October 03, 2002
Hello All,
In December there was a lot of discussion on the Yahoo Forum about enabling SSE support on the "Morgan" based Mobile Duron and the Mobile Athlon processor. For some reason it seems that SSE support is by default disabled on these processors. However, SSE support does exist. The problem has been how to enable SSE support.
Update March 6, 2002 -- SSE support can be automatically enabled on Athlon and "Morgan" Duron processors by updating to the R0114K5 Bios.
Yesterday, February 1, 2002, Tony (tone_man2001) and Chris "hilbeiu", from the Yahoo forum, figured out how to enable SSE support on the Mobile "Morgan" based Duron and Athlon processors. The solution to enabling SSE support is to use a new version of the WCPUID utility from H.Oda. The newest version of WCPUID is version 3.0f. This version was posted on 1/01/2002 according to the H.Oda download page.
About page from WCPUID ver 3.0f
This version of WCPUID is a very cool and useful tool. On this page I am showing how to enable SSE support using WCPUID. I also decided to do a full review of WCPUID the review can be found under wcpuid_review. In addition I am going to show the results of enabling SSE on my 900Mhz FX210.
When you first start up the WCPUID 
utility the following screen appears.
As you can see, SSE support is shown as "Not Supported" initially. To enable SSE open the "Tweaks" menu.
Click on "AMD Athlon MP/4 SSE Control" and the following window will open.
Make sure the radio button for "SSE detection Enable" is selected and click OK. Voila! SSE is now shown as Supported.
The big question that I had is, is SSE really enabled or not? To
answer that question I fired up SiSoft Sandra
(SiSoft Sandra Standard ver 2002.1.8.59) to see what it showed. Shown below are
screen shots of Sandra's CPU&Bios information screen 
before and after I enabled SSE.
|
|
|
|
Before |
After |
Well it looks like SSE is indeed enabled. The next question is,
does SSE actually make a difference in benchmark numbers when it is turned on? I
decided to use Sandra's CPU Multimedia benchmark 
to see if there was any difference with SSE enabled. Shown below are the results
of Sandra CPU Multimedia benchmark before and after enabling SSE. Keep in mind
that these are all mobile processors (Thanks to Tony for the Athlon stuff). Click on
images to see full screen captures.
| Processor |
Before (no SSE) |
After (SSE) |
| 900Mhz Duron |
|
|
| 1.0Ghz Athlon |  |
 |
| 1.1Ghz (OC) Athlon |  |
 |
| 1.15Ghz(OC) Athlon |  |
 |
As you can see SSE tests are definitely being performed when SSE support is enabled.
There are some problems with SSE support though.
On my FX210 if Win2K crashes (I thought it was supposed to be a tough OS) after the reboot SSE support is not enabled. I have to go back in to WCPUID and enable it again. However, if I shut down Win2K with SSE support enabled when I bring it back up SSE support is still enabled.
If I Standby or Hibernate my system with SSE support enabled when I bring it out of Standby or Hibernate mode SSE support is disabled. Why? Again I can go back in to WCPUID and enable SSE at least till the next crash, standby, or hibernate.
All of these problems have been resolved by updating to the R0114K5 bios
What does WCPUID do to enable SSE support? good question. The answer to this seems to be lack of Bios support for SSE in the Bios's for the FX210/FX215. WCPUID has the ability to bypass this missing support and enable the SSE feature by turning ON a bit in a register of the processor. Update March 6, 2002 -- SSE support can be automatically enabled on Athlon and "Morgan" Duron processors by updating to the R0114K5 Bios.
How can I keep SSE support permanently enabled? another good question. A solution for this problem has been developed by Chris Hilbert. He was able to work with a developer buddy of his and develop a small utility that can be placed in your startup folder to enable SSE when you log in to your system under Win2K and WinXP. The utility is called A4SSE. Here is a download link. Update March 6, 2002 -- SSE support can be automatically enabled on Athlon and "Morgan" Duron processors by updating to the R0114K5 Bios.
Like always if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop me an e-mail.
Later,
Brad
mailto:bhite@rocketmail.com
