A lot of things that are now implemented in hardware had to be done in software in the early days. HPET was always a costly way to retrieve an incremental timestamp counter, especially when CPU cycles were on a tight budget. Yet the root of some of the performance problems was the same as it is today, but in a different way. Forum threads about this topic popped up here an there, lots of misinformation and make-believe happened back then. To understand this properly we need to go back serveral years when HPET was already diagnosed to hurt gaming performance in certain situations. Evidently there are lots of people out there having low framerates on their setups and no explanation for it. The contrary is the case, Intel suffers from this bug and we are pretty sure that Anandtech is not the only review site that has published wrong results because of these issues. Let's rip the bandaid off: Yes, there IS an HPET bug and no, Intel is NOT cheating.
It provides proof behind these infamous HPET problems and helps you to test the impact of your timer configuration on your system performance.Äownload: TimerBench 1.5 (173 MB, Self-extracting EXE, CRC32: 34EC2A27)
NAMEBENCH REVIEW WINDOWS
We take this opportunity to have another look at the HPET bug and finally announce TimerBench, our Windows timer benchmark to the public. People are calling out Intel as cheaters when actually the opposite is going on. Since then a lot of misconceptions are going around. Some Intel processors suffered from decreased performance in games and other benchmarks. Not sure how? Then view this Google page, replacing its server IP addresses with the ones that namebench recommends.Anandtech recently released an article that pointed out problems with their CPU reviews due to an enabled High Precision Event Timer in Windows. You'll still have to change your DNS server settings manually, unfortunately. Go make a coffee or something, give the program the 10 or 15 minutes it needs, then come back and admire the finished report: detailed charts and graphs that tell you exactly how fast each server is, and recommend the two that you need to use.
NAMEBENCH REVIEW PC
You should stop using your PC while the benchmark is running, just to ensure that you don't skew the results. Click "Start Benchmark" and namebench will extract 200 recent URLs from your browser history, then query several DNS servers for each one.
To get started, launch the program and choose your most commonly used browser in the Benchmark Data Source list. There are plenty of public alternatives around, and namebench can help you find out whether any of these would improve your surfing speeds. You don't have to use the DNS server provided by your ISP, though. DNS lookups normally take a fraction of a second, but slow servers might take 3, 4, 5 seconds or more to return any information for some sites, and that can quickly become very frustrating. But another possibility is that your DNS server (the computer that translates a domain like into an IP address like 209.85.229.147) is just slow. The delay might be down to the remote site. It happens all the time: you type a URL into your browser address bar, hit enter, and there's a long pause before anything happens.