Question for anyone who has gone from single to dual to quad CPU...

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aamsel

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A question for anyone who has gone from single to dual to quad CPU:

Years ago, when I had many different single core CPU's when a CD/DVD was being burned, you walked away from the computer until it was done. It was unusable for any other operation. This was under XP and OS's that came before it.

With dual core, currently an E8600 under VISTA/Windows 7, I can surf the web or use other applications while burning a CD/DVD, but I do notice a lag or delay due to the burning process. The burning does not bring the PC to its knees, but there is an obvious toll.

For anyone who has gone single to dual-core to quad-core, does this still occur?
I realize that this depends both on hardware and software. Windows 7 can (theoretically) take advantage of many cores, but I am not aware of any version of Nero (for example) that will keep the application local to one core only, or take full advantage of multiple cores.

Can anyone comment on any differences with burning discs using a quad?
 
No slow down at all on mine. Multi tasking is a joy.
 
i went from a e8400 to a q9400 and it was a huge difference in terms of multitasking man...
 
went from an AMD64 3000+ to a e6700 to a q6600

even going back to the e6700 is painful.... quad is the way to go :)
 
aamsel said:
Had you ever noticed the slowdown or lag that I mentioned on a dual core?
Click to expand...

My dual core was an E 6750. Loved it, but did not have it for very long about 6 months maybe. Yeah, it rocked compared to the AMD FX 55 it replaced and though it was a night and day difference between the two, Burning and Vid production and Photoshop could still get bogged down. Once I went Quad I'll NEVER do with anything less.
 
Kangg said:
My dual core was an E 6750. Loved it, but did not have it for very long about 6 months maybe. Yeah, it rocked compared to the AMD FX 55 it replaced and though it was a night and day difference between the two, Burning and Vid production and Photoshop could still get bogged down. Once I went Quad I'll NEVER do with anything less.
Click to expand...

Thanks.
I am aware of the benefits for quad in vid production and Photoshop, but am particularly focusing on the effects of burning on other simple tasks, such as browsing, because that has been an issue forever for me.
 
Going through the 1, 2, 4, core transition, now with HT and integrated memory controller too, I can say that it's fun to burn a dual layer DVD, encode a DVD movie to Divx and play a game like NFS shift (very playable, no severe FPS drops) all simultaneously, without a hiccup. Granted this is on an OC'ed i7, but make sure you've stability tested, otherwise it's BSOD, coaster land.

You'll notice that now alot of burning software allows for a large temporary system memory cache that'll account for any HDD (source) read lag, a quad core will improve the situation even further than a dual core, because I/O transfers are handled by one core and there are three others to handle other things. (Of course, thread hierarchy isn't that simple, but you get my drift.)

You should really pair a quad with a good hard drive Raid array or an SSD for maximum performance. If you do allot of ripping I advise against the SSD, because repeated reading and writing on the SSD will cause it to deteriorate (like in 8-9 years vs 10 years. hehehe). Alot of the lag and coasters from burns have to do with I/O caching and the hard drive not keeping up with the burner, though this has improved greatly in the past couple of years.
 
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aamsel said:
Had you ever noticed the slowdown or lag that I mentioned on a dual core?
Click to expand...

Yes, my E8400 system does that. For example, a file copy operation, or windows updates installing or virus scan type of thing going on, will make playing a game during that impossible. Even if the CPU isn't at 100 percent load.
 
I am running a backup X2 6000+ w/ 4gb memory system the last few days and the multi-tasking even on basic stuff like Mat-AL said is ridiculously slow compared to a quad core where everything is just butter smooth.
 
I remember when I went from an Intel P4 Northwood @3.06 ghz to a Q6600 I was nearly left in tears. There is just no comparison in multitasking performance with quad core CPUs. Sadly I had to move a little over a year ago and sold the Q6600 rig and bought a dual core laptop. It had the same amount of RAM but a Core 2 Duo at 2.4 ghz, and it was bad compared to the quad core at multitasking.

With quad cores being available for as little as a 100 dollars (the Athlon II 620), there is little reason to invest in older dual core CPUs. For ultimate multitasking performance the i7s with hyper threading are a treat to use, with 8 core (although 4 are virtual) to multitask with. I don't know if its just me, but I swear Windows 7 uses Hyperthreading much better than Vista or XP ever did.
 
My Athlon XP 2500+ and the 3500+ I had after that both multitasked beautifully. I never had to leave my machine while burning a CD or DVD that I can remember. The issue might be with something else that could be common with your builds. I'd take a look at your hard drive setup and see if you could improve performance there. Modern burns can ask for a lot of MB/s and one hard drive that's possibley too full and/or has high access times might not be able to supply the data the burner needs.

Just a thought.
 
let see

Burn DVD;s
play l4d or TF2
have pidgin open
FF or IE with plenty of tabs open
DVD printing software running and usually something printing
Music playing in winamp...


sure some other things, what helps is if your burning the files from a separate hard drive then the one your using, i have 3 x WD640 gig drives so i notice no slow downs.
 
Waypo said:
My Athlon XP 2500+ and the 3500+ I had after that both multitasked beautifully. I never had to leave my machine while burning a CD or DVD that I can remember. The issue might be with something else that could be common with your builds. I'd take a look at your hard drive setup and see if you could improve performance there. Modern burns can ask for a lot of MB/s and one hard drive that's possibley too full and/or has high access times might not be able to supply the data the burner needs.

Just a thought.
Click to expand...


I have a Velociraptor and some other fast 7200rpms.
About to install 1 or more X25-M's as well.

Is this lag while burning media a normal occurrence with a single or dual-core setup, and not in a quad setup?

Some of you have stated that you don't see this in your quad setups.
Do any of you not see this in a dual setup?

I had asked this when starting the thread, because I had not been aware that burning of CD/DVD's would be a true example of heavy multitasking while doing anything else.

Is it?

It would seem to me that the CPU would be the bottleneck in this operation,
since the hard drives only have to write read fast enough to satisfy the DVD burner.

This also occurs when simply ripping a DVD while surfing.
 
Its hard to really answer the question. my e8400 was on vista with 4 gb's of ram, my i7 has only had windows 7 on it and has 6 gb's of ram. However, there is definitely a difference.
 
maverick0817 said:
Its hard to really answer the question. my e8400 was on vista with 4 gb's of ram, my i7 has only had windows 7 on it and has 6 gb's of ram. However, there is definitely a difference.
Click to expand...

I appreciate that answer, and then you have to add to it that Windows 7 is supposed to "play better" with multiple cores. I don't think that 2GB of RAM would make the difference.
 
I went from an Athlon XP 2600+ to the C2D E6600 and finally upgraded to a Q9450 back in 2008. All which have been operating in Win XP.

First, while burning a DVD on my Athlon XP, I was still able to at least surf the net without any issues. Moving on to the C2D E6600 made multi-tasking much smoother. I was able to encode movies and play games at the same time; I'm sure I took a performance hit, but gaming was still definitely possible.

Stepping up to a Q9450 made thing run smoother and since there is extra "power" on tap I am able to game and encode movies using x264. When I decide to upgrade, the Q9450 will be going into my HTPC which currently has my old E6600 CPU.
 
aamsel said:
I had asked this when starting the thread, because I had not been aware that burning of CD/DVD's would be a true example of heavy multitasking while doing anything else.

Is it?
Click to expand...

You're on the right track asking a question like this. In the old days when CD burners first came out, there were the creme de la creme SCSI setups and if you were really rich you had SCSI hard drives too. There was a dedicated processor to handle the I/O operations, so if you were burning a CD you could do other things without the CD turning into a coaster.

We've gotten to the point where other CD burning tech has allowed us to minimize coasters, but we're still lagging, so what's the problem. Well, if you're doing random seeks on a hard drive (not all burnt data is sequential) and you're trying to use other apps (opening and closing, web caching, etc.) which is even more random seeks, the hard drive gets bogged down (which is the slowest tech in a modern PC.) A quad CPU will aid with being more responsive, but you're still going to wait for things to load up.

When I said I game, encode and burn, at the same time, while true, I do want to point out that my games take 2-3 times longer to load a level (30 seconds vs. 10 seconds big whoop), some food for thought.
 
a quad core is much better for multitasking. i use 2 different computers networked together. if i want to rip or burn something, i do it on my pentium D and it can take as long as it damn well pleases. :) meanwhile tf2 is chugging along on my E6600 at 100+fps the whole time. fine by me. if you want to do both burning and gaming on the same rig at the same time, go for a quad core. you will be glad you did.

and yeah, get an ssd if you can afford it. biggest single thing you can do to increase your computering experience right now.
 
ekuest said:
a quad core is much better for multitasking. i use 2 different computers networked together. if i want to rip or burn something, i do it on my pentium D and it can take as long as it damn well pleases. :) meanwhile tf2 is chugging along on my E6600 at 100+fps the whole time. fine by me. if you want to do both burning and gaming on the same rig at the same time, go for a quad core. you will be glad you did.

and yeah, get an ssd if you can afford it. biggest single thing you can do to increase your computering experience right now.
Click to expand...

Got the SSD, and I prefer not to use 2 PC's for daily tasks.
No gaming involved, except on rare occasions, just standard stuff,
but some of the delays have been annoying.
 
When I am burning a CD, I am usually surfing the web and doing some other work at the same time on my i7-860. Sometimes, it is something along the lines of managing a large music library, pictures, or videos and it still does not slow down. When I had my E8400, it did slow down a little but was still usable. On my x3 710 system, it really does not slow down but it is not as fast as the i7.
 
lbwarped said:
Go for the quad!
Click to expand...

Well, the question wasn't whether the quad is more capable or not, since it
obviously is.

Most of the stuff that people get a quad for I really don't do much of.

The slowdowns I have seen while DVD ripping/burning were situations that I thought
would not tax a dual core.
 
DVD burning on a t5600 (mobile Core 2 Duo) does not slow down Windows 7 x64 at all.

But I don't really game.

The general consensus is correct, hdd access is the limiting factor of DVD burning, especially while using hard drive heavy tasks (video encoding, file transfers, etc)
 
jeremyshaw said:
DVD burning on a t5600 (mobile Core 2 Duo) does not slow down Windows 7 x64 at all.

But I don't really game.

The general consensus is correct, hdd access is the limiting factor of DVD burning, especially while using hard drive heavy tasks (video encoding, file transfers, etc)
Click to expand...

I apprecate that, but this is simply surfing while ripping/burning files
that are on a Velociraptor, so I would think that would be fast enough?
 
Yes, going from my single core 800MHz P3 to my OC'ed Q9450 I gained a small amount of speed. ;)
 
Athlon XP 2400M @ 2.2GHz with 1GB DDR1 at home still.....when I'm burning something I just turn on my 360 or go do the dishes or something. The computer is still ok for surfing, email, downloading and playing shows (720p brings it to it's knees tho).

At work I've got an i7 machine with 6GB of memory and a few GTX285's to choose from, always have tons of stuff open and it's always smooth as butter. Even when I'm streaming Win7 images to my burner from our little C2D file server over gigabit, I don't notice a hit.
 
No one mentioned DVD drives itself, compare a dvd drives 12x from even 3 years ago to 24x and with sata, and how a newer motherboard io sees the drive. that could be a factor.
 
Multitasking while burning a CD/DVD is not going to be limited by the CPU in the vast majority of cases. About the only time this might be the case is if the drives are running in PIO mode instead of DMA mode. If that happens, the CPU will be hit very hard for any type of disk access. However, your drives should not be running in PIO mode and you'll need to fix that.

The major limiting factor with CD/DVD burning will be disk access. If you are running a game or another program from the same hard drive which holds the data you are burning, it's going to cause slowdowns with disk access. The program you are running will probably be reading/writing from or to the hard drive at the same time the burning program is reading data from the drive to burn to CD/DVD. The hard drive is going to have to go back and forth between the different I/O operations which will slow down your ability to multitask because access times will be higher than usual.

I did a 126GB backup to DVD last night and had no trouble with multitasking. At the time I was doing the burning/verifying, had a DC program maxing out all 4 cores, another DC program maxing out my GPU, browsing using Firefox and streaming a TV show from the network. I also have a lot of other programs running in the background but their disk I/O and CPU usage are minimal. I never had a problem with disk I/O sluggishness because everything disk related was spread out over different drives in my system. Not all of the programs were running from the same disk and the video was streamed from the network so it wasn't causing any disk I/O hits.

Generally speaking, you won't notice a difference between a dual or quad core while burning a CD/DVD as long as the disk I/O for burning is separate from the disk I/O for anything else you're doing.

 
Flexion said:
You're on the right track asking a question like this. In the old days when CD burners first came out, there were the creme de la creme SCSI setups and if you were really rich you had SCSI hard drives too. There was a dedicated processor to handle the I/O operations, so if you were burning a CD you could do other things without the CD turning into a coaster. ... (omitted) ...
Click to expand...
The architecture for SATA is very similar to SCSI of the old days. There is a dedicated processor on your SATA drive, and there is a dedicated processor on your south bridge. They take care of data transfer by themselves, and the processor does little or no work. I think nowadays you can max out the CPU while burning a DVD with no ill effects.

I think Flexion is saying that DVD burning is not a CPU-heavy task, and the bottleneck is in the (mechanical) disk. Therefore, upgrading from a dual-core CPU to a quad will not give you much improvement (if any), and, for the OP's purposes, upgrading to SSD may be more appropriate.

Edit: Oh, SmokeRngs said the same thing (only more eloquently) before me.
 
aamsel said:
I apprecate that, but this is simply surfing while ripping/burning files that are on a Velociraptor, so I would think that would be fast enough?
Click to expand...
Velociraptor is fast alright, but it is still a mechanical disk, and it has the same kinds of limitations as other mechanical disks: high random access latency because the disk heads (which are mechanical devices) need time to seek (i.e., physically move) to a new position. NCQ support, which helps with throughput, may also increase random access latency when the disk is already busy.
 
chklin said:
The architecture for SATA is very similar to SCSI of the old days. There is a dedicated processor on your SATA drive, and there is a dedicated processor on your south bridge. They take care of data transfer by themselves, and the processor does little or no work. I think nowadays you can max out the CPU while burning a DVD with no ill effects.

I think Flexion is saying that DVD burning is not a CPU-heavy task, and the bottleneck is in the (mechanical) disk. Therefore, upgrading from a dual-core CPU to a quad will not give you much improvement (if any), and, for the OP's purposes, upgrading to SSD may be more appropriate.

Edit: Oh, SmokeRngs said the same thing (only more eloquently) before me.
Click to expand...

Yep.

Burning a CD from an IDE drive took 100% of a trusty coppermine.

The computer was completely unusable.

I got a SCSI card with a SCSI drive (wierd types of connections... took me a while to figure out how to set it up properly) and it was a world of difference (not much, but I was a lot more patient then).
 
Granted that a single core is slower than 2/4 cores, we also have to realize that subsystem IO such has HDD has increased in speed too. Burning a CD 5 years ago and today are different as today the HDD are physically faster and better interface IDE --> SATA for example.

But yeah last 5 years have been great I myself had a prescott then an e2180 to a q9650. Each leap had a very tangible difference and the latest q9650 being really good that I am confident I can hold another 12 to 24 months w/o significant problems. The only foreseeable upgrade in the next 6 to 8 months is a videocard and an SSD but they are a luxury for me right now.
 
You can manually set the processor affinity or download programs that will do it automatically for given applications. The very little bit I experimented with this I didn't see much improvement, but it's something else to try.
 
I noticed this with my old dual system, an X2 5000+, but it does not occur on my i7 setup. Granted, I've made other upgrades since then (such as new HDDs), so I can't say it was the processor switch alone.
 
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