Upgraded to a Core 2 2.13ghz - not seeing big performance

[theguy82]

Hi,

I upgraded from an Intel P4 2.8 HT to a Core 2 2.13 a little while ago. I also upgraded my RAM from PC3200 to DDR2 667 (Kingston 2x512) and also from a 6600GT AGP video card to a 7900 GT PCI-E. I also have 1 SATA 120GB and also a SATA 2 320 GB hard drives. This is all on an ABIT AB9 motherboard.

I am not seeing a huge difference in performance between the 2 when it comes to just doing multiple things or just heavy CPU/memory tasks. Booting up into windows xp seems to actually take longer then before. Gaming is better, but I think that has a lot to do with the video card. I am just not sure if I have the CPU setup correctly or something to actually optimize what I have.

Is there anything that I am missing or that I should check? Any help would be great. Thnx in advance!

 

[redwing]

I dont think you should expect a mind-boggling increase in speed when it comes to everyday tasks (internet browsing, light office apps, etc), since your previous rig was not nearly at 100% CPU load when it was doing those. In these cases you are limited by other factors such as the time to load a program from a HD into main memory. If you want to see a measurable difference, open 20 IE windows as well as a few games, and then try switching between them and monitoring their performance.
You're right, your gaming performance increase comes mostly from your video upgrade, since a 7900GT would hardly be bottlenecked even by a fairly slow (Prescott?) P4 in most games.

Cheers

 

[shinigamiX]

Hi,

I upgraded from an Intel P4 2.8 HT to a Core 2 2.13 a little while ago. I also upgraded my RAM from PC3200 to DDR2 667 (Kingston 2x512) and also from a 6600GT AGP video card to a 7900 GT PCI-E. I also have 1 SATA 120GB and also a SATA 2 320 GB hard drives. This is all on an ABIT AB9 motherboard.

I am not seeing a huge difference in performance between the 2 when it comes to just doing multiple things or just heavy CPU/memory tasks. Booting up into windows xp seems to actually take longer then before. Gaming is better, but I think that has a lot to do with the video card. I am just not sure if I have the CPU setup correctly or something to actually optimize what I have.

Is there anything that I am missing or that I should check? Any help would be great. Thnx in advance!

Did you reformat your HDD?

 

[Guest]

Had a somewhat similar upgrade from my P4 2.6 and you won't see the difference just browsing the web like others mentionned.

Try encoding vido while playing a game. My encoding of 4 X 45min video on a DVD went from 2h20 to roughly 40 minutes. Also alt+ tabin out of games is super smooth. Running uTorrent along encoding while playing is nothing to sneeze at!

Finally games like Rainbow Six Vegas can still puish my new cpu to almost 100% so I see a big difference in this game

 

[monkeymanuk]

You won't see a significant difference in general windows usage. Because general windows tasks don't requre all that processing power.

You'll notice the difference in benchmarks though

 

[Track]

Its slow because of other things - not the CPU. Get a 10,000 RPM HDD and ull see the difference.

 

[ajfink]

Re-install Windows. It sounds like it's not really making use of both cores.

 

[Eurasianman]

I think it depends on whether your software setup is the same on both computers as well as peripherals that are hooked up to it. My AMD Athlon 64 3200 @ 2.2 GHz w/ 2 GB DDR @ 400MHz boots up faster than the computer in my sig. Apps do feel they load up a little bit faster, but then again, I don't have a lot of things running on it like I do on my new computer.

Also, if you moved your hard drive from your old computer to your new computer, that'll also make a difference. It's always wiser to reformat and reinstall windows as well as programs when you go to a new build

Other than that, like other said, Dual Cores are really good if you do a lot of multitasking and encoding/decoding and gaming. I ran Rainbow Six Vegas and Battlefield 2 on both setups and my setup below does load things a bit faster.

 

[theguy82]

I always format my computer when I do upgrades as big as this. When I do look in task mgr, 2 cores do show up. What I find is when I am extracting something in something like WinRAR and then browsing and also doing something else that can "lag" your computer, I find that it does just that. Doing multiple things I find isn't really faster then my old setup.

 

[Blacken]

You won't see a significant difference in general windows usage. Because general windows tasks don't requre all that processing power.

You'll notice the difference in benchmarks though

Right. Betting DX10 and Vista will show improvements for multi-core. Especialy when multi-core gaming takes to full and games are written to utilize it specificaly. It will result in a large FPS bump. Until then, you have 2 Pentium M's sharing usage.

 

[skud]

You won't see a significant difference in general windows usage. Because general windows tasks don't requre all that processing power.

You'll notice the difference in benchmarks though

Right. Betting DX10 and Vista will show improvements for multi-core. Especialy when multi-core gaming takes to full and games are written to utilize it specificaly. It will result in a large FPS bump. Until then, you have 2 Pentium M's sharing usage.

what they said

 

[NMDante]

Not sure why.

I noticed a difference in my encoding/decoding time, especially when running multiple instances of said app. It might have cut my time down around 2-3 mins per job queued.

If you're talking about just normal, mundane Windows stuff, yeah, I don't see much difference, but then again, I wasn't expecting much. My Windows startups are much faster though.

Again, not sure why your build seems slower. Maybe you can take the advice given already to help.

Good luck.

 

[cc3d]

blame marketing. I've heard tales of sales people telling people that thy can't play MP3s and surf the web at the same time without a dual core chip.
As above, you won't see a big difference until you compare the C2D in something CPU intensive. I've got several machines setup for rendering (3D stuff). The Core 2 Duo is certainly the fastest available now and it's significant. I could get the 950D @ 4100 Mhz to score higher in 3DMark06 (CPU score) but it could not render as fast a an AMD X2 4800 @ 2400 mhz. The e6600 at 2400 mhz beats the AMD X2 4800 in scores and in application (rendering).

I've currently gotten the C2D e6600 up to 3400 mhz, and it's kicking butt. If you can use a CPU load monitor, you'll see that for most standard operations (surfing the web, working in Excel, playing music, e-mail, etc.), the CPU appears to be only utilized 50% (1 core). If you're encoding video, ripping CDs or rendering graphics, you may see that both cores get utilized.

The marketing hype makes it appear that you can't do every day stuff without dual cores.

Reminds me of when the FPU came out and everyone bought one to make Lotus 1-2-3 run faster.

 

[RyanMicah]

Hey Guy, my X2 system takes a lot longer to start up than my single core Athlon system does. I think part of it has to do with the integrated graphics I'm using on my mATX system for now. This ATI AIW X1900 card takes awhile to initiate and auto-check it's properties and functions. It also loads parts of the catalyst drivers and control center program I believe. I have many more devices and drives hooked up to this system, than my other one, which is probably also a cause for the longer startup time. As for seeing an increase in speed, you can't really see a visible difference in how quickly a program installs off a CD etc, because there are still bottlenecks with the drives and the HDD. When encoding or something you will see a difference from the dual core. You'll also see a big difference with how many apps you can run at one time, provided you also have enough ram. Don't forget too that the internet itself is still rather slow. I'm crossing my fingers in hopes that Internet 2 becomes available for cheap within the next decade and that more companies decide to upgrade their mainframes and servers.

 

[theguy82]

Well another example is last night I was burning data to a DVD. Just doing this slowed down me doing things like browsing etc.

 

[Eurasianman]

Well, I have that too. I think that's a hard drive issue, since you're copying data from the hard drive to the DVD drive. My computer doesn't feel so fast either when I do a virus scan and try to multitask, but that's because the anti-virus software is scanning the hard drive, which makes sense.

 

[Bloated]

blame the marketing boys for your current situation and opinion.

I tried to wait as long as I could before making the jump to dual core from single because I knew multitasking wasn't about web surfing while playing multimedia apps.... or despite some ppls opinion running a video game while running gamechat software and a software firewall :lol: .....

it's funny I have a few friends who have self categorised themselves as real power users, you know the guys who really need dual core processing, when asked how fast my Opty/FX62 (oc'd) compared to my previous Intel 2400mhz/4200mhz (oc'd) I said "it's ok you have to remember the Intel was pretty damned fast so I don't really see or feel the difference"..... after that I was removed from the "hard core power user group" because I just didn't get it...... let's ignore the reality that none of the "power user group" had a dual core yet but they really wanted one so they created their own need.

a few weeks later they asked again while they were in the process of selling me their single core platforms to swap for dual core AMD's and I stated "yeah finally I noticed huge benefit in going dual core, I worked my ass off for 3 hours encrypting, compressing, burning while surfing the web and playing a movie all at the same time, I managed to burn 9 DVD discs full of data in the span fuck I didn't stop working the entire time"..... then I joked "multitasking sucks"..... now apparently I've been re-included although I've never done it again, truly it was like working but I did see why all the hoopla about dual cores was created...... that it's useless for day to day useage apparently has no relevance.

I've since sold the Opty/FX62 and replaced it with an E6600 C2D which runs really nice at 3400mhz, it doesn't multitask quite as well as the Opty but the difference is irrelavent and the inherrent gaming benefits overwhelm any multitasking desires I never had anyway.

I've since gotten another Opty platform in along with some single core socket 939's that I'm overclocking for the fun of it and comparing the overall perf to the C2D.... day to day useage I'm losing nothing but in a cppl games I find I prefer the C2D overall but not by much.

all platforms are using X1900 XTX's and a lonely X1800 XT.

if I ever get out of selling parts I'll probably start keeping my systems for 4 years minimum and simply add ram and upgrade gfx to keep them current.

 

[GigabyteRules]

i went for a 2.8ht p4 to core 2 duo e3400 and with nero digital i got 3fps on the p4 and 14fps on 1core on the 3400 and 25fps using 2 core , so ild say thats a HUGE difference

 

[djgandy]

You are kinda right, for the web browser person there is not a lot to be gained.

When you have 2 debugging sessions running on a game, 4 instances of msvc, web browsers, winamp, msn, loads of folders and folding at home all running at once, let me tell you...It makes a huuuuuuuuge difference

 

[MU_Engineer]

I went from a P4-M 2.20 GHz notebook to my X2 4200+ desktop and there was a significant difference in performance between the two. The CPU was obviously faster, but what really made the computer "feel" a ton quicker was going from the notebook's 5400 rpm HDD to a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor and a well-designed 3-disk RAID array. The CPU's contribution was mostly having that second core around to process things when I was running an intensive process that pegged one core at 100%.

 

[RyanMicah]

Well another example is last night I was burning data to a DVD. Just doing this slowed down me doing things like browsing etc.

So what you're saying is that games are faster, but at certain times it seems to slow...particularly when you're using the hard drive. Do your games load quickly? Does your mouse get jittery? I think you mentioned several HDD's, are they in RAID?

 

[Blacken]

Games are quite a bit faster. Because XP wasn't built upon multi-core, you will find that very unoften will the total cpu usage ever go above 50%. For the most part, it's a usage trade for trade between cores cutting it's potential. Hopefully all this changes with Vista.
Comparing the value of a multi-core to web browsing seems uterly rediculous if you think about it. Text and pictures? With enough ram, a Pentium 66 could efficiently run IE or Firefox
We reached multitasking a long time ago. My old P133 would run a 128kbps MP3, browse, and have headroom run other programs. Good ol' Penty.

 

[RyanMicah]

Games are quite a bit faster. Because XP wasn't built upon multi-core, you will find that very unoften will the total cpu usage ever go above 50%. For the most part, it's a usage trade for trade between cores cutting it's potential. Hopefully all this changes with Vista.
Comparing the value of a multi-core to web browsing seems uterly rediculous if you think about it. Text and pictures? With enough ram, a Pentium 66 could efficiently run IE or Firefox
We reached multitasking a long time ago. My old P133 would run a 128kbps MP3, browse, and have headroom run other programs. Good ol' Penty.

Are you (edited for Ninja) COMPLETELY retarded? I was talking to GUY...trying to help him trouble shoot by hearing about more symptoms...but thanks for all the knowledge, I'll keep it in mind. :-\

 

[dasickninja]

Could you edit that so its not so flame worthy?

 

[RyanMicah]

Could you edit that so its not so flame worthy?

Lemme check. Nope. Sorry. I know, I know. I reap what I sow. Sow? :twisted: Wait, I added a word...just for you Ninja. Enjoy!