So how much does the HyperTransport Link's speed really effect an overclocked system's performance? We aim to find out. Come have a look as we find out how much life the HT Link's current specification still has in it.
Introduction
The entire premise of the HyperTransport Link is to provide a high bandwidth & low latency data pathway for the CPU to communicate with the rest of the system. Currently, the only CPUs in the wild with this HT link (instead of the old aging EV6 bus) are the K8 based AMD CPUs. If you wish to learn about the nitty gritty, the HyperTransport Consortium has a wealth of information at their website.
Now, onto what it really does without the fancy terms:
Conclusion
As we can see, the numbers do not change a whole lot. The only one with any noticable downward trend is the 3dmark score, which shows that even even my lowly video card likes having bandwidth and low latency. I wish there was a benchmark to directly measure the bandwidth and latency of the HT Link to compare it to these semi-real world tests. I feel it would be also be a handy tool for system diagnostics, as there have been some reports of performance reducing if the HT Link speed is pushed too far. I presume this is due to the packet nature of the link, the bad packets are thrown out and sent again, reducing the effective performance of the link.
The HT link appears to effect one thing in it's current state: Video subsytem performance, and even there it's not a tremendous change until we get down to the very lower limits of the speed range that is available. It's been said before and I'll say it once more to drive the point home. The HyperTransport Link speed has a very small effect on system performance. I invite you to discuss this article in our forums. Registration is quick and painless
For the complete article with benchies visit Eclipseoc
Introduction
The entire premise of the HyperTransport Link is to provide a high bandwidth & low latency data pathway for the CPU to communicate with the rest of the system. Currently, the only CPUs in the wild with this HT link (instead of the old aging EV6 bus) are the K8 based AMD CPUs. If you wish to learn about the nitty gritty, the HyperTransport Consortium has a wealth of information at their website.
Now, onto what it really does without the fancy terms:
- Connects the CPU to the Chipset.
- Allows CPUs to talk to eachother in MULTI-SOCKET configurations.
- Connect the CPU to the RAM.
- Connect two cores in a dual core CPU. This task is left for the System Request Interface that all K8's have.
Conclusion
As we can see, the numbers do not change a whole lot. The only one with any noticable downward trend is the 3dmark score, which shows that even even my lowly video card likes having bandwidth and low latency. I wish there was a benchmark to directly measure the bandwidth and latency of the HT Link to compare it to these semi-real world tests. I feel it would be also be a handy tool for system diagnostics, as there have been some reports of performance reducing if the HT Link speed is pushed too far. I presume this is due to the packet nature of the link, the bad packets are thrown out and sent again, reducing the effective performance of the link.
The HT link appears to effect one thing in it's current state: Video subsytem performance, and even there it's not a tremendous change until we get down to the very lower limits of the speed range that is available. It's been said before and I'll say it once more to drive the point home. The HyperTransport Link speed has a very small effect on system performance. I invite you to discuss this article in our forums. Registration is quick and painless
For the complete article with benchies visit Eclipseoc