Frequent Beachballing AND bizarre openCL results on June09 MacBook Pro

[bishboria]

Hi,

First of all, I frequently get beachballing on my June09 MacBook Pro (even before installing Snow Leopard). It usually happens when working with iTunes or iPhoto or anything hard drive "intensive" like watching a video on VLC while downloading a large file from the net.

I've read that the problem may be caused by the EFI firmware update, I can't/don't know how to verify that.

The other problem I have is that since installing Snow Leopard I ran the openCL benchmark tool just to find out how fast my GPUs are compared to the CPU. The 9400M runs the bench mark at about 9 secs, and the CPU gets about 12 secs, which is about right from what I can see. However, the 9600M GT (the 512MB version) gets about 14 secs!

Below is an example run for you to see:

...........................................................
.................. OpenCL Bench V 0.25 by mitch ...........
...... C2D 3GHz = 12 sec vs Nvidia 9600GT = 0,93 sec ......
... time results are not comparable to older version! .....
...........................................................

Number of OpenCL devices found: 3
OpenCL Device # 0 = GeForce 9600M GT
Device 0 is an: GPU with max. 1250 MHz and 32 units/cores 
Now computing - please be patient....
time used: 13.871 seconds

OpenCL Device # 1 = GeForce 9400M
Device 1 is an: GPU with max. 1100 MHz and 16 units/cores 
Now computing - please be patient....
time used:  8.968 seconds

OpenCL Device # 2 = Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T9900  @ 3.06GHz
Device 2 is an: CPU with max. 3060 MHz and 2 units/cores 
Now computing - please be patient....
time used: 11.860 seconds

Now checking if results are valid - please be patient....
:) Validate test passed - GPU results=CPU results :) 
logout

This can't be right can it?

Is anyone else having similar problems? Some guidance/advice would be great

 

[jasko]

I just got my MBP a few days ago and have locked up, or beachballed, a few times already. Something I never experienced with my old iMac. Like you said, mostly when I'm using iTunes or closing VLC or Quicktime. What the hell. It's annoying. How can we fix this.

 

[Sneakz]

Plug your magsafe into your MBP then bench again. 9600M GT will be higher. And why do you care about OCL results anyway? Its not like there are any applications to take advantage of it yet.

 

[thesmoth]

I've had a 13" mbp for about 3 months now and i've been getting more 5-20 second beach-ball lock ups with snow leopard than I had before.

 

[bishboria]

Plug your magsafe into your MBP then bench again. 9600M GT will be higher. And why do you care about OCL results anyway? Its not like there are any applications to take advantage of it yet.

OK. Running on magsafe now runs the benchmark at about 3 secs, much more respectable! Thanks for that tip.

This still leaves the beachballing... At least that's one problem done.

EDIT: To answer your question Sneakz, it's that not I cared about the openCL results as such, just that I thought the long run time may have been hinting at a hardware issue. But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least for the GPU.

 

[Donar]

I've read that the problem may be caused by the EFI firmware update, I can't/don't know how to verify that.

Go to "About this mac" Hardware -> Serial-ATA and check if SATA speed is 3 Gigabit.

If it is at 3 Gigabit i suggest you downgrade the Firmware from 1.7 to 1.6. There is a big thread about this problem the last pages contain the downgrade procedure and files.

 

[bishboria]

I've changed Snow Leopard to always boot the kernel in 64 bit mode. I barely get any beachballing now... iPhoto got a nasty beachball, I was holding the right arrow key down continously through my entire photo collection (13.4GB, about 5MB per picture), but this happened once.

Go to "About this mac" Hardware -> Serial-ATA and check if SATA speed is 3 Gigabit.

If it is at 3 Gigabit i suggest you downgrade the Firmware from 1.7 to 1.6. There is a big thread about this problem the last pages contain the downgrade procedure and files.

I do have 1.7 firmware installed, so I might go back to 1.6 and see what happens.

 

[bishboria]

to save anyone else hassle of having to find it, here is a link to the page where Panzo explains how to restore firmware 1.6: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/729883/