Gigabyte P35 motherboards and DPC

Hi John,

At the risk of thinking you are directing your thanks toward me for starting this thread, I can only thank everyone that has contributed. It's amazing the knowledge that is shared on this forum, and the generosity of it's members.

ORIGINAL: emwhy

Lance your screen shot looks almost identical to mine after I rolled-back to F3, glad to see it worked for you. I've had two heavy-duty sessions since then and no problems, although things were stable for me before. I guess I just feel better now. BTW I vote you get Q6600, you can overclock it to 3.0 with ease, but you might not need to.

Yeah Ill probably get Q6600 since it is prett reasonable price now, and Im building a mobile system anyway, with this!!!!
thermaltake lanbox

Ill put the best performing cpu in the main unit, probably Q6600 Oc'ed to 3.0ghz
...and the 2nd best one in the mobile, which will probably be the E6320 Oc'd to 3ghz.

Thanx for the fix for my board!

ORIGINAL: Desperate Dan

Dan

Sorry I didn't answer your Question after the Sonar Freaked out. I rebooted and it's back to performing well now, don't have a clue what caused that. There is a process that keeps popping up called winlogon.exe, but I dont logon or use those facilities.

Winlogon is part of MS's phone home project installed as part of the Windows Genuine Advantage garbage. Basically Winlogon will check your system every 14 days and report back the state to MS headquarters. Sadly it can not be removed in any real way and will be installed if you try to access Windows Update or many of the tech and download sites. It comes as a regular install package, or as a browser plugin.

Fun eh?

Maybe this would help: RemoveWGA 1.2

Winlogon is part of MS's phone home project installed as part of the Windows Genuine Advantage garbage. Basically Winlogon will check your system every 14 days and report back the state to MS headquarters. Sadly it can not be removed in any real way and will be installed if you try to access Windows Update or many of the tech and download sites. It comes as a regular install package, or as a browser plugin.

Can I not use a Security Policy to kill winlogon.exe every time it starts like I have done with other PITA exe files like Google Notifier and Ctfmon.exe?

A dead winlogon will kill your system - it's an essential Windows process (and the whole spiel about it being part of WGA and 'phoning home is BS).

A dead winlogon will kill your system - it's an essential Windows process (and the whole spiel about it being part of WGA and 'phoning home is BS).

Thanks KP i will give that one a miss then. Someone on the Internet also said it's part of the Windows Genuine Advantage stuff as well. I will live with it unless it becomes a proble,.

Mailed Janus from Gigabyte team support (janus.yeh@gigabyte.com.tw) asking for a fixed bios for my GA-P35-S3G and after one day only i got a new beta bios (F4D) that fixes my DPC spikes!!!!!!!!
The problem is gone and seem that i got no other side effects but im still investigating.
I've run a 35 minutes S&M memory stress test and i got no errors.
My system (Intel Q6600 G0 quad core with 4 GB G.Skill PQ Series ram) is not overclocked so i don't know if i can get problems with OC.
Seems that at Gigabyte there's two support centers,one of that centers it's full of dumbs,other fortunately not!!!

KWild,

That's great news! The beta BIOS works well on my system, too, except that I cannot change CPU voltage. I would think it would be easy for them to fix that, so I'm hoping for a good official release after their beta testing.

Did your audio performance improve?

Mailed Janus from Gigabyte team support (janus.yeh@gigabyte.com.tw) asking for a fixed bios for my GA-P35-S3G and after one day only i got a new beta bios (F4D) that fixes my DPC spikes!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the email address, I have sent him an Email explaining that the F3e BIOS for the EP35-DS3R they sent me didn't work.

VERY IMPORTANT : READ ALL



I've discovered that installing the MS FIX for CoreDuo KB936357 , i got memory read errors wih S&M after 9 seconds of memory torture test!!!!

Unistalling the KB936357 the errors are gone!

ORIGINAL: KWILD



VERY IMPORTANT : READ ALL



I've discovered that installing the MS FIX for CoreDuo KB936357 , i got memory read errors wih S&M after 9 seconds of memory torture test!!!!

Unistalling the KB936357 the errors are gone!

Was this a problem only after flashing to the new beta BIOS?

I don't know Dan coz i've never installed that fix before updating bios.

If possible, could you flash back to your previous official BIOS and test it? We need to find the problems with the beta BIOS so Gigabyte can fix them for an official release.

Sorry i can not do that now.
Maybe i can do a test in the next days.

Desperate Dan, I have in fact gotten that problem when closing SONAR, which I have traced to the fact that I have an iLock USB key with my KORG Legacy stuff that gives me problems every now and then. It's as if the device doesn't shut down properly when I close a SONAR project that is using the Legacy plug-ins. The way I shut down is to close the project first, wait a few seconds and then close SONAR.

Janus Yeh at Gigabyte Taiwan is an absolute star. One Email explaining my position and comes back 24 Hours later with an F3F Bios for my EP35-DS3R and gues what ??? No more Spikes.

ORIGINAL: Desperate Dan

Janus Yeh at Gigabyte Taiwan is an absolute star. One Email explaining my position and comes back 24 Hours later with an F3F Bios for my EP35-DS3R and gues what ??? No more Spikes.

Dan,

Are you able to adjust your CPU (vcore) voltage in the BIOS and have it actually make a change when read with HW Monitor or CPUID within Windows while using the beta BIOS?

Are you able to adjust your CPU (vcore) voltage in the BIOS and have it actually make a change when read with HW Monitor or CPUID within Windows while using the beta BIOS?

Hi Dan, I actually haven't overclocked this Board since I got the New BIOS, but I will try now and let you know what happens. I Did notice that the BIOS headings are in the wrong order, I assume they will fix that for F4. The M.I.T Section is first instead of General Settings in the BIOS list. Still the Latency fixed, that's good enough for me.

Are you able to adjust your CPU (vcore) voltage in the BIOS and have it actually make a change when read with HW Monitor or CPUID within Windows while using the beta BIOS?

I Have just set mine back to overclocked at 3.2 Ghz (8 x 400, Mem 2.00, CPU Voltage 1.375) although the Voltage is set at 1.375 Hardware monitor and CPU-Z shows around 1.16/7 volts for CPU core which is way under the 1.375. I am going to push it up a little at a time and see if it responds and get back to you.On the Old BIOS I was showing around 1.34/5 volts CPU with the 1.375 BIOS Voltage setting.

That's what mine is doing, too. If you run Prime95, it will probably fail quickly. I have found that if I overclock using the F3 BIOS, then flash to the new beta BIOS, but don't clear the CMOS, it will hold the voltage you had it set at in the F3 BIOS.

ORIGINAL: Desperate Dan

No more Spikes.

Dan,

Did you have any improvement in low latency audio performance with the beta BIOS?

Janus also sent me a Bios. first he sent me F12, which didn't make sense. Then today he sent me 13b which I need to try (this is for GA-P35-DS5(rev2.0)).

He seems to be a highly regarded individual on that TweakTown forum. Let's hope we are pushing things toward official production release fixes.

ORIGINAL: dewdman42

Let's hope we are pushing things toward official production release fixes.

(At the risk of revealing my identity as a superannuated hippie): Right on! Power to the People!

Dan,

Did you have any improvement in low latency audio performance with the beta BIOS?

I haven't got around to trying that yet, will do and post results later today.

Same problem here.

This is the first time that I switch to Gigabyte from ASUS and MSI. What a mistake! If this thread had appeared earlier, I would have chosen something else. Sigh.

Thanks to Dan for bringing this up. Hope Gigabyte will fix the issue soon.

ORIGINAL: bin68

Same problem here.

This is the first time that I switch to Gigabyte from ASUS and MSI. What a mistake! If this thread had appeared earlier, I would have chosen something else. Sigh.

Hi bin68,

All is not lost. Ask Gigabyte tech support for the beta BIOS, F4b. I have the same board as you, and I've been running it for a while with great stability and no DPC spikes. There are a few minor problems that I have faith they will work out in the final release. If you are not overclocking, then you likely will have no problem with the beta BIOS. If you are overclocking, do not clear the CMOS when you flash to the beta. On my system, the CPU (vcore) voltage doesn't respond with the beta BIOS. I am overclocked to 3.2GHz (8x400), and as long as I have the voltage set correctly when I flash to the beta BIOS, it holds it and everything is fine.

I contacted Gigabyte through the Tech Support Page, but some people have gotten faster service by contacting Janus Yeh through the Tweak Town Gigabyte Forum.
For some reason my link to it won't work, but you can google tweak town to find it.

Thanks a lot, Dan. I'll give it a try.

This is the first time that I switch to Gigabyte from ASUS and MSI. What a mistake! If this thread had appeared earlier, I would have chosen something else. Sigh.

ASUS is made in the Same plant as Gigabyte anyway? I Had 4 Intel Boards in 8 days go faulty on me in one PC, up till then I had been a strong Intel supporter. Now I can reccomend Gigabyte with no problem.

I just want to say that I just installed the beta bios "13b" that was provided to me from Janus in Gigabyte Tech support for the GA-P35-DS4(rev2.0) and it works like a champ. with F12, and a barebones simple new XP Pro install, not even a soundcard installed, I was seeing regular speaks in the 700us range and occasionally some around 1500us. Installed F13b and now a "spike" is 40us, even when I am moving the mouse around like crazy...and often times it is under 10us.

I think Gigabyte is on top of the issue, whatever it is. Let's hope it makes it out into all of their board's production BIOS releases.

By the way, a Q6600 is in my board and its overclocked lightly to 3.01ghz and working fine with this bios, but I left the settings from the previous BIOS as suggested by Dan in order to retain the vcore settings.

Anyway, just wanted to report something positive.

I just want to say that I just installed the beta bios "13b" that was provided to me from Janus in Gigabyte Tech support for the GA-P35-DS4(rev2.0) and it works like a champ. with F12, and a barebones simple new XP Pro install, not even a soundcard installed, I was seeing regular speaks in the 700us range and occasionally some around 1500us. Installed F13b and now a "spike" is 40us, even when I am moving the mouse around like crazy...and often times it is under 10us.

I think Gigabyte is on top of the issue, whatever it is. Let's hope it makes it out into all of their board's production BIOS releases.

By the way, a Q6600 is in my board and its overclocked lightly to 3.01ghz and working fine with this bios, but I left the settings from the previous BIOS as suggested by Dan in order to retain the vcore settings.

Anyway, just wanted to report something positive.

Good news indeed, dewdman. I believe they will come through for us.

Good to hear dewdman

KWILD

This is great news! Can you post me a link to this bios, or can provide it somehow? I'll PM you in addition, so you perhaps can send it to me by email

Regs,
T.

Absolutely! kwild sent me the beta-bios (thanks!) and my system runs stable and with 128 samples latency until asio reaches 100%, then the first(!) klicks appear.



GA-P35-S3G
Q6600 G0
RME 9652 PCI
2x UAD-1 PCI
2x Powercore PCI
ATI HD3570 passive

average DPC is 12 µs

USB MIDI does it's own to the DPC: when having big MIDI traffic such as controllers DPC reaches 125 µs, bud did not affect audio at all until now.

I'm trying to flash my bios to a new beta bios which Gigabyte sent me but I'm having a time getting Qflash to see my flash drive. My motherboard is GA-P35-DS3L, Windows XP. Hopefully this new file will correct the DPC issue.

So when I press 'end' while booting up and get to the Qflash utility, I'm given a choice to "Update Bios from Drive". It lists two 'floppy drives', one of which I believe is my flash drive. But when I click on it to access the beta bios file, I get nothing. There are no files listed on the drive -- even though the flash drive is connected to the computer and the beta bios had been unzipped there. It further says that the drive has equal amounts of total size/free size. So it's seeing nothing on the drive. Flash Drive is formatted with Fat32.

Anyone know what's going on or why I can't access the flash drive?

Thanks,
Mahlon

I don't know how to help you. I actually used a flash drive this morning to do my Gigabyte bios and it was totally painless. My flash drive is an SD card kind of thing...and it showed up as HD in Q-flash, was totally painless. Not sure what is going on with you, but I'm pretty sure its an issue about the flash drive being formatted correctly. Check with gigabyte support or the TweakTown forum for more help on that.

Thanks dewdman, I'll try over at tweaktown.

Mahlon

Ok, finally got the board to flash. I believe the problem was with the Lexar Jump USB drive. I ended up making a small fat32 partition on one of my hard drives and flashed from there.

BUT!! the beta bios P35DS3L.F8n did not fix the problem. Still getting spikes -- in fact, the spikes were a bit worse, but still under 1000.

So, I tried the old f3 bios, and that DID get rid of the spikes.

But just curious, to those of you with this motherboard (ga-p35-ds3l), has anyone used the P35DS3L.F8n beta bios and if so, did it get rid of your spikes?

Thanks,
Mahlon

ORIGINAL: Mahlon

Ok, finally got the board to flash. I believe the problem was with the Lexar Jump USB drive. I ended up making a small fat32 partition on one of my hard drives and flashed from there.

BUT!! the beta bios P35DS3L.F8n did not fix the problem. Still getting spikes -- in fact, the spikes were a bit worse, but still under 1000.

So, I tried the old f3 bios, and that DID get rid of the spikes.

But just curious, to those of you with this motherboard (ga-p35-ds3l), has anyone used the P35DS3L.F8n beta bios and if so, did it get rid of your spikes?

Thanks,
Mahlon

Same experience here. f8n made it worse. f3 fixed it. I've stopped messin' with it.

"If it works... don't fix it".

Hi guys! Just decided to purchase GA-P35-DS3R and sadly there is no this model in warehouse anymore :(
They offered me GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R with this E before the chip set...
Any experience...?


Currently I'm with Asus P5K but I cant get rid of DPC spikes... Reading all the forums and disabling everything/new drivers, updates...etc.../
Also I've found that the PCI slots on P5K are shared and on the GB mobo the 1st one is dedicated. That's why I decided to move on Gigabyte.
EMU1212M here

Thanks!
Dimi

Hi guys! Just decided to purchase GA-P35-DS3R and sadly there is no this model in warehouse anymore :(
They offered me GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R with this E before the chip set...

That's the one I'm using, with the F3f BIOS it works like a charm. PM me if you want me to email the F3f BIOS to you. The Latest on the Gigabyte site is F3e. My DPC Latency is flat as a pancake now with the F3f BIOS.

Wow, great! Just placed my order!! :)

ORIGINAL: dimitar

Currently I'm with Asus P5K but I cant get rid of DPC spikes... Reading all the forums and disabling everything/new drivers, updates...etc.../
Also I've found that the PCI slots on P5K are shared and on the GB mobo the 1st one is dedicated. That's why I decided to move on Gigabyte.
EMU1212M here

Thanks!
Dimi

Interesting that you are experiencing spikes with the Asus P5K. Are they a repeating pattern as shown in the first post in this thread, or a constant spiking? How high are they?

I've been using the beta BIOS (F4b) on my GA-EP35-DS4 for about a month without any problems. I have a Q6600 overclocked to 3.2 (8x400) 1600 FSB without problems. The DPC spiking is gone with the beta BIOS, at least on my motherboard. Gigabyte still hasn't released an official BIOS that fixes the DPC spiking. I hope that doesn't indicate a problem, but you might want to keep that in mind before you buy one.

repeating pattern and sometimes constant spiking...:(

just my 2 cents, I got pretty decent result with my ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard, it's pretty old compare to P35 chipset boards.
it does support all Intel latest CPU on the market, so folks has problems with P35 chips motherboard could have try this one, it also built in with TI chipset firewire interface, I think the price of this board goes down abit now since it's relatively old :)

Running the GA-P35-DS4 here with beta bios 13B, which also eliminated the DPC spiking. Running here at 3.2ghz also, no problems. Hopefully gigabyte will move these fixes into production, but I agree with Dan, you might want to consider that issues before you buy a gigabyte board.

What board is tested and working stable than Asus and Gigabyte ?

ORIGINAL: dewdman42

Running the GA-P35-DS4 here with beta bios 13B, which also eliminated the DPC spiking. Running here at 3.2ghz also, no problems.

Dewdman,

Did the Xigmatek cooler work out for you?

ORIGINAL: dimitar

What board is tested and working stable than Asus and Gigabyte ?

It's not that the Gigabyte boards aren't working, just that you need the beta BIOS to get rid of the DPC spiking. They are great motherboards.

I bought an Asus P5K Pro to replace the Gigabyte while I was still able to return it, but Gigabyte came through with the beta BIOS and I decided to keep the Gigabyte board and return the Asus. So far, this is the most reliable system I've ever used.

Seems to be working good. Overclocked to 3.2ghz now and idle temps are around 32C while mousing around and surfing the net. Prime95 loads it up in the upper 40's. Using vcore 2.875.

I had it overclocked a little higher, but the temps were getting into the 50's, even approaching 60 and I had to go well over 1.3v, etc..I just decided that this is a nice compromise and the difference in performance between 3.2ghz and 3.4ghz is not that much. It runs cooler now at 3.2ghz with this cooler, then it did at 3.0ghz with the stock cooler. but it seems like moving up from here requires quite a few more volts, so I'm sticking with 3.2ghz for now.

I didn't end up using the backplate thing to mount it because I read about the copper plate on the back of my mobo. I didn't take it out of the case to find out. Anyway, I have an extra backplate if anyone needs it now. ha ha. but it seems to work fine without it.

One question, are you seeing as a pretty regular pattern that the first core always seems to be just a bit warmer than the other cores? The 2nd core also, but not as much as the first. ?? For example, right now while mostly idle, first core is 35 and the others are 32. That is pretty typical. Under load the difference is a little bigger.

On another note, I have spent the past couple weeks playing around with hackintosh OSX on this pc and I have to say, I am impressed. Everything works 100%. I even got several of my win32 VST plugins working using Wine and EnergyXT, together with JackOSX. Works very well. I can even run Reaper in wine. Sonar does not work on wine though and probably never will. I had Project5 working briefly, but I would need to spend more time to sort out the problems after I upgraded to 2.5, if possible at all. I even got prime95 running under wine on OSX. Wild.

Most likely I will change to OSX permanently to be honest. I am so impressed with that OS and I have lost faith in Microsoft for the future. ...the OSX desktop experience is WAY SUPERIOR than anything else. I'm really impressed. The "Spaces" feature alone is worth the price of admission.

Anyway, one thing I found out through this experiment is that our mobo is one of the most compatible ones to use with Kalyway hackintosh. Frankly, I will probably end up buying a real mac next, but for now, I am going to use this. Performance wise, I'm benchmarking numbers that come pretty close to MacPro performance levels and blow away all the iMac and MacBook numbers.

what version of hackintosh ??? :) thats sounds cool...

Kalyway 10.5.2

ORIGINAL: dewdman42


One question, are you seeing as a pretty regular pattern that the first core always seems to be just a bit warmer than the other cores? The 2nd core also, but not as much as the first. ?? For example, right now while mostly idle, first core is 35 and the others are 32. That is pretty typical. Under load the difference is a little bigger.

I have the same differences. I had them with the stock cooler, too. From what I've read, I think it's normal to have about a 5C difference between cores.

cool. I won't worry about it then.

Anyone with this problem. Just got GA-EP35-DS3R. Installed XP without problem but after tried the CD with Gigabyte drivers I've got this:
Also I can browse the installation cd but after tried to copy some files it says there are problems...

It was bad DVD media...
GA-EP35-DS3R.
I have installed my mobo now and all seems to work fine.
updated the bios, some usb ports disabled.
EMU1212M sound card on 1st slot - no IRQ sharing.

I've noticed DPC spikes when I'm trying to access the video settings. It is Gigabyte 8500 512mb silence model.
DPC meter Jumps to 500 - 700 us also when open Easy Tune it makes some bad spikes.

What video card model or brand do you suggest me for better compatibility with my new motherboard GA-EP35-DS3R.

ORIGINAL: dimitar


I've noticed DPC spikes when I'm trying to access the video settings. It is Gigabyte 8500 512mb silence model.
DPC meter Jumps to 500 - 700 us also when open Easy Tune it makes some bad spikes.

What video card model or brand do you suggest me for better compatibility with my new motherboard GA-EP35-DS3R.

I would recommend that you don't use the Easy Tune or Dynamic Energy Saving software. They caused pops and clicks on my system. I make overclocking changes in the BIOS. Also, you can't use the DES software if you are overclocking, anyway.

Are you getting DPC spikes using the new beta BIOS?

I'm using an eVGA 7900GS KO 256MB video card without any DPC spiking, but it's an older card. Are you just experiencing spikes with you access the video settings, or when there is video activity? If it's just when accessing the settings I wouldn't worry about it.

With new beta BIOS DPC spikes are occasional.
I'm getting some around 500-800 when access the video settings or access EasyTune. The Dynamic Energy Saving software is not installed.

Does anybody have a GA-P35-DS3P (rev 2.0) [not an EP]? I got a beta BIOS last night but it did NOT resolve DPC latency spikes. In fact ths spikes went from an occaisional one of 500 every 5 seconds to a constant level of just over 500. Anybody else seeing this or have a suggestion on how to fix?