AMD HyperTransport make sure its 1000mhz or higher! /too much work !

 THIS IS NOT AN OVERCLOCK GUIDE ITS A REMINDER TO CHECK YOUR HT AS IN SOME MOTHERBOARD IT COMES IN LOW SPEED SETTING AS DEFAULT

AMD's HyperTransport:

I wanted to venture fort into the subject of AMD and its hyper transport technology and how configuring its speed can mean a slow or fast computer
, but after doing a lot of tests and benchmarks i came up with a lot of unconclusive data and mixed results. in short you just gotta make sure its 1000mhz at least or higher! setting it lower does hinder performance, but beyond 1000mhz  you really cant tell the difference (only in some case specific situations) let me explain a  bit more.


Recent AMD processors, come with a technology called Hyper Transport (not to be confused to Intel's Hyper Threading) which is basically a port or gateway in which the processor can "talk" and communicate with other peripherals, the bandwidth is in bits, and the speed id given in mhz, the data flow works in DDR terms or double data rate, this means that data can be sent back and forth at the same time in the same cycle it is regulated both by AMD and the "hypertransport" consortium, which tries to keep it a standard  for developers and hardware designers.


AMD's HyperTransport comes in many flavors and trough the years it has been updated from its introduction in April of 2001 , from version 1.0 to the current 3.1, the differences noted here below:
 

version		Max. HT frequency		Max. DDR data bandwidth available
1.0		800 MHz		12.8 GB/s
1.1		800 MHz		12.8 GB/s
2.0		1.4 GHz		22.4 GB/s
3.0		2.6 GHz		41.6 GB/s
3.1		3.2 GHz		51.2 GB/s

Simplified Explanation:
Trying to stay away from all the technical mumbo jumbo,the purpose of extending the bandwidth with every version is to keep a head room for new technologies and avoid bottlenecks and delays between peripherals, but do we have to worry about it when we set up our computers? well yes and no   :O

1000mhz is enough for most:

Current out of the box AMD phenom processors you go and buy today come with version 2.0 at least , and the cheapest motherboards that come with the Nvidia 6150 chipset support max HT speeds of 1000, after doing a lot of testing of my own and consulting other internet sources, i come up with results that show that our current technology (video/network/sound cards) does not require much more than that to properly function without delays and bottlenecks even while doing heavy gaming or video editing, of course there are some intense traffic I/O ocurrances where having a bigger bandwidth is a must (internet web server/file servers) and theres always special cases.

Having more never hurts:new upcoming high speed controllers might need it soon! (and SLI/Xfire too)

Of course if you are building a new AMD computer, i have to recommend you to procure a motherboard that DOES support AMD HT 3.0 or higher, for several reasons, in short, motherboards that come with the Nvidia 6150 chipset are obsolete, also they tend to come with "old" non solid capacitors to keep the price tag low, and chances are that if you want to add a new PCIe SSD controller or high speed bus like usb card, you might run into a bottle neck down the line!, not to mention that new motherboard offerings from both AMD and NVIDIA do come with added perks and bonuses, such as USB 3.0 integrated into the board, and SLI/Xfire ports (which from a few  internet sources, seems can be affected by sub 2000mhz HT)

Check your AMD HT, It could be running at 200mhz and ITS   SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

Some motherboards  come with a default setting of 200 instead of 1000 and you ave to manually go into the bios and change the value, last year our local shop had been selling huge batches of Nvidia 6150 motherboards, and getting reports of slow performance and windows boot up, even on linux systems, they reported the system where very slugish no matter what processor they used or ram they added, when i got my hands on one of these boards, i quickly noticed the performance hit, and fired up CPU-Z and i got a big surprise!

cpu-z - http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
A great program to check and look at the many running frequencies of your processor and memory, widely used by the industry, enthusiasts and gamers alike, free for use a must have program, also used to check for overclocks!

 200mhz is too narrow for any computer to run well! this is wrong

this is how it should be normally! :D

How to check how much HT bandwidth you are actually using!

this takes me to how i discovered just exactly how important HyperTransport speed is and why having more speed (bandwidth) is not too important most of the time, from the makers of CPUZ, comes Perfmonitor, and with it we can check exactly how much of the HT we are using!

Perfmonitor - http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/perfmonitor.html
A tool to check and measure specific and obscure data transfer info from our processor and system, such as level 1 cache hits and misses, DRAM access hits and other info you really dont need to look at, but has the ability to check on the Hyper Transport bus bandwidth usage.

Im not sure if the readings is in % or Mhz (it says MW/s ???) it never maxes out no matter what i do, play, compress or encode, it seems to be using around 76.6 DW/s but i read on a forum that if it was maxing out then it means i need more bandwidth (HT speed) i did try with a bus of 200mhz but i didnt see any diference, but the computer did take longer to load up with a small value, as i said i really cant prove what is the lower limit.

to view HyperTransport LEFT CLICK on one of the 4 windows and select HyperTransport
(on my pc i have to choose HyperTrasnsport 3)

I wish i could have come up with a longer and much more entertaining subject, but this will have to do for now, at least maybe you do suffer from  slowness due to miss configured HT speed, GIVE IT A TRY, you might find a surprise!  Thank you for reading ! :D