CPU or HDD Bottleneck

[magruder13]

I made this rig a while ago and I just started using it for light gaming. When I am doing a whole bunch of multi-tasking it slows down to a crawl. What is my bottleneck, HDD or CPU?

Windows 7 32 ultimate (im going to upgrade to 64 over winter break, I ment to install 64 and didn't catch my mistake until after I installed all my programs)
4gb DDR3
MSI 6870 1gb
Asus Pro 1156 H55 Micro ATX mobo
Intel corei3 530
WD 1.5tb Green HDD

If its the hard drive I think I'm going to get an SSD. I had one before as a boot drive, but I think this time I would get a 80gb+ so I can have all my programs on it. The problem about getting a faster mechanical drive is that my case only supports one 2.5'' drive and one 3.5''.

I need the large capacity of my current HDD since I have hundreds of videos on it.

Thanks for your help!

 

[rolli59]

Your CPU is a dual core with HT so it can handle 4 threads at a time. when you are multitasking you are not always using the HDD so maybe it is just your 32bit system and ram limit that is slowing you down.

 

[jiyung]

It's the HDD. The WD Green is a high efficiency HDD made for storage, not for main drive. It's slower than the Blue and Black.

 

[gnomio]

Did you disable your page file by any chance?

 

[magruder13]

gnomio: I have not disabled anything.

jiyung: That's what I was thinking.

dirtyferret: My typical multi-tasking is a combination of the following: Skype, World of Warcraft, vent, chrome (multiple tabs), word, and/or media monkey.


Does anyone know if a standard 2.5" WD Blue HDD would make a difference over the WD green?

 

[phyco126]

RAM is super cheap. Any chance you can throw another 2 GB stick in there? For heavy multitasking while gaming, I tend to hit 4.5 GB RAM usage (but I'm a super duper heavy multitasker as well, and photo-editing is included in that). As Jiyung said, the HD wasn't mean for being a main drive.

I would throw 2 more gigs into the system, and get either a SSD like you were wanting, or a WD black drive.

 

[vdr369]

I made this rig a while ago and I just started using it for light gaming. When I am doing a whole bunch of multi-tasking it slows down to a crawl. What is my bottleneck, HDD or CPU?

Windows 7 32 ultimate (im going to upgrade to 64 over winter break, I ment to install 64 and didn't catch my mistake until after I installed all my programs)
4gb DDR3
MSI 6870 1gb
Asus Pro 1156 H55 Micro ATX mobo
Intel corei3 530
WD 1.5tb Green HDD

If its the hard drive I think I'm going to get an SSD. I had one before as a boot drive, but I think this time I would get a 80gb+ so I can have all my programs on it. The problem about getting a faster mechanical drive is that my case only supports one 2.5'' drive and one 3.5''.

I need the large capacity of my current HDD since I have hundreds of videos on it.

Thanks for your help!

buy another 4gb ram and upgrade to 64bit. It will not bottleneck. Present why u are getting bottleneck experience is your pc is using 1.7 gb of your ram as shared graphics memory.(EVEN u are having a descrete gpu.) your ram is devided by 1.7 gb for shard video memory, 1 gb for background apps. if you enable antivirus playing games it will use another 512 mb ram so u will get only 900 mb ram. That's why u got bottleneck.

if u not trust my words open run and type dxdiag and check your Video memory it will show you more than 2gb, it will show u 1gb gpu memory and 1.7 gb shared system momery.


if u believe me ,

then re-boot ur pc . select bios option and select 256mb or less shared memory in igp options.

It would not bottleneck your pc.

 

[gnomio]

gnomio: I have not disabled anything.

jiyung: That's what I was thinking.

dirtyferret: My typical multi-tasking is a combination of the following: Skype, World of Warcraft, vent, chrome (multiple tabs), word, and/or media monkey.


Does anyone know if a standard 2.5" WD Blue HDD would make a difference over the WD green?

Go to the device manager. First Sata controller, the drive your on, right click, properties, last tab and see what mode its running in.

 

[magruder13]

I am currently at school but when I get back home I will try these things. Thanks a lot everyone!

 

[magruder13]

@VDR369 I checked DXDIAG and it told me my gpu is using 2.2gb of ram. Then I went into my bios and found no setting that said anything about igp options.
I don't doubt you, but my logitech keyboard says I am only using 39% of my ram when I am having my huge comp slowdowns.

@gnomio I did exactly what you said and I didnt see anything that said anything about a mode.

If you guys could explain in better detail what you are talking about. I know evey BIOS is totally different from the other, but I couldn't find anything that talked about memory, or graphics.

The ram I originally bought is only $30 for two more 2gb sticks with free shipping. I would buy it today but I don't have the time to upgrade my system to a 64bit version at the moment so the extra ram would be useless.

 

[jcfordell]

@VDR369 I checked DXDIAG and it told me my gpu is using 2.2gb of ram. Then I went into my bios and found no setting that said anything about igp options.
I don't doubt you, but my logitech keyboard says I am only using 39% of my ram when I am having my huge comp slowdowns.

@gnomio I did exactly what you said and I didnt see anything that said anything about a mode.

If you guys could explain in better detail what you are talking about. I know evey BIOS is totally different from the other, but I couldn't find anything that talked about memory, or graphics.

The ram I originally bought is only $30 for two more 2gb sticks with free shipping. I would buy it today but I don't have the time to upgrade my system to a 64bit version at the moment so the extra ram would be useless.

To me it is obvious that your ram is the issue.
One thing you could do is to open the resource monitor in windows - run(windowsbutton + r) resmon.exe
under disk you will find real time access to the HDD and figure that when the computer slows down the HDD is highly solicited. This would be because of your ram. If you cannot add ram (which mean upgrading to 64bit) the only thing you can do is to enhance HDD speed. SSD will get you faster axs and xfer or RAID 0 if available on your board... but I am not sure how much more you can sqeeze out of this little ram...

 

[magruder13]

@Dirtyferret
I plan on upgrading to 64bit since I get a free win7 64 through IEEE. I just cant do it for a few weeks since I'm mid semester and don't wanna take an entire day to reinstall an os. When I do go to reformat how am I supposed to wipe my drive and transfer all 500gb of videos I have? Can I move them to a partition and then format the rest of the drive? I really want to get a SSD, I had a vertex 1 30gb and it was amazing.

When I talk about multitasking I am usually playing WoW, listening to music, on vent, skype, and have chrome open with a few tabs.

 

[magruder13]

Best answer selected by magruder13.