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Are my expectations too high for my Intel Core i5 2500K?

FlyingPig

FlyingPig

FlyingPig

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Joined
10 Jul 2011
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711
Location
London
I've had my new gaming rig for about 5 months now. I don't actually game much on it at all but mainly use it for work. Lately I've been a bit disappointed about its performance sometimes. I download quite a bit of files from Usenet during the night, and then in the morning my ritual is to check the PAR and PAR2 files, repair and to unrar the files. While I am doing this I try to get on with some work, e.g. updating a website via a CMS and uploading images, Office work, watching some videos, etc.
Now as I have an Intel Core i5 2500K and 8GB of RAM, I would expect this to go a bit smoother. Instead, the whole machine seems sluggish while it is parring and unrarring. Is it normal for this to "take over" my computer while it is doing this? I had hoped having a powerful multi-core machine would allow me to just keep doing my normal work. I am even wondering if it is simply a case of the programmes not fully making use of the available resources as CPU usage rarely goes over 30% and RAM is never maxed out.
Any ideas anyone?
 
Seems like your applications are struggling for I/O access, I guess you are downloading and untaring the files on the same HDD where you have OS installed, correct ? If so buying separate HDD just for download and untarring should help. Running OS + data untarring etc. from single SSD should also help as SSDs are orders of magnitude better in multithreaded I/O access than their mechanical counterparts.
 
appletree said:
Seems like your applications are struggling for I/O access, I guess you are downloading and untaring the files on the same HDD where you have OS installed, correct ? If so buying separate HDD just for download and untarring should help. Running OS + data untarring etc. from single SSD should also help as SSDs are orders of magnitude better in multithreaded I/O access than their mechanical counterparts.
Click to expand...

OS (Win7) is installed on a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD, downloading and unrarring happens on a Samsung F3 1TB mechanical HDD.

I think I'll start overclocking again. Upgraded my BIOS a few months ago and could never be bothered to put the clock back to 4.5.
 
Well I still suspect IO bottleneck as most probable cause (and one that is easy to confirm or dissmis) Don't you have documents, videos basically everything besides OS on the one HDD where you perform unziping ? Imo no reason for the entire system to feel slugish with just single core utilized. Have you tried copying the archives on a ssd and trying to do your usual work while unziping there ? It would be best to have dedicated HDD just for downloads / unziping - if that doesn't help than that should rule out IO bottleneck but until then IO bottleneck seems quite probable to me.
 
It's the Supersaurus system built by OcUK themselves. Motherboard is the MSI P67A-GD53. I never checked properly whether everything was connected properly as it all seemed to work fine and gone are my days where I want to tweak everything (after once destroying a motherboard with static).
Thanks for the thoughts so far. I guess it is the HDD being the bottleneck then. My SSD is already pretty much full so I can't use that one and I can't justify buying another. However, yes, I've got about 9GB left so I guess I could try to do some unzipping on there and see what difference it makes -- then at least I know where I stand.
It's no big deal for me really as I am pretty happy with my current setup, I am just trying to understand it a bit more.
 
I notice this slowdown too with my 2600k, especially if it has to access my blu-ray writer, or when trying to multitask by unrarring or copying hdd to hdd.
When I had an e8400 I used to get the same problem.

It Never happened with my amd.
 
sorry to tell you, but the hype over most modern processors is a load of utter rubbish. purchasing a 2500/2600K isn't going to result in uncontrollable, insane, intense, massive speed that you've never experienced before to be honest, anyone expecting that (unless upgrading from something rather ancient, and for crying out loud a previous generation i5/i7 isn't ancient!).

at the end of the day, there is only so fast you can open a browser, or start Starcraft II, or boot to Windows, people told me I would be experiencing the worse gaming, media and so on experience ever getting an FX chip, but not one of those things is remotely true! oh and just to throw this in there, this FX chip doesn't feel remotely sluggish, almost regardless of how much crap I have open at a time, ranging from endless instances of Google Chrome, Media Player, decompressing files and such. to be honest but think the expectations are indeed too high, a processor is a processor, its only as fast as the weakest link in the system whatever that may be. ;)

Edit: also know that like all of my posts, that say anything remotely against the 'norm' there'll be endless pages of Anandtech Bench links posted to 'prove me wrong', but at the end of the day you can't quantify the 'feel' of a system, as much as we might want to, the AMD Reality Check came back saying that the majority of people found AMD systems 'smoother' than their Intel rivals, I personally find that as well even though all these endless benchmarks point to the opposite.
 
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I'm shocked they weren't pushing me aside to deem you as a troll. Especially that first paragraph.
 
Gashman said:
sorry to tell you, but the hype over most modern processors is a load of utter rubbish. purchasing a 2500/2600K isn't going to result in uncontrollable, insane, intense, massive speed that you've never experienced before to be honest, anyone expecting that (unless upgrading from something rather ancient, and for crying out loud a previous generation i5/i7 isn't ancient!).

at the end of the day, there is only so fast you can open a browser, or start Starcraft II, or boot to Windows, people told me I would be experiencing the worse gaming, media and so on experience ever getting an FX chip, but not one of those things is remotely true! oh and just to throw this in there, this FX chip doesn't feel remotely sluggish, almost regardless of how much crap I have open at a time, ranging from endless instances of Google Chrome, Media Player, decompressing files and such. to be honest but think the expectations are indeed too high, a processor is a processor, its only as fast as the weakest link in the system whatever that may be. ;)

Edit: also know that like all of my posts, that say anything remotely against the 'norm' there'll be endless pages of Anandtech Bench links posted to 'prove me wrong', but at the end of the day you can't quantify the 'feel' of a system, as much as we might want to, the AMD Reality Check came back saying that the majority of people found AMD systems 'smoother' than their Intel rivals, I personally find that as well even though all these endless benchmarks point to the opposite.
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Slightly twisted facts there, 2500k/2600K will be significantly faster than the LGA 775 CPUs they replace when used on CPU intensive applications.

The FX chips are pretty fast, but when compared to the year old 2500k/2600K there's very few uses where they are better, which is why most people are disapointed and not recommending them. It's not that we are Intel fanboys, AMD just produced a disappointing chip.

AMD Reality Check = Marketing BS with Machines and demo's cherry picked by AMD probably running at stock.

At the end of the day both will be very good at running run-of-the mill stuff like Google Chrome, Media Player, decompressing files, etc.
Opening loads of stuff like that will be down to your RAM and HDD performance not what high end CPU you have.
 
Forgetting your computers speed, bottlenecks, etc; use sabnzbd to grab your usenet files as it does everything for you (verify, extract, delete originals if extraction completes ok).
 
I don't think this has much to do with CPU power. If you had a better SATA controller or even a separate one for the unrarring things would improve.
 
gurusan said:
I don't think this has much to do with CPU power. If you had a better SATA controller or even a separate one for the unrarring things would improve.
Click to expand...

That's why I would check what controller the HDD's are on, if the Samsung F3 is on the SATA6G controller along with the Crucial M4 then it might be worth moving it onto the SATA3G controller along with the optical drives.

That's one of the problems with the mainstream Intel boards, they lack many PCI-E lanes compared to 990FX/Intel Enthusiast series, so the board makers usually have a hard time feeding all of the controllers with all of the bandwidth they need.
 
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