# what is hpet mode?



## DTV DRAGON (Mar 30, 2010)

hey guys can ya tellme what hpet support and mode realy does in the bios,, it says it a high precision event timer, whatever that means, and by default it is set to 32bit mode. should i do anything with it like set it to 64 bit mode? or is it a waist of time?


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## francis511 (Mar 30, 2010)

I think it`s for hyperthreading.


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## DTV DRAGON (Mar 30, 2010)

hmm could be, but if iam running a 64 bit do ya think its a benifit for me to change it to 64 bit mode cause default is 32bit?


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## francis511 (Mar 30, 2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPET

There`s an entry in wikipedia but it didn`t make it much clearer for me !


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## W1zzard (Mar 30, 2010)

HPET is a new timer that you can use to measure time. it's more accurate than previous methods, but only supported on vista and up

due to buggy implementations sometimes the 64 bit counter in the bios/motherboard doesnt work with the implementation in the 64-bit os, that's why you can change it to 32-bit here.

no reason to change it to 32-bit unless you have problems

all that changes when going from HPET to no HPET is that QueryPerformanceCounter uses the HPET, or not. nothing else


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## DTV DRAGON (Mar 30, 2010)

so you are saying just leave it as is at 32 bit even though i have a 64 bit win7? or try 64bit and see if its buggy or not  lol


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## W1zzard (Mar 30, 2010)

set it to 64-bit if you want, makes no difference really

you can run this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd424533.aspx to check if your hpet works right

oh i forgot .. with hpet enabled, applications that use timer functions gain a very slight performance benefit

also look in your PC's Event Viewer for a HAL error like this:
'Initialization of the High Precision Event Timer failed due to a BIOS configuration problem'


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## DTV DRAGON (Mar 30, 2010)

you have given me more info on it that i can understand ,then what i found googling it


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## 95Viper (Mar 30, 2010)

Older Intel specification paper on High precision event timers, if you like reading, it may explain things.

If you don't like reading; there are a couple of pictures.


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