erly_Cuylers

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this is my first build. Asus Mobo, AMD 965, 2X2GB Ram, ect.

this is just a general question about the HD bottleneck theory, because I replaced everything but the front panels, the case, the PSU, and the hard drive that came with the pc, which was a Compaq sr2180nx.

the first thing i noticed was there was no significant improvement in speed or performance especially when it came down to the CPU. the more i use the computer, the more it seems to be behaving the same way it did before the upgrade. system lag during cpu intensive tasks, same old habits, same old glitches.

I had read that a HD can effectively bottleneck a system, so i reluctantly decided to replace the HD. I'm getting a WD 500GB 7200RPM 6GB's 15MB cache Blue. it may not have been the optimum choice but it's already ordered.

I guess I'm just looking for that confirmation that "yes this should work" :sol:

so thanks a bunch, erly
 
Solution
Yeah, that will work fine, but I would highly recommend buying a SSD instead. Yes, they really do make THAT big of a difference. They can make an old laptop have new life too. Seriously.

steelbeast

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Yeah, that will work fine, but I would highly recommend buying a SSD instead. Yes, they really do make THAT big of a difference. They can make an old laptop have new life too. Seriously.
 
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suteck

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The best way to boost performance is to increase your memory. 4 GB's ain't bad but can you go to 8? The more you can store on your memory the quicker the response since the cpu doesn't have to go the the hdd. What motherboard model do you have now? Asus what?.
I don't believe you will see a difference with the sata 6 GB/s unless you get an SSD, (I know I didn't), or you were getting close to 7/8ths full on your old hdd, which slows down performance.
 

erly_Cuylers

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yes, I considered a SSD but I am less concerned with quality of HD and more concerned with correcting the bottle neck for now. when SSD's come down in price a lil more I'm sure to make the upgrade.




it's an Asus M4A88TD-M/USB3. as far as RAM goes I have 3.6GB available and I have never seen the system eat up much more than 1GB of memory, even under CPU intensive tasks.
I figure as much about the 6GB's thing. more of just a pound for pound thing old outdated slow HD - out new higher end HD - in.

the next thing is perhaps Linux is not utilizing the CPU correctly. the sign is during CPU intensive tasks I look at the system monitor and although the system begins to lag, the first two cores are fairly busy but the second two are only maybe 10-15%

thanks
 

suteck

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It's the quality of the SSD's that corrects or lessens the bottleneck. That is the whole point of the SSD's, the speed at which they transfer/read/write information. I didn't know you were using linux. Whole different ballgame that I don't know anything about. Windows uses a lot of memory, especially if you're running vista or 7. That's why I put that in there. 3.5 Gigs sounds like a 32 bit system. So you really wouldn't benefit from more memory anyway. As far as the processor going though intensive tasks, I don't think that has anything to do with the hdd, so the bottleneck sounds like just too much tasks for the cpu. What are you running that makes the processor work so hard? That's a lot of processing power. are you coding video or something?
 
You say the CPU is not being utilized fully. Could you be more specific? Does the OS have a way to monitor the activity level of individual cores or can you use a utility to monitor?

If your software isn't designed for multiple cores upgrading won't have helped much.

Video encoding... I think I would upgrade RAM before getting an SSD, but certainly a quality SSD will help.

 

erly_Cuylers

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yes, I use the system monitor found under administration>system monitor>resources. it's the same under ubuntu or mint.

it gives me a simple CPU graph and also shows all four cores individually by %. it also shows Ram usage by size and %. I only have 3.6GB of memory available because the system uses some for on board video ect. I have never seen much more than 1GB eaten up under any situation. when the system does begin to lag as I'm editing and doing other things, I check the CPU usage by percent and all four cores are not at 100% but more like 50-75% for the first two and 15-35% for the next two with occasional peaks, not necessarily to 100%.

upgrading my HDD is just a given anyway it's time to update that. weather it was the bottle neck or not remains to be seen. so I'm not to worried about that. but I have read before Linux is sometimes needs to be configured correctly in order to utilize these CPU's. however I have yet to reseach that. Perhaps my issue would be better suited for the Linux section, although that was not the topic opener.

thanks much
 

erly_Cuylers

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right now after running all day even though I haven't been doing any encoding the CPU temp is 42C Mobo temp is 35C. the average temps are also around there. I have yet to check that during encoding though.

thanks