Issue - Enabling SVM (Virtualization) causes BCLK to fluctuate a lot

[WereCat]

When I enable SVM Mode to allow virtualization my BCLK starts to fluctuate between 97.8x and 98.9x causing my clock on FCLK, DRAM and CPU to downclock by quite a large margin. I don't understand why, should I report this as a bug to ASUS or is this expected behavior?

 

For reference with SVM disabled I get 99.8x to 100x BCLK and my CPU can actually boost to it's rated 4550MHz instead of maxing out at 4450MHz.

 

I have both SB Spread Spectrum and VRM Spread Spectrum disabled. I've tried disabling C-states and forcing power limits to allow max performance etc... but nothing besides disabling Virtualization helps. Luckily I don't actually use it that much, just sometimes for WIndows Sandbox but I would prefer to leave it enabled for convenience.

 

Motherboard - X570 Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi (using newest BIOS version 4304 because they added Curve Optimizer for 5800X3D which I'm using)

CPU - R7 5800X3D

4x16GB DRAM

[zipspence]

14 minutes ago, WereCat said:

When I enable SVM Mode to allow virtualization my BCLK starts to fluctuate between 97.8x and 98.9x causing my clock on FCLK, DRAM and CPU to downclock by quite a large margin. I don't understand why, should I report this as a bug to ASUS or is this expected behavior?

 

For reference with SVM disabled I get 99.8x to 100x BCLK and my CPU can actually boost to it's rated 4550MHz instead of maxing out at 4450MHz.

 

I have both SB Spread Spectrum and VRM Spread Spectrum disabled. I've tried disabling C-states and forcing power limits to allow max performance etc... but nothing besides disabling Virtualization helps. Luckily I don't actually use it that much, just sometimes for WIndows Sandbox but I would prefer to leave it enabled for convenience.

 

Motherboard - X570 Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi (using newest BIOS version 4304 because they added Curve Optimizer for 5800X3D which I'm using)

CPU - R7 5800X3D

4x16GB DRAM

First assumption here is heat issues. Past that are you doing a forced overclock at all or is that base speed?

[WereCat]

1 minute ago, zipspence said:

First assumption here is heat issues. Past that are you doing a forced overclock at all or is that base speed?

It's not a heat issue, the CPU is cooled by 360mm AIO and reaches 80 C during Linpack Extreme which is the most demanding thing I can throw at it. During typical loads it stays withing 60 C.

 

This is not related to temperature however as this happens on idle as well when the CPU is at 28 C.

[zipspence]

29 minutes ago, WereCat said:

It's not a heat issue, the CPU is cooled by 360mm AIO and reaches 80 C during Linpack Extreme which is the most demanding thing I can throw at it. During typical loads it stays withing 60 C.

 

This is not related to temperature however as this happens on idle as well when the CPU is at 28 C.

With no temp issues, I would suspect its a "built in buffer" or a possible disconnect of the SVM getting a true read on the system capabilities. I would get ahold of ASUS on this one and talk to their tech/engineering team and see if they know about this issue. It could be badly implemented coding on the back end of this program. Either that or because it IS actually giving you a BETTER read on the system, it is telling you the real HW readouts instead of the fluff alot of Manf's like to toss up in their spec sheets. 

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, zipspence said:

With no temp issues, I would suspect its a "built in buffer" or a possible disconnect of the SVM getting a true read on the system capabilities. I would get ahold of ASUS on this one and talk to their tech/engineering team and see if they know about this issue. It could be badly implemented coding on the back end of this program. Either that or because it IS actually giving you a BETTER read on the system, it is telling you the real HW readouts instead of the fluff alot of Manf's like to toss up in their spec sheets. 

I've written them right after I posted this. I expect this to be a bug because I don't remember this happening on my 3900X and a way older BIOS however I am not going to check as that would be too much hassle to change CPU and reflash BIOS again.

Just wondering if anybody has any more insight into this in the meantime.

 

When I had 4770k I had similar issue with BCLK which was related to Windows for some reason and after clean install it got fixed but that was not an issue tied to virtualization.

[zipspence]

On a side note, within the last few windows updates I have been noticing Windows defender/malware has been starting to zap system resources more heavily and there might be a bad bit of code going on with windows (yet again) and you might have hit the nail on the head with the second part of your post. 

[WereCat]

2 hours ago, zipspence said:

On a side note, within the last few windows updates I have been noticing Windows defender/malware has been starting to zap system resources more heavily and there might be a bad bit of code going on with windows (yet again) and you might have hit the nail on the head with the second part of your post. 

So I've got an answer outside of this forum.

 

Basically I had to disable Memory Integrity inside Core Isolation settings in WIndows and also disable Hypervisor and Sandbox and restart PC. Now with SVM enable the BCLK is fine at 99.98x to 100x.

 

And I still can't use virtualization as if I went to BIOS and disabled SVM because I had to disable Hypervisor and Sandbox instead ...  So I guess I'll just deal with it for now and maybe find some other solution in the meantime.

[zipspence]

3 minutes ago, WereCat said:

So I've got an answer outside of this forum.

 

Basically I had to disable Memory Integrity inside Core Isolation settings in WIndows and also disable Hypervisor and Sandbox and restart PC. Now with SVM enable the BCLK is fine at 99.98x to 100x.

 

And I still can't use virtualization as if I went to BIOS and disabled SVM because I had to disable Hypervisor and Sandbox instead ...  So I guess I'll just deal with it for now and maybe find some other solution in the meantime.

I guess I should have asked this in the first place as well, what are you trying to do? lol. Instead of troubleshooting without an end result in mind troubleshoot tends to go in unintended directions. I assumed you were just trying to fab up a VM or a VM Server. But with you saying that solution I think I got your original intent of what you were trying to accomplish wrong. 

Pesky Windows settings seem to always get in the way of when you try to do the simplest tasks. I was fighting tooth and nail on getting .net 3.5 put on to an NI PXI chassis a bit ago and went as far as disabling almost all of the group policy functions on the machine that could have been blocking the machine from pulling the updates from the internet (to the woe of our InfoSec department and InfraApps department) to no avail. Edited registries, edited group policies, went into a deep dive on the failure to update log to see where the fail was happening and ultimately.... The spinning platter that was in the box had the perfect placement of a bad/corrupt sector which was making the update fail. A month of troubleshooting with multiple teams looking into the issue and trying to force update the dumb thing and it ended up being a hard drive in failure that wasnt failing enough for it to show up in any testing. Talk about a waste of time. 

[WereCat]

16 minutes ago, zipspence said:

I guess I should have asked this in the first place as well, what are you trying to do? lol. Instead of troubleshooting without an end result in mind troubleshoot tends to go in unintended directions. I assumed you were just trying to fab up a VM or a VM Server. But with you saying that solution I think I got your original intent of what you were trying to accomplish wrong. 

I'm just using WIndows Sandbox to open non-trusted links in and some programs as it's easy an convenient to use without me to setup a new VM.

 

But in order to do any sort of virtualization I need to go to BIOS and enable it for my CPU which is done by enabling SVM Mode in the BIOS.

The moment I've done that my BCLK started acting up so naturally I would blame that as enabling/disabling single option in BIOS is what is causing it.

 

But I already had Windows Sandbox installed on my PC so whenever I would enable/disable SVM it would cause BCLK to act up because the Sandbox is present and because the Memory Integrity in Core Isolation was enabled by default as it's a Windows Security feature (which I have never even heard of until now).

 

So after disabling this stuff in Windows and keeping SVM enabled the BCLK is working fine as it should but I can't use Sandbox because I disabled it and if I enable it again the BCLK will start to act up again.

 

I haven't tried using VMware for example yet to see if that will cause the same sort of issue.

 

16 minutes ago, zipspence said:

Pesky Windows settings seem to always get in the way of when you try to do the simplest tasks. I was fighting tooth and nail on getting .net 3.5 put on to an NI PXI chassis a bit ago and went as far as disabling almost all of the group policy functions on the machine that could have been blocking the machine from pulling the updates from the internet (to the woe of our InfoSec department and InfraApps department) to no avail. Edited registries, edited group policies, went into a deep dive on the failure to update log to see where the fail was happening and ultimately.... The spinning platter that was in the box had the perfect placement of a bad/corrupt sector which was making the update fail. A month of troubleshooting with multiple teams looking into the issue and trying to force update the dumb thing and it ended up being a hard drive in failure that wasnt failing enough for it to show up in any testing. Talk about a waste of time. 

Yeah, those sort of things are so annoying that once you figure out the issue you want to kick something really hard because it's so stupid.

 

I have few stories like this but the most infuriating was when my parents bough a SONY smart TV and it could not find any Wi-Fi network. I've tried multiple routers, hotspots, etc... nothing.

The fix was to disable automatic clock in the date and time settings. SO OBVIOUS! right? Am I dumb here?

[zipspence]

23 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I'm just using WIndows Sandbox to open non-trusted links in and some programs as it's easy an convenient to use without me to setup a new VM.

 

But in order to do any sort of virtualization I need to go to BIOS and enable it for my CPU which is done by enabling SVM Mode in the BIOS.

The moment I've done that my BCLK started acting up so naturally I would blame that as enabling/disabling single option in BIOS is what is causing it.

 

But I already had Windows Sandbox installed on my PC so whenever I would enable/disable SVM it would cause BCLK to act up because the Sandbox is present and because the Memory Integrity in Core Isolation was enabled by default as it's a Windows Security feature (which I have never even heard of until now).

 

So after disabling this stuff in Windows and keeping SVM enabled the BCLK is working fine as it should but I can't use Sandbox because I disabled it and if I enable it again the BCLK will start to act up again.

 

I haven't tried using VMware for example yet to see if that will cause the same sort of issue.

 

Yeah, those sort of things are so annoying that once you figure out the issue you want to kick something really hard because it's so stupid.

 

I have few stories like this but the most infuriating was when my parents bough a SONY smart TV and it could not find any Wi-Fi network. I've tried multiple routers, hotspots, etc... nothing.

The fix was to disable automatic clock in the date and time settings. SO OBVIOUS! right? Am I dumb here?

You are trying to use Hyper-V for this or use the box itself as the VM? Sorry just trying to clarify because I have never had a major performance loss doing a sandbox because I normally VM with dedicating cores and ram specifically to run those systems. I have only setup dedicated vms or sandbox environments via server tasking, which yet again normally controls via Azure in off site/on site VM hosting.  So I can say running a single box entirely as a VM would be a new one for me. 

Oofta, that time sync function on the TV would be a tough one. Although I can understand it. Back in my military days we had to be within 3 seconds GMT (zero time) to have our systems sync with eachother so I get that. But for a TV to lock out WiFi handshake due to a time sync error is ROUGH. Which you JUST gave me an idea on what is happening in another ticket I was helping with yesterday and a Wifi Connectivity issue. Time Sync as stupid as it is, can cause issues with wifi connectivity. 

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, zipspence said:

You are trying to use Hyper-V for this or use the box itself as the VM? Sorry just trying to clarify because I have never had a major performance loss doing a sandbox because I normally VM with dedicating cores and ram specifically to run those systems. I have only setup dedicated vms or sandbox environments via server tasking, which yet again normally controls via Azure in off site/on site VM hosting.  So I can say running a single box entirely as a VM would be a new one for me. 

No, Hyper-V is disabled, just using Sandbox as a VM, just a nice clean Windows instance. But apparently just enabling Sandbox automatically enables hypervisor. 

 

The performance loss is not really big but when you spend days tweaking memory timings, voltages and doing stability tests and then this basically nullifies the effort it just sux. 

 

Basically my CPU runs at 4450MHz instead of 4550MHz, Infinity Fabric runs at 1866MHz instead of 1900MHz and DRAM at 3733MT/s instead of 3800MT/s by just having Sanbox enabled. 

Not even running it, just having the checkbox in Windows for Sandbox enabled so that I can run it once I click the icon. 

 

If this only happened once I actually opened and started to use the Sandbox I wouldn't mind but 90% of the time I don't use it but it's very convenient to have it as an option when I need it. 

[zipspence]

10 minutes ago, WereCat said:

No, Hyper-V is disabled, just using Sandbox as a VM, just a nice clean Windows instance. But apparently just enabling Sandbox automatically enables hypervisor. 

 

The performance loss is not really big but when you spend days tweaking memory timings, voltages and doing stability tests and then this basically nullifies the effort it just sux. 

 

Basically my CPU runs at 4450MHz instead of 4550MHz, Infinity Fabric runs at 1866MHz instead of 1900MHz and DRAM at 3733MT/s instead of 3800MT/s by just having Sanbox enabled. 

Not even running it, just having the checkbox in Windows for Sandbox enabled so that I can run it once I click the icon. 

 

If this only happened once I actually opened and started to use the Sandbox I wouldn't mind but 90% of the time I don't use it but it's very convenient to have it as an option when I need it. 

Yeah that is incredibly frustrating. I would report this specifically to the Sandbox community/Windows and see what they come back with. The only thing I can think of at this point for your issue is that There is just a tiny smidgen off the top end being exposed due to the "program" taking up resources on the host box. I foresee this being a code bug that is something that only a top end user like you would even notice. 

 

Does the sandbox run in X86 or X64?