P55 chipset: What is C-State and what does it do ?

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Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2005
Messages
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Hi there all.

A short time ago I purchased a i7 860 and a P55 mobo (Asus Maximum III).

I had all types of trouble connecting devices to the USB ports, particulary my iPhone. I could not maintain a connection to the iphone for more than a minute or two and could not sync, update or do anything useful when the phone was connected. Connecting my iPhone would drop other USB devices from the USB ports as well.

I read a gazillion posts trying to diagnose the problem when I came across a post regarding enable processor C-STATE in the BIOS. The moment I enables C-STATE all the problems with USB immediately went away.. voila.

I am, however, now having issues with online games such as WOW.. every so often I get a fair bit of lag between my actions such as casting spells.. they are often 0.3 to 0.6 MS behind my keystrokes. Sometimes the game lags for up to 2-3 seconds before things happen.

I am beginning to suspect that enabling C-STATE has something to do with it.. what does C-STATE do and if indeed it should be enabled, what do I set it to for a i7 860 quad-core CPU ?

1000
 
C-State AFAIK is the power saving feature of a CPU. Enabling C-State most likely allow the throttling of CPU speed or disabling cores. Personally I'd enable it for power saving when I am not running intensive applications but YMMV.

As for your issue in WoW, thats an odd one. Considering it should know that you are doing something and not idling. I'd suggest updating your BIOS if you havent done so. It might solve the issue.
 
The thing is i CAN'T disable C-STATE because it kills the connectivity to my iPhone and other USB devices become unstable. I've had TWO p55 boards and it's the same for both. What the hell am I doing wrong here ? I'm running Windows 7 64bit but have been doing so for a looong time now with no problems until P55.

1000
 
I am going to run a driver and BIOS update tonight and see if anything changes.

Last night I DISABLED C-STATE and oddly enough the iPhone is syncing just fine again .. I guess that C-STATE needed to be enabled for the first sync or something. It still hasn't resolved the NIC lag though but perhaps the driver/chipset updates will deal with it.. here's hoping.

I have to say that overall upgrading from a P45 to a P55 chipset has been an absolute nightmare.

1000
 
That's odd, if anything, enabling C-state is telling the computer to that's ok to throttle things, which you'd think if anything, that would cause issues rather than non-throttling. Though it ideally shouldn't matter. Surprised it's not enabled by default, I've always found that to be so on my mobos.
 
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/31/iphone-and-windows-7-dont-play-nice-intel-p55-chipset-to-blame/
Tell that to Intel's quality control team who seem to have somehow missed an issue between Apple's app carrier deluxe and the P55 Express chipset's USB controller. Consistent (and persistent) syncing issues have been reported on Apple's support forums, wherein iTunes on Windows 7 machines recognizes the iPhone, but spits out an "error 0xE8000065" message whenever the user attempts to sync.
Click to expand...

Might not be the same thing but might be :)
 
Hmm, glad I haven't run into that on my GD80 the few times I've synced my phone.
 
You WILL my friend, you WILL. Some guys happily plod along for week, then one day = BOOM, no more connectivity to iPod and it syncs up empty. Mark my words

1000
 
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/...datefixesiphonesyncproblemwithwindows7forsome

Interesting, the link was on the hardocp front page. Looks like a BIOS fix for gigabyte and it mentions ASUS...
"The BIOS update will help people who have the Gigabyte motherboard in their systems, but it won't help other people who have the problem, such as those with an ASUS motherboard."

...well I guess the good news is that if it's a BIOS issue, it's easily fixed and hopefully something that's being looked at by ASUS. I'd poke them with an email to make sure they're looking into it.
 
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/gigabyte-fixes-iphone-sync-issue-with-bios-update/

Gigabyte fixes iPhone sync issue with BIOS update

by Vladislav Savov posted Nov 9th 2009 at 8:47AM
The Intel P55 Express chipset snafu that caused iPhones to lose their syncing minds has now been remedied -- at least by one motherboard maker. Gigabyte has issued a BIOS update making things all hunky-dory between the phone and the mobo, putting your troubles to an end. The P55 is Intel's latest midrange chipset and orchestrates things for newer Core i5 / i7 machines. The other two P55 purveyors, ASUS and MSI, were also caught by the bug, and there are anecdotal reports of success with an ASUS BIOS update, but not official fixes as of yet. Given the competitive nature of this market, though, we'd be surprised if those two companies didn't quickly follow suit. All's well that ends well, right?
Click to expand...
 
Still haven't had a problem with my MSI, though I don't sync that often. Also running a beta bios version that was up to date a few weeks ago, I know there's been 2 revisions since then, I'll have to see where they're at now. I'll probably just wait for a final 1.6 at this point though.
 
that happened to my Zen Vision:M on my x38. Just gotta go to device manager with it plugged in and uninstall the device, reboot, and reconnect it.
 
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