Dual-Core Performance with XP Home

R

Red Shirt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2005
Messages
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Hey guys....tried searching for this so if I missed it, I am sorry.

I have a AMD X2 5600+ and 2GB of DDR2 800 with XP Home installed and the computer seems no faster than the 3700+ it replaced. I also ran PCMark05 and got a score around 5500 which ranked as one of the lowest with my configuration.

So I have a couple of questions to throw out there to see if I am doing this right.

1) I know XP Home supports dual-core but would XP Pro have better performance? Is it designed to run better with dual-core?

2) I have the AMD CPU driver for dual core. Do I need any others? Do I install those drivers before or after the chipset drivers (chipset is nForce 550 SE)?

Any help will be appreciated.
 
For nearly every intent and purpose, XP Home and XP Pro are the same operating system with respect to the basic code itself. Pro offers some additional features related primarily to domains, Administrator functionality, and some utilities that only work on Pro (command line stuff) that most "Home" users would never have a need for in a million years.

After all this time, the fact that people still think XP Home and XP Pro are "different" OSes is kinda disheartening, but then again, we're talking about consumers. :p

As for a driver, again, XP Home and XP Pro are the same OS - whatever drivers work for one automagically work for the other. Performance of the two OSes should be precisely the same. Come to think of it, theoretically Home should offer slightly better performance after a clean install because it'll have less services/processes running than XP Pro does. Go figure. :)

For you, they're the same OS, so don't waste too much time worrying about it.

Hope this helps...
 
I think he's saying that he doesn't notice a performance difference between his old cpu and new cpu.

FIrst off, windows itself is not multithreaded (i could be totoally wrong, correction please). If you open multiple apps they will be spread across both cores so it should theoretically be faster. Also if you added more ram it will help.
 
After re-reading it, coolxboxgamer is right in one aspect: I misunderstood the "question" as it was, if there's one there really. But coolxboxgamer is wrong in one respect: Windows is multithreaded - all currently available OSes on all platforms are (Windows, OSX, any Linux distro, etc), so they will all make use of whatever CPUs/cores are available. There's a difference between physical CPUs however and a CPU with multiple cores, and some OSes do have limits on how many CPUs they can work with - XP Home can only work with one physical CPU, whereas XP Pro can work with two, etc.

Applications, most notably older ones that are several years old, are not necessarily properly multithreaded, so that becomes an issue and typically shows up when you look at Task Manager (or whatever CPU monitor you're using) and you run such an app and one CPU/core seems to spike in activity while the other just sits there. If the app is properly written (based on the current concepts of multithreading) then you'll see activity across both CPU/core monitors.

Fire up Task Manager and see if the Performance tab is showing two cores - meaning two graphs. If not, click View - CPU History and make sure One Graph Per CPU is selected. At that point you should now have two graphs (one for each core). If not, then something else is going on in Windows. Could be that multicore driver is needed, it could be your OS is still working on the Single processor (Uniprocessor) HAL which gets a bit more in depth to resolve/fix.

Check Task Manager and try to get two graphs listed; if that doesn't work or it doesn't show up, one thing you can try is clicking the Processes tab and pick any running process at all, preferably one of your programs that's running. Right click on any of them (again, one of your programs is preferred) and see if "Set Affinity..." is listed on that right-click menu. If it is, you've got both cores enabled and something else is going on - if you don't have the "Set Affinity..." option then either your HAL (hardware allocation layer) is wrong or Windows is just pooched.

Realistcally there's a whole list of stuff that could be wrong. But check those things first and report back.
 
I suspect that Red Shirt has made the incorrect assumption that a dual-core CPU will somehow make his system way faster. Not true. Windows itself might be capable of multi-threading, but most of the everyday applications we use aren't. There are exceptions, of course. Some of the more demanding jobs we do on the PC certainly benefit from the presence of an additional CPU core, with calculations taking less time to complete. But by and large the benefit to everyday private users is predominately in increased responsiveness of the system rather than in increased speed from it. We can do more things concurrently without creating slowdowns, rather than run a few tasks and have each operating 'faster'.

If the application is only coded to use a single CPU core then the dual-core CPU will only perform as well, in that task, as a single core CPU of the same type and speed. It's nice to be able to have those everyday tasks running whilst the system is also running a full virus scan, though, without suffering a performance hit!

:)
 
Wow...thanks for all the responses! I was at work and so was unable to respond until now.

To clear up alot of confusion:

I didn't think that my system would be way faster with a dual-core. I know most individual applications will not benefit from DC, but did feel like I was not getting really any performance boost. One reason for this was separate applications were not acting like they were using separate cores (i.e. I was having trouble with gaming and having a podcast running in iTunes or gaming and video editing with Pinnacle Studio 10 Plus which does not support DC (I think)).

Windows does show performance graphs for both cores and I did run Memtest to check the memory. I am open to the idea I need more memory, but I am running XP and have 2GB of DDR2 800.

I tried to benchmark with PCMark05 and 3DMark06 to see if it was just me. The ORB suggested my performance was low for my specs, so I am trying other things.

My real questions are 1) Do I have the best OS for DC I can and 2) Did I set up the OS correctly in the first place?

The posts so far say that XP Home is fine for DC, but do I have all the drivers I need? I have just the one from AMD's site. Is there anything else I can do to get better performance?
 
The dual-core CPU device driver is NOT something you need to have your dual-core CPU operating correctly in the sense that it is capable of producing its best performance. Windows XP will extract that 'best performance' itself, without the installation of a device driver being needed.

The device driver is related to the use of 'throttling' technology features, which slow down your processor during periods of low demand being placed upon it. Power saving mechanisms, in other words. The device driver makes XP (or Server 2003) a bit more responsive in quickly enabling or disabling the throttling as usage requirements change. If you don't have the power-saving feature enabled and in use then you have no need for the device driver.
 
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