I purchased new hardware my desktop machine late last year and have tried many different configurations but runs much slower than my AMD 1.8 laptop with a gig of RAM.

I am running Windows Vista 64bit Enterprise with Aero/Vista theam
turned off, indexing turned off, the side bar turned off. I basically turned off all the special features in Vista to take up resources. The only special feature that I’m using is the “Start” menu because the “Start Search” is very useful. Please note, I’m running the same OS and configuration on my desktop and laptop.

Here is an brief overview of what my desktop looks like:

- Intel Quad 2.4
- 8 Gigs of 800Mhz RAM
- Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Motherboard
- Two Seagate Barracuda 250G drives that mirror each other on the Motherboard

Here is the Rating that Windows Vista gives it.

- Processor: 5.9
- Memory: 5.6
- Graphics: 5.4
- Gamming Graphics: 4.6
- Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

There are many times I run process in parallel on my desktop and my laptop, and my laptop seems to outperform my desktop. Last week I had to convert files from PDF to TIFF. It took my desktop 1.5 days and my laptop did it in 6 hours.

They both have the same OS and I have configured them exactly the same as above.

My laptop is an HP dv2000, 1.8 AMD and a gig of ram.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The resource monitor in windows indicates no bottlenecks. If anyone has suggestions on another program to monitor bottlenecks, that would be great.

Thanks!

Ryan

what vid card are you using?

Thanks for you reply.a

My desktop has a Nvida GeForce 8400 GS
My laptop has a Nvida GeForce Go 6150

On my desktop I think that is the only thing I went cheap on. I never play games on my computer so I saw no need for it at the time.

Plain and simple... either the computer has been setup incorrectly, or you have defective hardware.

Umm, did you install those Windows OS on your own or was it preloaded?

Both my laptop and desktop I loaded myself.

It could how I setup the computer, but I’m pretty confident I have done this correctly.

I think it something with the hardware. I had a very hard time finding a mother board that would work with a 64 bit processor and 8 gigs of ram. I actually tried 3 other boards before I found one that worked.

Could my RAID1 be slowing it down?

Could the speed of my RAM too slow? My laptop has 533Mhz RAM and it still out performs it.

Anyone have any suggestions on a good diagnostics tool(s)?

Heat issue causing a clock down, software causing the cpu to stay in speedstep down mode. is it underclocked? How about cruddy software installed? Run an identical benchmark between one and the other, sisoft sandra will do, compare the numbers. Especially check the hard drive for performance issues. Hard drive is the slowest part of any system.

what does ur bios say? i would disable speed step . make sure that all 4 cores are being implemented .what bios are u running the newest one should help. what about powersupply if u aint got enough juice the computer does a lagging kinda deal that could be the problem or because the 64bit sounds like its running ok. the raid slowing wouldnt have much of the performance hit ur talking about. hrm......... its either the mobo or the processor that would make the biggest slow in performance

The reason why I asked is, if both systems are set up and working the way they should, the core2 quad with 8 gigs of ram should blow it out of the water.

what happen you run the benchmark program to test you cpu and hard drive? super pie to run cpu and memory and hd tune to test hard drive.

SISOFT program has a bench mark built inside, so you can compare the cpu score with similar system.
You can get it from Guru 3d.com

The GA-P35C-DS3R is pretty decent. Mine works very well, in fact.

Check Task Manager, see if all 4 cores are working. If you only see one chart in the Performance tab switch to 4 charts from the View/CPU History tab. (I'm looking at the XP Task Manager, yours may be a bit different.)

Maybe only one core is working on the desktop, for some reason.
Also, see if there are any processes on the desktop taking up lots of CPU time.

Maybe try a newer and faster hard disk (Spinpoint F1 1TB is the best right now AFAIK). Try without RAID.

Speed step was enabled and that was the issue!!!!!! I disabled is and WOW, what a difference.

I did a speed test with converting 2400 text files to tiff. The laptop did it in a little under 2 hours and averaged 80% of the processor. The desktop did it in an 75 minutes and averaged 35% of the process.

I was also able to run 3 VM sessions with no issues.

Another question. Should I purchase two of the drives that Aeum suggested or should I buy two more Seagate drives of the same model and do a Raid 5 to help performance?

I’m very excited about these results.

Thank you everything, you all ROCK!

That's insane. SpeedStep is supposed to lower your clock from 2.4 GHz to 1.6 GHz. It's also supposed to get back to 2.4 GHz as soon as there's some serious work to be done. It can't understand how it caused the things you've noticed. Oh well, as long as it all works well now...

RAID 5 sounds good for a work machine because it has fault tolerance. Just don't do RAID 0.

The Barracuda 250GB disks are actually pretty good as far as price/performance. In THG's charts they come 6th.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/stor [...] 6&chart=49
If you need more room than that, I suggest you pick one of the first 5 models on that chart. TBH I don't know much about the F1 750GB, only that it's slower than the 1TB version because it doesn't use the new 332GB platters.

It is not clear to me why disabling speedstep helped. It should be lowering the multiplier only when the cpu is not working. Is your mobo at a current bios level, and are the most current chipset drivers installed?

To test, start up cpu-z. The multiplier will go down while idle, and should jump back up instantly when a load is put on the cpu.

I have 8gb of ddr2-800 ram on the GA-P35-DS3R (rev2.1) board. for what it is worth, my RAM index is 5.9 so there might be some issue there.

Mirroring your data is protecting you from a hard drive failure. More exactly, it gives you instant recovery if a hard drive should fail. This capability is essential for servers that can not tolerate any down time. It does not protect your data from other types of loss such as a virus, software error, operator error, or fire...etc. If you care about the data, then backup to a EXTERNAL destination is essential. If you have done this, can you then afford the time to rebuild a failed hard drive from backup?
Mirroring is costing you some performance; writes have to be duplicated. If you do a lot of converting of files, then it would be better to arrange it so that the input file is on one drive, and the output is on another drive. Performance could easily much better.