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Poor performance for core i5

dal

dal

dal

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Joined
10 Sep 2005
Posts
909
Location
Lincolnshire
Hi all, I've recently upgraded my system from this :


Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra - SOCKET 939
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Venice 90nm @2.6 Ghz ** SINGLE CORE **
RAM : 2GB DDR
graphics - X850 XT PE 256MB

to the specs in my sig ( same graphics card, HDD,optical drives and OS )
I'm running windows XP home

But I've not really noticed a difference in performance & in the case of playing sim city just now I'd say performance is worse :eek:,
In fact if I didnt know better I'd say the system hasnt had a upgrade at all.

I've not done any CPU benchtests on it yet which is what I need to do but has anyone got some idea as to what could be wrong. I've done a clean install of the OS then installed the drivers on the CD that came with the mobo.
I mean windows takes about the same amount of time to boot up, opening up internet explorer isnt any quicker, I feel like somthing is very wrong but i dont know what.
 
Well your graphics card will really be bottlenecking it, but it shouldn't be slower by any means. How old is your hard drive? Just a thought, may be slowing down access times.
 
Get a better graphics card in there (as you appear to have planned) and then report back. I suspect you'll see a remarkable increase in performance; that old X850 is holding everything back.
 
There's no way it's going to be slower, that's just your imagination :p Your graphics card is just ridiculously old and holding everything back.
 
The OP is playing Sim City - that is hardly Quake 4 or something like that. An - X850 XT PE 256MB should be fine for that AFAIK.

It would be useful to know what PSU the OP is using for their new system.
 
Just read the bit about the boot times. That's pretty much hard drive based, and opening up internet explorer is damn quick on my old P4 system. Can't get much quicker on my i5 system..
 
Maybe I'm just expecting too much !!

Can anyone recommend a CPU benchmark program I could use to check just the CPU performance.
 
Tbh with a PC that old, I would have started again and left the old PC as it was. You will now end up buying a new sata HDD, a new graphics card and then you might find a you want a new PSU and a new case. That's a lot of work! And then where's your old PC ? a bit in a drawer, a bit given away and a bit sold on ebay for a few £.
 
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jamiehavok said:
i'd say boot up times are more hard drive limited.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Several of the earlier posts were obviously tl:dr responses claiming the graphics card was at fault, even when SimCity performance was not called into question.

Still though, you should be seeing an improvement. It might be down to the fact that there's only so much faster a boot up can be with the same hard disk. Once you start opening multiple apps and using it for intensive applications you should feel the powah.
 
Simpler explanation is that the old system was more than capable of doing everything the OP wanted it to. So now the new, much more powerful system is performing the same as it's doing the same tasks as the old one.

I.e. no improvement for the upgrade as you didn't need to upgrade.
 
JonJ678 said:
Simpler explanation is that the old system was more than capable of doing everything the OP wanted it to. So now the new, much more powerful system is performing the same as it's doing the same tasks as the old one.

I.e. no improvement for the upgrade as you didn't need to upgrade.
Click to expand...

Exactly,

People need to start thinking before upgrading instead of just looking at all the "extreme performance i5/i7" adverts.

A just gpu, hdd/ssd and ram upgrade will do a lot better for that system than even i9.
 
PhoenixUK said:
Exactly,

People need to start thinking before upgrading instead of just looking at all the "extreme performance i5/i7" adverts.

A just gpu, hdd/ssd and ram upgrade will do a lot better for that system than even i9.
Click to expand...

True what you've said but I do intend to add a better graphics card within the next month & I'll probably upgrade to windows 7.
Cheers for the input though guys.
 
What PSU is the OP using BTW??

One guy I knew had this issue with his PC taking yonks to boot up.

After we replaced the PSU the computer booted up much quicker and was more responsive too.
 
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My PSU is a tagan 480 W ( sli enabled ) and is the same age as my graphics card.
I did wonder if my psu was up to the job but if that was at fault surely if be getting random crashes and stuff like that ( allthough it has just switched itself off and restarted for no apparent reason on one occassion)
I dont know if this has got anything to do with it but every now and again I get a very short bleep from the case speaker & when i mean short i mean like a blip ( 1/4 second ) but this can happen even when the PC is idle so I'd say it's unrelated to power.
I've looked in the manual at the bleep codes and there is nothing for what I've just described.
 
When you update your GFX card, you might need a new PSU depending on what you get.

Example 5770 -



Radeon HD 5770 (single GPU)
  • The card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 40 Amps available on the +12 volts rails
The nearest l could find to your intermitent short beep -

Repeating short beeps - Power supply or system board problem


Read this thread -

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=84778

Hope this helps.:)
 
Newer graphics cards actually seem to perform worse in SimCity 4.. Dunno which version you are playing. Your hard disk will be the biggest factor in your boot speed, not the CPU. Talk about a difference swapping from a 3 year old 7200.10 Seagate to an Intel 80Gig SSD :)

But for SimCity 4 my P3 and Geforce Ti4800 were pretty much the "peak" performance wise :/
 
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