Dual Processor Speed Issue

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I am not sure where to ask this question. I just got a new HP
pavillion with dual AMD processors running at ~1900MHz each. This is
about double the speed/processing capacity of the previous system that
died on me...and I have doubled the RAM to 1GB. Frankly, I haven't
notice one bit of improvement in my multitasking. I use some audio
processing software that use to gobble up all the system cycles, but
now with dual processors, I expected the system to let me do other
tasks with the second processor. With twice the memory and the new
motherboard I should have the bus bandwidth to let me see some
improvement....it is not happening.

Is there something I don't know about XP or the setup on this PC that
I might be missing or is this just more hype to separte consumers from
more dollars??

?Thanks for any help.

Henry
 
I am not sure where to ask this question. I just got a new HP
pavillion with dual AMD processors running at ~1900MHz each. This is
about double the speed/processing capacity of the previous system that
died on me...and I have doubled the RAM to 1GB. Frankly, I haven't
notice one bit of improvement in my multitasking. I use some audio
processing software that use to gobble up all the system cycles, but
now with dual processors, I expected the system to let me do other
tasks with the second processor. With twice the memory and the new
motherboard I should have the bus bandwidth to let me see some
improvement....it is not happening.

Is there something I don't know about XP or the setup on this PC that
I might be missing or is this just more hype to separte consumers from
more dollars??

?Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...

If you're not noticing any difference then you've not got the Multi-
Processor ACPI driver installed for the CPU.

When I moved from a Single P4/3ghz machine to a Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz machine
I noticed the difference right away, but I also had the Dual HAL kernel
installed.

Open Task Manager, select the Performance Tab, Select View, Select "Show
one graph per CPU" - if you don't see Two then you don't have the multi
processor kernel installed.
 
Good stuff Leythos.

Just too make sure Hlamuthnospam does the system actualy have two cpus or
one duel core cpu? If your not sure look and see if have two cpu fans. Ive
seen alot of advertisement that make the duel core look like its a duel cpu
system when it actualy is not.

The Woodpile
 
One very large fan over sockets...very quiet....system purchaced as a
dual processor and not a dual core...trying to check on the HP web
site but system is slow. I have two processor graphs and the System
Info lists two processors. I have two applications running...one is
downloading and the other is doing audio format conversion...a real
hog for resources. I don't see any speed difference from the old
system, which I might not if only one processor is doing the
work...but it is only using ~62% of the resources, a definite
improvement from over 90% in the single processor system. Some sharing
is going on, it looks like, but for some reason the process speeds are
limited.

Maybe my expectations are too high, but this configuration is in some
ways slower than the other one at worst and about the same at best. Is
there some "tweak" or switch I should know about??

Henry
 
Hi Hlamuthnospam,

Are you by chance downloading and doing the conversion on the same hard
drive? If so I would recomend trying to use differant hard drives. Unless of
course your converting the files as they are being downloaded.

If you have a spare drive and want to try this make sure you do not
install it on the same cable. Unless your using SCSI or SATA drives. I
shouldnt asume your using IDE drives but if you are the IDE controller can
only use one drive at a time. In other words you cant read and write to both
at once. If you put one on each controller you can.

Im curious if the system hard drive is just getting bogged down. Ive
been wrong before though. HeHe.

The Woodpile

P.S. Have a good weekend Hlamuthopsam
 
One very large fan over sockets...very quiet....system purchaced as a
dual processor and not a dual core...trying to check on the HP web
site but system is slow. I have two processor graphs and the System
Info lists two processors. I have two applications running...one is
downloading and the other is doing audio format conversion...a real
hog for resources. I don't see any speed difference from the old
system, which I might not if only one processor is doing the
work...but it is only using ~62% of the resources, a definite
improvement from over 90% in the single processor system. Some sharing
is going on, it looks like, but for some reason the process speeds are
limited.

Maybe my expectations are too high, but this configuration is in some
ways slower than the other one at worst and about the same at best. Is
there some "tweak" or switch I should know about??
Click to expand...

In general XP Pro does a fairly good job of allocating resources such
that foreground response is maintained while intensive processes run in
the background on multi-processor systems, but sometimes setting
processor affinity manually is useful - particularly if a process has
given itself a priority above normal.

To do so, you open Task Manager, select the Processes tab, right click
on a process, and choose Set Affinity...

XP will typically have allowed both of your applications to execute on
all available processors, but you can use processor affinity to force
the two applications to run on separate processors - which may or may
not improve perceived performance.

You may find that lowering the priority of background processes to below
normal is more effective - this will typically improve foreground
response at the cost of increased execution time for the background
process. Choose Set Priority on the Task Manager right click menu to do
this.

Sunny
 
I just stumbled on the affinity setting. I went to HP and asked them
what was happening and the tech had me literally stop all start up
processes from loading. Now the problem app won't load...so I need to
back up to a previous good configuration, if I can. When the app
doesn't fully load, it is chewing up ~50% of my total Cpu
resources...equally divided between the two processors. When I set the
affinity to one processor, the selected one pops to ~100%
utilitzation and the other drops to idle. Now to figure out why the
app just sits there and chews up cycles without fully loading.

Thanks for the feedback...this dual core stuff will take some
finessing to get the most out of, I think.

Henry
 
dual-cores (or dual processors) will not necessarily make an app run twice
as fast. But you will be able to run two apps at a time (concurrently).
or more precisly, two threads. a typical windows system is juggling about
100 threads at any given time (look in task manager, turn on the "threads"
colume if it isn't on). So, your new box should be more RESPONSIVE, but
not necessarily faster at a specific task (like ripping, or encoding;
but ripping and encoding at the same time should be faster, assuming the
right setup, like EAC w/ LAME).

A good "test" would be to run Adaware - it is multi-threaded and will run
faster on a dual-core.
 
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