Who’s affected, and who can see the performance increase?

• Everyone with a B2 Stepping Quad Core AMD Processor (Phenom 9500, 9600, 9700 & B2 Stepping Opterons) who runs Windows Vista SP1+, or Windows Server 2008 (Even if you have the TLB fix DISABLED in your BIOS).

General Info:

When AMD released the 9500, 9600, & 9700 series processors they missed a huge error.  The L3 cache is shared across the 4 cores… there is a bug in processor that can cause a deadlock under certain nested & recursive L3 cache writes.
AMD released a BIOS “fix” for this but as consumers quickly found out the “fix” came at a high price… about a 30% performance hit.  Most people have not applied this patch… and why should they?  They aren’t using virtualization, and they haven’t suffered any lockups.  Not to mention it requires the user to flash his or her BIOS which isn’t something most people are keen on doing.  Honestly… they probably don’t even know about it.

The deadlock is mostly seen when the host OS is running visualization (VM Ware, etc) and under a steady load.  I’ve yet to deadlock while playing Warhammer.

It’s not just AMD’s fault…

You purchased it and Microsoft FORCED the TLB onto your system with SP1.  Yup, you heard me you can’t even disable it via the BIOS.  There is no setting you can change inside windows… you’re supposed to live with it.

How do I disable the TLB fix?

1. Download the files: [Link]
2. Run TLB_Disable.exe
3. Enjoy the boost…

sam2008 wrote the TLB_Disable GUI… you can view his thread here: [Link]

Great Instructions for getting this to run automagically at every boot:  [Link]

I went from 24 FPS to 40.

If you have any questions feel free to post a comment. I won’t be checking the warhammer alliance post very often.