How does your dual core CPU perform?

[-BA-]

These 4200+s you are talking about. Are they the 939 variety, if there is indeed one that fast for 939.

Know very little about the X2s.

 

[drunkenmaster]

check the cpu, it won't be at 100% when unzipping/unrar'ing something, it takes relatively little cpu time. access, reading and writing to hdd's uses a bit of cpu, but that will be completely hdd limited. the reason why extracting two things at the same time takes longer(often) than doing them one after the other. windows automatically puts space down for the file and allocates a block of file one and then another block for file two. the hard drive will be constantly seeking from one place to the other doing a bit of each one after the other, rather than writing continuously from one sector to the next which is way way faster.

not only is writing slower when its trying to write to different parts of the platter, but its also reading two separate places for the file transfers so theres a lot of extra seeking there too which slows everything down even more.

if you check reviews you will see cpu reviews normally throw in a unrar'ing test all with identical, absolutely identical times no matter the cpu as the hard drives tested will be differently, likewise hdd reviews will show different times with the same cpu. all very hdd limited.

as for quickpar, normally i have no issues at all with quickpar, but it depends doing a 700mb movie or tv file fits in my mem fine, my system gets more sluggish when i'm repairing a 4gb dvd file, this again is hdd/mem based limitations rather than cpu, i never find repairing files anywhere near maxes out my cpu, but while fixing a 700mb file, even very heavily damaged files can take 20 seconds, fixing less parts but of a 4gb file takes well, can depend 5-15 minutes and its all because it won't fit in the memory so its constantly accessing, writing, seeking and swapping out files to memory.

those are two of the really, only things that cpu's don't really benefit from greatly.


as someone else said i can run an encode in the background no problem and still game at very acceptable framerates. though load times can be increased due to encoding using hdd a lot, but once loaded theres no issue. encoding only needs a little bit of a file at any one time so doesn't take much memory. quickparing a 4gb file + gaming would be awful as the memory used would be a joke.

 

[FrankJH]

FYI

Not only will extracting files to different hdd's be effective - but also I blieve its helpful to have the app installed twice also, so you arent actually "addressing" the same program for the two seperate extractions.

I believe this is how people have been installing SuperPi to test each individual core anyway

 

[Stan_Lite]

For more sciency stuff and other number crunching dual cores is a lovely thing. For playing games/office/web surfing? Nah, doubt I'd notice much difference.

This is correct in my experience

All of my dual cores work excellently on both cores for Folding. I run 2 instances and each gets automatically assigned to a separate core.

Most games however, are not optimised for dual core so they only play on one core at a time meaning they won't run any faster.

For example:
My gaming rig is an X2 4400+ which also runs F@H. The other day after a 2 hour Doom3 session, I checked the F@H logs for both clients; one client had completely stopped for the duration of play whilst the other never twitched.

Stan

 

[FrankJH]

This is correct in my experience

All of my dual cores work excellently on both cores for Folding. I run 2 instances and each gets automatically assigned to a separate core.

Most games however, are not optimised for dual core so they only play on one core at a time meaning they won't run any faster.

For example:
My gaming rig is an X2 4400+ which also runs F@H. The other day after a 2 hour Doom3 session, I checked the F@H logs for both clients; one client had completely stopped for the duration of play whilst the other never twitched.

Stan

I completely understand where you are coming from but I have always felt that having windows and av and "background tasts" using another core always felt much better to me - and I did side by side testing between an X2 4200 and a A64 3700+ both pretty decent chips (this was when the 4200 was just out)

I am stunned how so many think it doesnt make that much difference is all

 

[drunkenmaster]

its quite simple, a very very very low percentage of people actually use the cpu that much anyway. quite frankly dual core won't increase the performance of everything by double because thats not how things work, games are gpu limited, working with huge files is hdd/mem limited. when i switched i found a massive responsiveness increase to my computer using. with a single core cpu running quickpar, or a whole host of programs would not exactly bring my computer to a halt, but make it very unresponsive, switching from quickpar to even just firefox used to take longer, its nothing significant but i notice the difference. i have loads of stuff open at any one time and not necessarily the power of the 2nd core but the better thread switching i find very useful. when i do use cpu intensive stuff dual core is a godsend. but outside of games 99% of users only use their computers for word, IE, outlook of which none would benifit from a dual core cpu, none of those things would feel differently on a 1Ghz via chip to a 4Ghz conroe tbh.

 

[Booner!]

so your saying that it would benifit people like me who *usually* have msn, windows media player, temperature readings, games and internet explorer up all at once ?

 

[drunkenmaster]

yes and no, i mean quite often i play city of villians in windowed mode and watch a film or tv on the side with all that other stuff open in the background too that i switch to now and then. msn, ie, takes very little juice, temp monitoring is almost none existant. really wmp, msn, all that stuff if you are playing full screen will be using almost no cpu time so doesn't really count. its more like if you're gaming and running an encode or something on the other core.


hell, i love upgrading as much as anyone, i tend to upgrade a lot more than most. but somewhere along the line we seem to stop realising that most of the stuff we do isn't really using the cpu much at all.