Anyone using a newer model of AMD phenom X4, especially if you are using a phenom II, on vista/win 7 read this:



on very old phenom cpu's there was a problem known as the TLB BUG.

there was a windows update patch put out to fix it,

the problem is, windows 7 and vista are now mistakenly applying this "fix" to PHENOM CPU'S THAT DON'T HAVE THE PROBLEM, severely limiting cpu performance!!!!


anyone with framerate drops with phenom cpu , first make sure your CPU is NOT affected by TLB bug(most newer ones are not), then read this thread (and note- even if your bios allows TLB bug fix to be disabled, windows may re-activate it!):

http://www.overclock.net/amd-cpus/48392 ... sable.html

there is a link to this tool in the thread, which allows you to disable TLB bugfix in vista/win7:

http://www.overclock.net/attachments/am ... e-tool.zip

extract the files, then
run TLB_disable.exe *as administrator* and enjoy your new CPU without framerate drops!!!!

if you want to read more about this, here is another thread:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/o- ... henom.html

and i quote:
"After the 16th reworking of Google keywords, by fluke I happened upon a discussion between AMD enthusiast who had deduced a rather startling fact – Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom and without informing users, had chosen with Vista SP1, to arbitrarily over ride user’s BIOS settings in regards to the TLB fix. Manually disabled or not, SP1 WILL set the TLB fix to enabled on your system dramatically hurting performance. This is also true of the AOD (AMD OverDrive) utility, even when set to disabled (yellow ring), the TLB fix setting is forced to enabled by SP1 code." -- this also applies to win 7

btw, the file has to be run every time you reboot, but you can use "task scheduler" to have it autostart on boot

this fix applies to all games of course -- while you may not see a massive boost in maximum framerate, it should greatly improve minimum framerate, giving you less framerate drops -- (I've seen massive improvements in minimum FPS in TF2, BFBC2, LOTRO) , not just black ops -- you can easily try the fix and then simply reboot and the fix will be gone until you run tlb_disable.exe again. For example: in unigine heaven 2.1 , my minimum fps without this fix is 3.1, with the fix is 14.0.

my system: AMD Phenom II X4 945, Radeon 6870 1 gig, 6 gb ram, Windows 7