2017 Hardware Thread

lx07 said:

This advice is good for all kids in all situations, not just nephews and hardware.

Yes, perhaps you're correct. The nephews were understandably excited. But I'm on top of the most important leaderboard for now, the uncle leaderboard, sitting close to essenbe on the grandfather leaderboard. Feels great.:)

Well that's an interesting long conversation/email exchange I had with Futuremark on the Time Measurement Data not available error.

I gave them links to valid results and Invalid time measurement data unavailable runs. They asked for 3D mark logs and then asked for task manager details. They said just to make sure your system is stable (hey, what?) disable 3D mark's hardware monitoring and run a half dozen benchmarks. 4 Time Spy's and 4 Firestrikes all valid with hardware monitoring disabled.

They said the issue has nothing to do with Windows 10 game mode on or off (oops, sorry Microsoft). I said are you going to tell me it's Rivatuner? Because I checked with guys who run the same version and they get valid results. Here's the response:

" Your issue occurs randomly. RivaTuner can definitely cause it. Out of those things you have running, RTSS.exe is the only known incompatibility. The RivaTuner incompatibility does not occur on all systems but we have not yet found a clear pattern. The main issue is if Hardware Monitoring of SystemInfo and RTSS.exe both "poke" same low level hardware bits at the same time, which can lead to SystemInfo crashing and unlike RTSS, it does not attempt to restart itself during the run - instead you get a "time measurement unavailable" (and incomplete or missing hardware monitoring data) when that occurs. This is also why your issue is random.

Disabling 3D Mark hardware monitoring should work for you. And yes, you kinda have to choose which hardware monitoring bit to use - RTSS or Futuremark SystemInfo. They unfortunately do not happily coexist on all systems and we really cannot fix this since the code is from CPU-Z and GPU-Z and we only license it. Possibly future updates to those third party DLL:s help, but I can't give any guarantees."

Well that's all interesting to me. Told them AB/RTSS has the best OSD out there. They said, understood so just disable 3D Mark's hardware monitoring and you get valid results.

Interesting response from Futuremark. I wonder why they didn't mention that futuremark sysinfo is installed when you install their benchmarks and as near as I can tell on my machines at least is not updated EVER.
I was doing some cleanup a while ago and one file would not let me delete it. The file was part of CPUID v1.41. So I went looking for the culprit and it turned out to be Futuremark sysinfo. Hrmm, I wondered why they were using such an old version of cpuid sooo, I deleted the sysinfo from control panel and the CPUID 1.41 file disappeared. Then, I verified files in the benchmarks thru steam. It did not download and install a new sysinfo. I ran Timespy and got the time measurement error. I have never gotten that error before with any version of A/B or RTSS. Then looked for the latest version of sysinfo which is 5.1.620.0 and installed and wala no error.

This may not be your problem, especially if you aren't running 3dMark from steam. But, you might take a look in control panel and see what version of futuremark sysinfo you have. YMMV

specialkone said:

The main issue is if Hardware Monitoring of SystemInfo and RTSS.exe both "poke" same low level hardware bits at the same time, which can lead to SystemInfo crashing

This sounds fair enough to me even if they didn't explain it so well.

I get this message from HWiNFO which is clearer (I think anyway).

When I run another program (TPFanControl in particular) checking same sensor (not sure what, temperature or fan I suppose) then eventually one or other program (or sometimes the whole PC) crashes.

Running one such program at a time or disabling reading from the sensor in the box above seems to be the answer for me.

If HWiNFO know reading some sensors is dodgy then presumably other programs could also do the same pre-emptive check (although how I've no idea).

Futuremark Systeminfo

lx07 said:

This sounds fair enough to me even if they didn't explain it so well.

I get this message from HWiNFO which is clearer (I think anyway).

When I run another program (TPFanControl in particular) checking same sensor (not sure what, temperature or fan I suppose) then eventually one or other program (or sometimes the whole PC) crashes.



Running one such program at a time or disabling reading from the sensor in the box above seems to be the answer for me.

If HWiNFO know reading some sensors is dodgy then presumably other programs could also do the same pre
emptive check (although how I've no idea).

That's interesting too. As it happens, I am running Corsair Link, HWINFO64 and MSI A/B 4.3/7. in the background all the time. No Problems, no crashes.