assigning duo cor processors to talks

izak

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Jan 23, 2007
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I have been lurking on this forum or a bit and i finally have a question. I just bought a PD Smithfield, and i was curious if there is a way to assign certain programs to a specific CPU? basically i want to assign one to a game and another to all other background stuff.

sorry if this is a repost, i didn't see another thread like this. im wrong please link the appropriate thread. thank you!
 

fredgiblet

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Jul 8, 2006
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I'm just about positive the answer is no, but there is good news, Windows should (SHOULD!) automatically transfer most of the other processes to the underused core and run the game exclusively on one core...SHOULD, but I'm not 100% on that.
 
In Windows XP you can:

1. CTRL+ALT+DELETE
2. Go to the "Processes" tab
3. Right click any process and select "Set Affinity"
4. Check the cores that you wish the process to have access to

Remember, CPU 0 is the first core. CPU 1 is the second core. Computers start counting from 0 and that's why it is this way in Windows, don't let it confuse you.



taskmanager_set_affinity.png


ttam_set_affinity.png
 

heartview

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Jul 20, 2006
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In Windows XP you can:

1. CTRL+ALT+DELETE
2. Go to the "Processes" tab
3. Right click any process and select "Set Affinity"
4. Check the cores that you wish the process to have access to

Remember, CPU 0 is the first core. CPU 1 is the second core. Computers start counting from 0 and that's why it is this way in Windows, don't let it confuse you.

This is probably only necessary if you are running another complex task at the same time as the game. So if you plan to burn CD's or something like that while playing your game, set your game to use one CPU and set the burner software to the other.
 

darkz

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Jan 24, 2007
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As has been said, you can set process affinity in the task manager, however in 99% of situations it's best to let Windows control which processors are used.

In most cases you will actually lose performance by restricting process affinity, so only use that if you want to test something (like, single-core performance in a multithreaded app), or if your application crashes when run on multiple processors/cores.