionally, it can reduce the voltage draw of a core as well.  The latest iteration also has a "Turbo" mode where the core can boost up to something like 42x (4.2GHz) if needed.  This is enabled/disabled in the BIOS.

Core Parking - also reduces power use, this basically disables a core.  This is a Windows thing.

Since I have a quad-core 2600K with multi-threading, Windows sees 8 processors.   During my test, when idle, with Speedstep on, Windows parked CPU1, CPU3, CPU5 and CPU6 and sometimes CPU7.  When I kicked up the load, the CPUs would get unparked and would kick in.

When Skyrim runs, it's not very processor intensive, at least not on my system.  The loads go up and down depending on what's happening.  Perhaps while in game, some cores are parked.  Perhaps combined with my 16GB of RAM and virtually nothing else running on my system, save for Steam, I'm not really needing a lot of cores while playing Skyrim.  My current theory is that neither the Gamebryo or the Creation Engine handles this very well with 4 cores and 8 "virtual processors."

I tested this by re-enabling all the defaults (i.e. Speedstep) and then disabling the Core Parking feature of Windows 7.  Note that there are many ways to do this.  I went with enabling the menu options and then setting minimum to 100% and maximum to 0% (see below).

Be sure to set "min cores" to 100% and "max cores" to 0%.

I recommend checking out the Microsoft way.  Anyway, it worked - I verified the Core Parking and Core Un-Parking effects using the built-in "Resource Manager" of Windows (scroll down for what it looks like).  Skyrim was played thoroughly for about and hour and DID NOT HAVE ANY CRASHES.  It's quite possible that this may be the "core issue" (pardon the pun).


It's still early in the testing, but at least I'm being somewhat green again, although not as green as when Core Parking is enabled.  But the power savings is minimal for me.  This is mostly intended for the huge server farms where some systems may stay idle for long stretches of time.

I'll give this at least a week of testing before I call it a win, but so far so good.  (I'll be out for a few weeks though, so no updates for a while.)   It's a nice discovery in any case and I learned way more about power savings than I intended to.  But now that I found it, I can't stop looking at it - kinda like the orb in Skyrim,

I found it, now I need to understand it before I can control it.

These are what parked cores look like in resource manager

After disabling core parking

Final note: After enabling the menu item, I made the changes and it immediately took effect, no reboot was necessary.  But, you probably should reboot anyway, just to make sure.  This is still Windows after all.  :-)

Skyrim Blinking Out/Rebooting Part 5 [SOLVED]

UPDATE: It's quite possible that disabling Speedstep is overkill.  I'm having success re-enabling Speedstep and disabling CORE PARKING.

After putting in some hours last night, I'm fairly confident that the problem with Skyrim rebooting my system is solved by disabling Intel Speedstep.  No issues whatsoever running Skyrim.  Naturally, since the idea behind Speedstep is to lower the power consumption, it stands to reason that increased power consumption and increased heat would be a concern.  I can't do anything about the power consumption, but I should really worry about the heat.  To that end, here are some charts I put together that hopefully will help add to the discussion regarding Skyrim reboots and the effects of disabling Speedstep. 

To disable Speedstep, go into your BIOS and disable the following "Advanced CPU" Core Features:

CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E)
C3/C6 State Support
CPU EIST Function

The following charts demonstrate the effect on CPU frequency and voltage when Speedstep is enabled and disabled:

CPU Frequency and Voltage under load with Speedstep ENABLED

CPU Frequency and Voltage under load with Speedstep DISABLED

 The following charts illustrate the effect on temperature on each core with Speedstep enabled and disabled.  As expected, the GPU temperature was not affected:

CPU/GPU Temperatures under load with Speedstep ENABLED

 

CPU/GPU Temperatures under load with Speedstep DISABLED

The data show that with Speedstep enabled, we get slightly lower CPU temperatures in the cores never going beyond 60C and possibly slightly lower CPU loads (this probably needs a more controlled test to confirm).  After Speedstep is disabled, we see core temperatures getting closer to 70C, still below the danger zones, although getting really close to it.  It's still not clear what the temperature max is for the 2600K, but Intel's specs show a "TCase" of 72.6C, which probably doesn't mean as much as the TJMax, which, if I read the Core MSRs on my CPU properly, comes out to 01100010 or 0x62 or 98C:

MSR 0x000001A2        0x00000000    0x00621200

I'm looking at this as the temperature at which the CPU will call it quits.  With a 20% buffer, I think I am comfortably outside the overheating temperature zone for this CPU.

Presumably the power consumption goes up with Speedstep disabled, but I have no measuring tools for that.  HWInfo64 does report that the +12V at a steady 12.025V - 12.074V.  Note: with my old no-name PSU, it varied between 11.436V and 11.976V.

So far so good.  I hope this helps someone out there.