Co-incidentally I bought in another of the same Fujitsu-Siemens P4 2.4GHz computers a few days ago
It has the same chipset (82801EB/ER) and I set BIOS the same way, completely disabling APM, setting the fan to max so that it doesn't keep checking temp, disabling hyper-threading etc
The video chipset is the same (Intel 82865G video chipset) so I was expecting the same figures as the other 2 I have.
When I ran a latency-test it was initially 5500 ish and then spiked to well over 200,000 as soon as I touched the mouse (that may well have been co-incidence) and kept spiking at a period of only a few seconds.
The old computer I was going to replace, runs unloaded at 5995 and even with quite brutal loading never got above 9500.
I have stripped the new one, upgraded all the peripherals on the old one and given it the new case etc. and the new computer will be doing house duty.
When I get time I will try to fathom out what is causing the spikes, which may assist.
In the interim I am tempted to remove this computer from the 'known good' list - I put it there so suppose I am entitled!
regards
PS
Installed 8.04 and ran a latency test for 5 hours on this machine with different memory sticks, HDD, keyboard, mouse, VDU
It ran on 10,553 for 3 hours or more and then had a single spike which sent it to 29000 ish
Very strange - it is not SMI thats all I can say for now
Had it stayed on 10553 I would have been tempted to blame mismatched memory modules for the first set of figures.