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C2D v X2 = Not as good as you think?

I wonder if its anything to do with the Windows scheduler?

AMD have released the dual core driver and optimizer to help run things more smoothly, whereas afaik Intel haven't. (maybe they didn't need to?)
Just a thought.

Pants said:
P.S. Easyrider can you post without patronisiong and the huge ego you come across as having? Without wanting to break rules you come across as a smart arse and it's runining an interesting thread.
Click to expand...
Indeed. No offence, but its one of the reasons I don't take any of his posts seriously.
 
clv101 said:
We really need to hear from a few other people with similar, high spec AMD and Intel systems to try the same kind of thing.
Click to expand...

Good Grief!

I have had many high end systems.

I upgraded from an opty 170@ 2.8ghz to conroe.

I have first hand experience using both platforms.

The conroe has been the fastest system up to date.

Both in terms of multitasking and single threaded apps.

I get no lag when having loads of filters open in Premier and photoshop and after effects that are all rendering filters and effects in real time.

Plus having loads of programs open at the same time.
In fact I could call my editing experience with C2D snappy now.

A damn site faster than the 2.8ghz opty 170 it replaced.
 
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Pants said:
FatRacoon very interesting what you are testing here...

Certainly I believe reviews need to test for heavy multitasking such as this in the future. Can anyone else with a Core 2 Duo and AMD X2 test this please?

Also the benchmarks posted are off topic, as single application performance is not in dispute.

P.S. Easyrider can you post without patronisiong and the huge ego you come across as having? Without wanting to break rules you come across as a smart arse and it's runining an interesting thread.
Click to expand...

Testng what a system with half the system ram?

Even his AMDs are not really clocked to extreme levels.They are running at 2.5ghz FFS.

What needs testing here?

I don't see why everyone else who is upgrading to conroe from heavily overclocked A64 systems are not complaining too.


Is it because they have the correct settings and drivers installed.

It seems to me that the only person here having trouble with his conroe is Fat rakoon.

This does not make it TRUTH
All this means is that he has his conore system setup incorrectly.

As conroe is faster across the board its faster new technology


@ fat rakoon

What Timings is your ram set to?

Do you have the latest drivers installed?

There are so many factors to consider.

In fact give me a few hours with your system and I will have it blowing chunks off your AMD rig in a jiffy!
 
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easyrider it's good to know you are not having problems with heavy multitasking. I hope your right as I may well be going C2D after xmas! :)

Can't hurt having a coupe of people test this tho to be sure. I think I am just paranoid because I can't stand any lag with the oporating system. Thats why I run raptors etc!
 
@ Rackoon - I do not doubt that the results you are observing are genuine, but you're not taking the analysis to the next level and speculating as to why this may be the case.

clv101 made the pertinent point here - "where do we go from here". Since the C2D performs more work per clock (fact?) so why on earth would a C2D be slower at multitasking that a slower AMD?
 
FatRakoon said:
Ok, try the most simple test to get an example of what I am talking about...

Whatever is in your system right now, it should not make too much of a difference and you will probably get the idea on how I mean...

1 - Run Folding At Home on both cores. I think Folding at Home is about the best example, because the idea of how that works, is that it uses up CPU time thats NOT being used.
No apps and FAH uses up 100% btu as soon as the CPU gets used, it drops off to 0%

2 - Now run a program that converts something to another thing... MP3 to WAV or AVI to DVD or such like... Anything will do but oviously if its MP3 then the job will be done before you can grasp the idea. One that uses up both cores is preferable, if it uses only one, run another instance of it

3 - Have a look at TASKMAN, and what FAH cores are up to and the program you are using to encode the stuff...

You will notice that even FAH is eating up a lot of CPU time, giving less to the encoding.

4 - Cycle through the Start menu... Tell me honestly if everything comes up instantly ( Sub-Menus ) or if there is a small gap for it to bring them up ( I know you can change the time of the menus to apprear, so it depends on that as well )

5 - DeFrag all your partitions ( I have currently 6 partitions on 4 Drives ) - C: and T: are sharing I use T: for ISO Images, and D: and F: are sharing, my Apps & Games are on D: and F: is junk, E: is my media, and M: is my downlaods - utorrent is on permanently, currently downloading 12 files

6 - burn as many disks as you can, I have 4 DVDRW Drives, and so I burn 4 DVDs at a time, this should take nothign out of the CPU, but will take the time from the HDs

7 - Now, open up Notepad and tell me its still instant?
Click to expand...

OK I thought I would try the above on my system

E6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz
2gig of G Skill 6400 running @ 447mhz on a divider
74gig 16mb raptor main drive
2 x 320gig segate .10 drives
2 old maxtor 120gig in a raid 0
all HDs are SATA
Asus P5WDH motherboard.

I don't do folding at home however I loaded up prime on each core taking both to 100%, I then started encoding a avi to mpeg in cce. At this point the processes were balanced with the 45min avi due to be finished in 9 mins (this used to take 40mins with nothing else running on my barton 2500 overclocked to 3200)

I then started burning avis to 3 dvd burners (all I have) in separate neros all burning different files at 2x as they were re-writable discs and this was what they are rated at, some of the avis were off the drive being used for source and destination for the video encoding.

Flicked through the start menus and sub menus all instant, opened up notepad also instant.

Thought to add to the test I started defragging my c drive, opened photoshop cs2 this opened up in 19secs then I opened internet explorer this opened up instantly.

The only point I noticed a slight pause in responces was when I minimised all windows to go to the desktop when everything was running this took less than a second however. After this every window when selected would pop up instantly except cs2 which took a couple of seconds this was however when the drive was being defraged.

From the above I would say your system require some tweaks, I would try the tests with the HDs out of the AMD system as most of what you are trying to do is disk intensive as I have fast disks this helps in the above test my files are also shared among the disks similiar to yours.
 
Dave thanks for adding to this thread rather than just posting "Intel is faster". Very reassuring.

FatRakoon you could try a fresh windows install on a HDD (with only that HDD connected) and see if this helps?
 
Yes, thanks dave

Your system does look a bit of a dream machine Ill give you that, and sure, I hope that with that much power, you should be running spot-on.

Ok, Fresh install on a New HD etc...

Ok, last night, I did put a fresh install on. I did say that, as I had previously ( For a few days ) been running a pair of 80GB Hitachis RAID0 for bit, but found that the speed increase wasnt really any use for me, so I went back. to the one HD... Currently one of those Hitachis ( The other was giving me a grinding sound anyway so its getting sent back to OCUK )

Ok, I am looking at daves and I dont think that Prime deos any real work to the CPU as such, and CS2 when its loaded up does nothign but wait anyway.

Try convertign a number of different Video Fiels at the same time with at least 2 or preferably more different apps... Like I said, I use DVDSANTA, DVD2ONE, and TMPGEnc as well as defragging 6 partitions and playign a game wjile Im waiting for these do finish.

Oh, while Im on the subject of why I burn 4 disks slowly rather than one at a time fast, is simple... I start the job and I know that I can walk away... If I did one disk at a time then Iwould have to wait till its done, do the next disk and wait for that one, do the next disk and then... At least as I said, because more often than not, they are the same files, I feel its ridiculous to do them one by one.

Anyway, back to dave... I can see your conroe will kill mine, but you must also appreciate that the actual work your system has done on that test is a quarter of what I have had mine doing.

Robbie G
Trust me mate... I have been. I have reinstalled Windows on this PC in the ... What? Month that I have had it, I have tried Windows 2000 Pro, SP3 and SP4, Windows XP Home, Pro, and 64 with SP1 SP2 and even no SP at all in the vain attempt at gettign it to play nice, I have the supplied drivers on the CD, plus a few various flavours of downloaded drivers, both from the official site, and other places. I am currently using an Audigy Card, and I have tried it with and without the card, and various drivers for that and the onboard Intel thing, I also have a PCI IDE card for the Maxtor and 2 DVDRW Drives and I have tried it with and without this card and again, various drivers.

There is one point though with regards to Disk access...

Can anyone tell me what the Device manager says in the ... Er... Device Manager???

I mean, When oyu have no drivers for the IDE controlers, it comes up with somethign like :-

GENERIC PRIMARY HOST CONTROLER
GENERIC SECONDARY HOST CONTROLER

For each IDE line yes - or somethign in that way, Im on the AMD right now so I cant tell you EXACTLY what it says on the DS3

Now, on the AMD that I am on, it shows me 4 of these, 2 Primary and 2 Secondary and then, once I install the drivers etc, it then comes up with the NForce controler only... One for each controler, so no more Master & Slave but the one for each controler... This is now showing 2 instead of the 4 right?

Now, on the DS3, while its showing me the 2 drive controler and the 4 drive one ( As I would expect it to ) its also still showing me a fair few standard ide controlers too!

Looking at this, I know I have the ITE8212 IDE Card, thats got one, and I am also using Daemon Tools, with 2 virtual drives on that, but these also show up in the SCSI Devices.

I have got 6 standard ide controlers showing up in my device manager.

Surely that should not be the case should it?

Hang on, I wil grab a screenie to show you what I mean... I need to go and have a play about.

Also while im here, is there any particular BIOS setting that can cripple this PC as much as it is doing?

Ill have to have a peek in that CTRL-F1 option in the BIOS that gigabytes have... I keep forgettign about that one.
 
joeyjojo said:
Because it doesn't achieve anything? Nobody else takes it as a personal insult that FatRakoon isn't happy with his Core 2 Duo.

You sir, are a conroe fanboy.
Click to expand...


oh no... I am very happy with the conroe... Very happy indeed.

Im just happier with my AMD.

I sir... Am an AMD Fanboy :D
 
this is mad, this is like football game for the premiership between arsenal and chelsea or something, its not a crime to be 'unsatisfied' with an upgrade, especially since this upgrade came with the total ocean of hype it got, lets just leave it at some people prefer intel, some prefer AMD, just because someone doesn't wanna jump on the conroe 'fan wagon' doesn't mean there evil or idiotic for doing so, now play nice :p
 
Keep the discussion civil and free of personal attacks and it'll stay open.

Anymore and people will be earning themselves a Christmas break.

Jokester
 
Hells bells, what did I miss???

Maybe I dont want to know...

Anyhow, as I said earlier on, I have grabbed a screenie of these extra devices so if anyone can point them out, and tell me if you also get them or not?



There are currently 2 primary and 2 secondary IDE channels right.

I do have a PCI IDE card, and before the drivers went in for that, there was actually 3 of each not 2. So, what are these other 2 for?

In the SCSI/Raid section, there is the Gigabyte, the 8211, and that SCSI/Raid host controler... Hmm... Hang on. I also have a Daemon tools in with 2 drives, plus the ITE card I have, is an 8212 not an 8211... I need to check that out.

Oh, and yes, I forgot about that... I swapped the Maxtor 40GB out for the Raptor... This was because with the Maxtor, I was unable to enter the BIOS without disconnecting it, plus the Raptor is SATA not IDE. They do the same job... Just downloading my torrents and nothign else.
 
ok back to the topic at hand

FatRakoon: its odd that the amd system is feeling quicker to you. the conroe setup should be way faster as all the benchmarks done on the c2d setups show them being far quicker than the amd clock for clock.

Now the thing is all benchmarks i have seen run are single tests, as in the benchmark itself is the only thing run on the system when its being tested. your in an environment thats never been benched before: multiple apps all at once.

now im not sure whats giving amd the advantage in your situation, the only thing i can think of is the time slicing system amd is using. my thoughts are that the on die memory controller giving the low latency and better memory management / possible better cache hit levels on the amd front.

conroe does have the raw power but may be its putting it on the ground via the rear wheels where amd is using all fours. very hard to think of what is going on here.

again someone mentioned it could be the seperate l2 cache of the amd cpu. dunno.

but your situation reminds me of one thing. petrol car vs diesle car. seen this happen with me and my mates, off the mark my petrol car will beat his diesle car in the 0-60 stakes. but when we both have 5 heads in the car and suitcases in the boot for our holiday trip, the speed difference was phenominal, his diesle car was keeping up with me VERY easily in 0-60 but 60 to 100mph he actually beat me.

case of power vs torque is what you may be experiencing. :confused:
 
Cyber-Mav said:
case of power vs torque is what you may be experiencing. :confused:
Click to expand...


Yes, possibly?

Thats quite interesting actually because I have owned A Guzzi Cali3 and a GoldWing and much prefer those to my current ZZR due to the massive torque they have over the ZZR, and yet in terms of BHP the ZZR is way more than the others.

Torque v Ponies.

Good comparison that.. Maybe it is? who knows? Maybe my conroe is a bit iffy due to soemthing Im missing, dont get me wrong here, but if I suddently come across somethign and set or change it and all of a sudden, my conroe kills the AMD as many say it should then by all means, I would love it, of course I would, like anybody else would, but at this time, Im back on the AMD.

Hey at least with the conroe doing nothing but folding and storage, at least my stats should go up a bit eh? :)

Oh, I forgot to mention, that I have now put the corsair into the other DS3 instead of the Kingston. Dont know if it will do anything cos thats running a P4 @ 4.3 but I have also put in the other Hitachi from this ones RAID array, and I am installing winXP onto it fresh, and I have no other hardware in that PC - just its own, which is mostly disabled for now, and I will have a play, mostly for disk access rather than CPU power obviously althouth at 4.3 its still a seriously powerfull PC and I have enabled HyperThreading just on the off-chance I find any use for it.

But I will play about and see if I can find anythign that will help on the conroe setup.
 
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Erm, no.

Correct my ignorance here, but the IDE/SATA ports can go on either

ACHI
IDE/RAID
IDE

I have currently got them as IDE only

So, this would not require the ACHI drivers would it?

I currently dotn have any SATA Drives connected to those lines anyway, only the orange ones, and I only have 2 DVDRW drives on them, so, do I need to?

I have the Raptor connected to the same line as the hitachi and I had thought about throwing it onto one of those purple ones ( Im assuming that the purple ones only go on as this ACHI thing??? - not seen this before you see )
 
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