D630 & 10.9 - Ways to improve performance?

[guwu]

Hi everybody,

 

a few weeks ago our company sold some used D630's (2GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, NVidia Gfx, 250GB HDD) to us employees for a very reasonable price (10,-€). I was lucky to grab one and only after that realized that there is a way to install OS X on it (I have a desktop Hackintosh already in use). So some days ago I installed Mavericks on the D630 and most things work just fine (I did exchange the Intel WiFi with a Atheros based module so wireless is fine, too).

Nevertheless the performance of the system is rather low and I'm wondering if upgrading to 4GB RAM and switching to a SSD as system drive would bring the system speed up to where it is really usable.

 

Anyone experience with this? Thanks in advance!

[rosmaniac]

Which C2D CPU do you have exactly?  The quick upgrade for performance is to get a Penryn CPU (assuming the D630 can take one, and I think it can) and do the mods found in the thread https://osxlatitude.com/index.php?/topic/3078-m4300-no-ethernet/ (yes, that's for an M4300, but with some modifications should work fine with the 630).

 

I found the default EDP installed kexts caused significantly less performance than I had with my previous generation D820.

 

I cannot understate just how much of a performance improvement getting the Penryn CPU and the right kexts in place was; it was not a small improvement, and in my specific instance was the difference between a totally unusably slow system and a snappy system.  But you need a Penryn CPU to take advantage of native SpeedStep it seems.  A T9300 on eBay should only cost $50 or so, and the increase in performance is very significant over the Merom CPU even at the same clock speed (most bechmarks show a 25-30% improvement from the T7700 at 2.4GHz to the T9300 at 2.5GHz; yes, 100MHz faster clock but nearly 30% better performance.

 

Something is amiss with the default EDP for M4300 at least; I've not looked at the exact diffs between the M4300 EDP and the D630 nVidia but they should be close, with the biggest difference being the LCD resolution and the video chip's RAM size, to the best of my knowledge.  Herve, what do you think?

 

Going to 4GB of RAM is also a good thing, and if you can swing it will help things along, too.  But not as much as the Penryn CPU with the right kexts, org.chameleon.boot.plist and smbios.plist was, at least for me!

[rosmaniac]

Alright, a bit more info.  Do understand that I'm doing this on a Precision M4300, which is more similar to a D830 than to a D630, but they're all fairly close.

 

GeekBench 3 scores: Mountain Lion with default bone-stock EDP, T9300 CPU (2.5GHz Penryn): Single core 1309, Dual core 2195.  Mavericks with the MBP5,1 mods as mentioned above, same hardware: Single core 1353, Dual core 2459.  Not spectacular for the single core benchmark (3.3% increase), but the multicore benchmark's 12.5% speed increase (and this is a processor, not a system, benchmark!) shows that the bone-stock EDP on ML is slower than Mav on the same exact hardware (and I mean exact; ML is one one partition and Mav is on another, and I'm selecting which one I boot from Chameleon).

[Axel-Erfurt]

Guwu, read this

Performance tuning with FakeSMC & SMBIOS

[Hervé]

Read this too 

https://osxlatitude.com/index.php?/topic/2673-performance-tuning-with-fakesmc/

 

Check you've configured your BIOS setup according to the recommended settings and make sure you have MultiCore and SpeedStep on. if you have a Merom CPU (T7xxx), keep Dynamic Acceleration off, but if you have a Penryn (P8xxx or T9xxx), you can enable it.

[guwu]

Which C2D CPU do you have exactly?

 

I did not have a chance to verify this directly since yesterday but as far as I remember this should be the T7300, so, yes, it is a Merom CPU.

 

@Everyone

Thanks very much for your support so far! As soon as I have the time I will work through all of your hints an give a report on possible success. In parallel I'm already trying to get my hands on a T9300 Penryn.

 

Again, thanks a lot so far!

[Hervé]

Good choice, one of the best buy these days is indeed a T9300 (2.5GHz, 6Mo L2 cache).

 

A SSD will completely transform your experience, so if you can get one, don't hesitate! I have one in my D630 nVidia as well as in my D430 and you'll get so used to the speed and responsiveness that a system running on a 7200rpm HDD will appear painfully slow!

 

If you upgrade RAM, opt for 4Go or 8Go DDR2-800. The chipset bus will still operate at 667MHz only but timings should remain better. I did some benchmarks over a year ago and RAM performance was better with DDR2-800 than with DDR2-667. The difference was not huge, but every little helps and there should be little difference pricewise if you go for 2nd hand RAM.

[rosmaniac]

.. I did some benchmarks over a year ago and RAM performance was better with DDR2-800 than with DDR2-667. The difference was not huge, but every little helps and there should be little difference pricewise if you go for 2nd hand RAM.

 

Which benchmarks did you use to do this?  Searching the forum brought up a link to a benchmarks page, but this page gets a 'not found' (cute to use a kernel panic to describe this!).  The link is http://www.osxlatitude.com/benchmarks/

 

Indications are GeekBench and Xbench; is this still correct?

[Hervé]

These are 2 well-known benchmarking tools under OS X, yes, but GeekBench appears mostly (purely) CPU-oriented.

 

Benchmark results are in R&D->Other Research section these days...