I7 for major multitasking vs Phenom II x 6 1090T

[4Gayle]

I am a major multitasking person with numerous on line, word processing, music & pictures windows open at all times. Which CPU would be the best for speed and not locking the computer up between the i7 and the AMD 1090T?

 

[cbrunnem]

amd 1055t, no need for your application for the 1090t save the 50 bucks unless you plan on doing something really cpu dependent or overclocking. your not running anything really cpu intensive so i wouldnt see a need for such and expensive system just to use the internet, word and to view pictures and videos.

 

[4Gayle]

There is $230.00 difference in cost between the i7 930 and the Phenom II x 6 1090T. I am upgrading to 12 DDR to help prevent the lock ups. I have another computer that has a AMD IIx4 965 3.40 GHz CPU it has 8 DDR that I periodically experience lock ups on.

 

[enzo matrix]

You'll need to help us out by elabourating on what you mean by "lockups" and exactly what you are doing when the "lockups" occur.

What is your ram and CPU usage during the lockups?

 

[amdfangirl]

Get a quality Antec PSU, some more RAM and you should be fine.

 

[hunter315]

What hard drive is in your one with the PII 965? People tend to under estimate the importance of the hard drive in how snappy and smooth a system feels. If you have multiple things that need hard drive access and you have an older and slower hard drive in there it will perform signficantly worse than something with a newer drive.

 

[4Gayle]

When my computer locks up I an usually on the internet with a number of things open and running. I can't get any of the keys to do anything, I can't even close any of the windows or programs I have open. I have to go to the task manager and close out my foxfire or explorer to get my computer functioning again. I have to close some of the pictures or word docks I have open before restoring the internet sites I have open.

 

[suteck]

When you go into task manager check the processes tab and see whats eating the processor and/or memory. Down at the bottom look at the cpu usage and see how much is being used.
I'd have to agree with cbrunnem on your usage and hunter315 on the hard drive issue. Do you use your system tools - disk clean up and disk defragment and every now and then error check? How much free space do you have on the hard drives. If the drives are over 90% full they tend to lock up also.
One other thing maybe? What is your video card? If you have 10 or 20 windows open at the same time you might only see 1 or 2 on the screen but the video card is still projecting them TO the screen and might be overloading it's processor(s). Graphics use seems to be your biggest draw.

 

[Houndsteeth]

Also, we are talking about Windows here, right? Even Windows 7 needs to be rebooted time to time. The OS is usually fine...it's 3rd party applications that have nasty things like unimplemented traps or memory leaks. One or two services like this can bring your performance to its knees right up until the OS decides to kill the service to free up resources. This used to be a lot worse in earlier versions of Windows, but bad code is still evident today, even in commercial applications.

Outside of memory issues (or lack thereof), you would be hard-pressed to find any quad-or-more-core CPUS that can't cut the muster for everyday office tasks like Word, email, web browsing, video and music, no matter how many windows you have open. In fact, I would say that you would bounce against memory constraints long before you choke the processor with such tasks.

Now, if you were trying to encode video and/or music while you were opening a 200+ MB Illustrator or InDesign file while also resizing a catalog of high-res photos using a Photoshop batch script while also burning a DVD...you might notice a slowdown. I do this on a regular basis. And that's not for work. My day job is UI programming, design and development.

 

[amdfangirl]

^ I agree entirely.

Mine normally locks up at the 200MB Illustrator (I mean like jeez, saving a raster scanned layer which was 1200dpi makes a massive Illustrator file compared 5MB~ ishh JPEG) file with Photoshop batch script while playing music and answering forums. To be fair, it never crashes because I like to have 8GB of RAM for my Athlon 64 X2.

I suggest that you use CCleaner to remove your unwanted cache files. Sometimes cache files break things. Ensure you regularly de-fragment and use ccleaner to keep your registry clean.