Windows 2000 doesnt use HT Correctly?

[Circaflex]

Well a friend of mine is running a new p4 setup and has his windows 2000 cd which he is going to use. He has a chip with HT and 800mhz system bus, a few people told me HT doesnt work correctly in 2k, that XP is by far better, he doesnt want to buy XP unless he has to, he likes 2k and wants to stick with it. Did SP4 fix this problem? Thanks for you input

[Bwizzel-B]

Neither OS utilizes HT correctly.

[Circaflex]

sorry to bump so quick but he kinda needs to know by the end of the night so sorry again if its too early for a bumpz0rz

[OptiPlex]

It's not recommended you use Windows 2000 and HT together so turn off HT in the BIOS before installing it.

Win2k SHOULD run smoothly with HT on but I hear there's some negative impact on performance.

[DigitalN.]

  OptiPlex said:

It's not recommended you use Windows 2000 and HT together so turn off HT in the BIOS before installing it.

Win2k SHOULD run smoothly with HT on but I hear there's some negative impact on performance.

UNLESS YOU MULTITASK

cant forget that.

so unless he multitasks alot, turn it off, but I would leave it on, good to know its there

[OptiPlex]

  Quote

Windows 2000 Professional is limited to two processors and doesn?t recognize the difference between a dual processor hyperthreaded system and a quad processor non-hyperthreaded systemThe 2nd logical processor on each physical processor would never be used.b>

  Quote

For Windows NT and Windows 2000, the answer i"It doesn't even know." These operating systems are not hyperthreading-aware because they were written before hyperthreading was invented.b> If you enable hyperthreading, then each of your CPUs looks like two separate CPUs to these operating systems. (And will get charged as two separate CPUs for licensing purposes.Since the scheduler doesn't realize the connection between the virtual CPUs, it can end up doing a worse job than if you had never enabled hyperthreading to begin with.b>

  Quote

A1 = CPU #1

A2 = Logical CPU #1

B1 = CPU #2

B2 = Logical CPU #2

Suppose you have two CPU-intensive tasks. As far as the Windows NT and Windows 2000 schedulers are concernedall four processors are equivalent, so it figure it doesn't matter which two it uses. And if you're unlucky, it'll pick A1 and A2, forcing one physical processor to shoulder two heavy loads (each of which will probably run at something between half-speed and three-quarter speed), leaving physical processor B idle; completely unaware that it could have done a better job by putting one on A1 and the other on B1.i>

Multitasking wouldn't even work properly in Windows 2000, those two statements explain it decently.

And HT has been known to make Win2k unstable or crash (not on all machines but some)

And in some cases it's been known to hurt performance.

It looks like HT causes more problems in Win2000 so my recommendation ... turn it off or hope it won't b0rk your install or anything...

[PseudoRandomDragon]

Clearly, to get his money's worth he should upgrade to WinXP, unless there is some patch for Win2k and HT provided by the company that made the computer or from microsoft itself.

[Mando]

Hmm

I am a bit confused here.

if the reasons why not to use it with w2k is true then why is it that Dual Xeon CPus used in servers running W2k server show up as 4 CPus and are used accordingly?

Here of all places i would notice a degradation in performance and response in the domain but this is not true.

Xeon 2.4 (533fsb) use HT technology without any problems in W2k server (same core as W2k pro).

My 3ghz prescott (w2k) runs all the same apps at the same level and power as my XP pro equivilent machine including 3dmark 2003,2005 & pcmark2004.

I dont have any problems with HT in W2k and performance in games and opengl Rendering is actually better in W2k with my ht cpu.

[John Veteran]

I believe either SP3 or SP4 for Windows 2000 adds support for HT (Y)

[Mando]

Thats that answered Gameguy

cheers mate :D

[Threedog]

I have been running Win 2k SP4 with hyperthreading enabled with no problems. I installed Win 2K tho with SP4 already slipstreamed in though.