Dual Core sucks?

B

Buford

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 16, 2004
Messages
130
An Intel question if I may?

I have a 3.8 Intel OC’d to 4.0. It works well in a multitasking XP OS with hyperthread. When I am working and some other process kicks in the CPU allocates it self well and applications don’t seem to suffer to great a performance hit.

I just built a new PC for my father, a real excuse to build something “snappy” for my dad who is 87 years old. I used a Dual Core Conroe 2.93 extreme edition and premo parts through out. It should be quick.

Of course Norton will never have peace until I permit it to do a “full system scan” on a virgin system. Forgetting that NAV is a PITA and resource hog; my hyperthread 3.8 seems to multitask much better than the Dual Core.

Using Task Mangler; on my dad’s PC one CPU is pegged running NAV, the other is doing nothing and doesn’t want to either. This is not a multithread app problem. Another process or app should be able to use the lazy 2nd CPU?

Something major is amiss with the Dual Core architecture. I thought I wanted a quad core Intel ASAP but not if 3 out of 4 core do nothing all the time.

The other problem is cooling. For Email and web surfing my dad never loads the CPU, but when I was building the PC I tried to rip a few DVD’s to disk using only the stock Intel CPU cooler. Anyone hammering on the dual/quad core will still need water cooling. The stock CPU cooler is fine for no load but USE the CPU, lean on it, and it will quickly slow to a crawl to stay in its thermal envelope.

Thanks
 
Not everything will peg both CPU's but it does sound as though windows isnt running well with 2 CPU's.
I suggest reading up on what you must do to get optimal performance from dual core.
Multitasking should be at least as good.
 
what are you temps? If the cpu is throttling, than its getting WAY TOO HOT. You may have bad contact between the heatsink and cpu. Get some decent thermal paste and try to re-seat it.
 
Antivirus is for the weak. Your problem doesn't sound like it's cpu related. My Core 2 Duo is faster across the board and better at multitasking than my 3.8 @ 5Ghz.
 
Not having anti-virus is for the foolish.. There must be something amiss with your setup or OS's install.. It should be as fast or faster at multitasking..
 
Ok, first of all everyone so far that has replied has missed the obvious. NAV when scanning is accessing the harddrive a TON which is what slows down performance. Is the machine slow when doing other things besides trying to run NAV and doing something else at the same time? If it's only when running NAV and then doing something, it's the harddrive. The only way around that is to use SCSI drives that can handle multiple accesses to the disk at the same time MUCH BETTER than the IDE platform.
 
I used the stock Intel cooler which is unique to the Extreem edition, and used the stock Intel paste, not AS.

Compressing video is CPU intensive. I don't remember the temps but after a short time the CPU got too warm and the clock speed went south. For my dad it does not matter.

My point is one CPU is running baseline while the other is pegged and the PC is too "busy" to get other work done. He does not need to NAV often, but my Prescott seems to multitask much better.

Looking forward I planned on a quad core this fall for myself. I do a lot of multitasking. Yes it was a PITA to get the CPU fan installed so the PC would boot, it required a few tries.
 
The other problem is cooling. For Email and web surfing my dad never loads the CPU, but when I was building the PC I tried to rip a few DVD’s to disk using only the stock Intel CPU cooler. Anyone hammering on the dual/quad core will still need water cooling. The stock CPU cooler is fine for no load but USE the CPU, lean on it, and it will quickly slow to a crawl to stay in its thermal envelope.

Thanks
Click to expand...

You have a problem with the way you seated the cpu cooler here or something. My MacBook has a core2duo processor that I can peg and it's confined to a tiny laptop shell and doesn't overheat. I also have an e6300 in my mainrig that I peg all the time on both cores and never pass the 50's Celsius (with just normal air cooling). Something is wrong with your application of your cooling my friend.
 
Boot drive is a 150 GB Raptor, SATA not IDE
MB= ASUS P5W DH DELUXE
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB
 
Buford said:
Boot drive is a 150 GB Raptor, SATA not IDE
MB= ASUS P5W DH DELUXE
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB
Click to expand...

SATA is IDE. There is PATA (Parallel ATA) and SATA (Serial ATA), it doesn't help with NAV, the only way to have NAV running and do something at the same time speedy would be SCSI. Trust me, ask the people in the storage sub-forum.
 
damn that sounds like a hell of a system.......

anyways I agree with the already posted solution. the heatsink is not seated right
 
> damn that sounds like a hell of a system.......

My dad is getting up there in age. Don’t know how many more years I’ll have him. Last system I put together for him a few years ago was an all-nighter. It was an Intel 3.0 HT with a new cable modem, he was on dial up before that.

So as I went to bed at 6:00 am as he was getting up to go to morning mass. I woke up at noon that day and my dad said to me re the new system “That is snappy”

I live to keep my dad happy, end of September I mentioned that his system was getting long in the tooth, “why not let me throw something together for you whenever you are ready?”

He said, “I’ll be out of town for a week, why not next week while I am gone?” That took me by surprise.

He had a 15” LCD Samsung display (1024 x768)($800 in its day) which I replaced with a $300 20” Samsung (1600x1200). I had a black Lain Li case I was not using so I got a pair of new black DVD burners + black floppy. The only place I cut corners was in graphics, he is just not a game player. I put in a $60 Geforce 7300GS, I wish I spent a touch more.

His old 35 GB raptor is now his data drive. He has a new spare 160 GB drive just to image back-ups to every week. A new battery for his UPS.

My own PC had 2 TB of disk space on several drives. Tying up one drive does not hose the whole system up. CPU ~ 1% for disk utilization on most SATA PCs. The CPU cooler is installed correctly. It is the single raptor, not RAID that is the bottle neck. How ever many R/W arms and platters in a 150GB raptor has they all move together and everything has to transverse the one R/W head. It is the only “slow” thing that he does and it can schedule at lunch.

RE: Cooling - Sustained video compression is brutal on the CPU. My 4.0 Prescott idles under 90F but water temp > 116F when I am ripping. I don’t like any slow downs when I rip and I forget the CPU temp when I ripped on the Dual Core but I know it was stepping down. I don’t like that. My water cooled Prescott never burps marching through thermal hell.

Netflix comes in the mail about 4:30 pm, last pick up at the post office is 6 pm. 4-8 per movies a day, and I don’t have time to loiter.
 
Buford said:
> damn that sounds like a hell of a system.......

My dad is getting up there in age. Don’t know how many more years I’ll have him. Last system I put together for him a few years ago was an all-nighter. It was an Intel 3.0 HT with a new cable modem, he was on dial up before that.

So as I went to bed at 6:00 am as he was getting up to go to morning mass. I woke up at noon that day and my dad said to me re the new system “That is snappy”

I live to keep my dad happy, end of September I mentioned that his system was getting long in the tooth, “why not let me throw something together for you whenever you are ready?”

He said, “I’ll be out of town for a week, why not next week while I am gone?” That took me by surprise.

He had a 15” LCD Samsung display (1024 x768)($800 in its day) which I replaced with a $300 20” Samsung (1600x1200). I had a black Lain Li case I was not using so I got a pair of new black DVD burners + black floppy. The only place I cut corners was in graphics, he is just not a game player. I put in a $60 Geforce 7300GS, I wish I spent a touch more.

His old 35 GB raptor is now his data drive. He has a new spare 160 GB drive just to image back-ups to every week. A new battery for his UPS.

My own PC had 2 TB of disk space on several drives. Tying up one drive does not hose the whole system up. CPU ~ 1% for disk utilization on most SATA PCs. The CPU cooler is installed correctly. It is the single raptor, not RAID that is the bottle neck. How ever many R/W arms and platters in a 150GB raptor has they all move together and everything has to transverse the one R/W head. It is the only “slow” thing that he does and it can schedule at lunch.

RE: Cooling - Sustained video compression is brutal on the CPU. My 4.0 Prescott idles under 90F but water temp > 116F when I am ripping. I don’t like any slow downs when I rip and I forget the CPU temp when I ripped on the Dual Core but I know it was stepping down. I don’t like that. My water cooled Prescott never burps marching through thermal hell.

Netflix comes in the mail about 4:30 pm, last pick up at the post office is 6 pm. 4-8 per movies a day, and I don’t have time to loiter.
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Ok, so you determined it is NAV running on IDE (PATA/SATA) then?
 
> Ok, so you determined it is NAV running on IDE (PATA/SATA) then?

It is just he is not running RAID, and has no need to.
 
Buford said:
> Ok, so you determined it is NAV running on IDE (PATA/SATA) then?

It is just he is not running RAID, and has no need to.
Click to expand...

Right, I understand that, but re-read your post. It's not clear "what" he will be doing on lunch. I am not following.
 
Try grisoft AVG instead of NAV.
I can't even begin to tell you how many problems are caused by damn near any Symantec products. I remove it from 10 to 12 computers a week, on average.
http://free.grisoft.com

As far as other programs not using the second core, I dunno what to tell you.
Im using a c2d 6800 with none of the problems you are experiencing.
 
You know, I am wondering, is this is a fresh install of Windows XP? If it was an old install from a previous machine, it could be a single processor install and not have the multiprocessor install or whatever. Just something I was thinking.
 
The other problem is cooling. For Email and web surfing my dad never loads the CPU, but when I was building the PC I tried to rip a few DVD’s to disk using only the stock Intel CPU cooler. Anyone hammering on the dual/quad core will still need water cooling. The stock CPU cooler is fine for no load but USE the CPU, lean on it, and it will quickly slow to a crawl to stay in its thermal envelope
Click to expand...

This is so much BS. I've got 2 dual core systems, 1 a X6800 and the other a 90nm 3.0 PentiumD (this is a hot fucker) and neither one has ANY issue when I tax the system. I'm also running a stock intel cooler on the P-D and it runs like a champ. You've got issues that have NOTHING to do with the CPU.
 
I say wipe everything clean and start over...no way my 3.4C even compares to my [email protected]'m converting a dvd to mpeg and playing COD2 with no problems ..wouldn't even dare trying anything like that on my old system...and if you are throttling it means you're running hot...get rid of the stock intel hsf and get one thats not a pita to install (for me anyway) and that should fix one of your problems...
 
I say reseat heatsink and use some AS on it while your in there ...and why are you using Norton/Symantec anything?

:)


[F]old|[H]ard
 
ThreeDee said:
I say reseat heatsink and use some AS on it while your in there ...and why are you using Norton/Symantec anything?

:)


[F]old|[H]ard
Click to expand...

Asking someone "why they use norton/symantec products" is like asking someone why they drive a ford instead of an import, etc... To each his own. If he prefers Norton instead of AVG, NOD32, Mcafee, Panda, etc... that's his choice. Good suggestion on the AS though, may improve contact (sure seems like it isn't on there correctly or something though).
 
kenham40 said:
Asking someone "why they use norton/symantec products" is like asking someone why they drive a ford instead of an import, etc... To each his own. If he prefers Norton instead of AVG, NOD32, Mcafee, Panda, etc... that's his choice.
Click to expand...

True. But Norton software is very bloated and runs too many processes in the background for it to be effective. Plus their antivirus program just isn't that great. IMO, it's inferior to NOD32.
 
dark_reign said:
True. But Norton software is very bloated and runs too many processes in the background for it to be effective. Plus their antivirus program just isn't that great. IMO, it's inferior to NOD32.
Click to expand...
hence the reason why I asked
:)


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to the OP, have u installed the latest chipset driver for ur mobo from intel's website?
 
You seem to keep glossing over the cooling issue, but it is definitely not working as intended. I would reseat the heatsink.
 
ChronicTrees said:
Antivirus is for the weak. Your problem doesn't sound like it's cpu related. My Core 2 Duo is faster across the board and better at multitasking than my 3.8 @ 5Ghz.
Click to expand...

QFT
 
Are you sure your HDD is running in DMA mode and not PIO mode? Ive run NAV on my laptop and it doesnt even max out my 1.7ghz Penitum M.

That said, Ive not used Virus protection for about 5 years, I have yet to have an infection. Its all about what you surf online. My brother can get more spyware and malware in a day than I can even imagine, yet I have not had a spyware/malware infection in a very long time, and I use no protection. I even use IE sometimes.

Also, there is something wrong with the way you seated that HSF, whether you want to believe it or not. You are capable of making mistakes just like the rest of us.
 
Are you serious man? how many people have told you that you need to re-seat the heatsink? Atleast 5 or 6. Now do it. IF you say its overheating, than that is more than likely your problem. As far as NAV goes, i've never had good results with it. Every time i've tried it, it was very buggy, and very annoying. Get GriSoft AVG Anti-Virus. You can get it free and it works good.
 
If the tasks that you are running depend on disk IO then you are only going to get things done as quickly as the disk(s) can process requests. You can throw 10 cores at the machine and it will still run like shit if some AV app is demanding high priority on the disk which will block IO requests from other apps.

If heat isn't the issue then remove Norton from your system and try doing some work with the computer and see if it is more responsive.
 
Personally, I have found it is pretty pointless to try to run any AV program while you are trying to do much of anything else on the computer, that is why I schedule my AV to scan at 4am, at a time where I am pretty much always asleep so I don't have to deal with it. I use AVG, because it is free. F-Prot and some others are also well reviewed. I stay away from Norton AV because a.) you have to pay for it, and b.) it is a total resource hog (even the background scan is worth that most). I have tried to explain this to my dad as well, but he is is dead-set on installing Nortan AV and Norton Utilities on every computer he gets (then again, all he does on it is use the web, e-mail, and video poker, so, nothing that intensive. Also, he uses a high-end photo printer for all of his documents even though 95% of them are just text and I have explained to him he would save a bundle in time and cost by buying a cheap monochrome laser printer to handle his text needs... only so much reasoning you can ever do with the over 60 crowd).

Try resetting the heatsink if you are getting overheating issues, any C2D CPU should run much cooler than even a single core Prescott (P4 with HT) CPU. Also, as stated, make sure you have the dual core chipset drivers installed. Not all apps will use both cores, but any decent video ripping/rendering/encoding app should. It should also get much better across the board with Vista since it was developed with multi-core optimization from the ground up.

Suggice it to say, dual core (and multi-core in general) does not suck. A C2D E6800EE should run twice as fast (if not three to four times as fast) as the older CPU he had. There is something buggy in either the installation or drivers going on there.
 
NulloModo said:
Suggice it to say, dual core (and multi-core in general) does not suck. A C2D E6800EE should run twice as fast (if not three to four times as fast) as the older CPU he had. There is something buggy in either the installation or drivers going on there.
Click to expand...

Ok, suggice is not a word I have ever heard of. Neither has dictionary.com :)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/suggice

Can you explain to me what you meant, thanks.
 
Steps to solve your problem
1. Stop griping and get to work on that system
2. Remove Norton, Install AVG
3. Run a benchmarking program like Sisoft Sandra and do one of the cpu tests. It will tell you if your cpu is too hot.
4. Reseat heatsink and use better compound like AS5
5. Test again with Sandra or whatever you want
A prescott system is not faster, better, or cooler than a core 2 extreme unless you have done something wrong. Period.
Ribs
 
Agreed about the AVG, not nearly the HAWG norton is. also, dirty lil trick, you can set your cpu affinity w norton to run on the 2nd core, and then the first core is available. I would do a clean reinstall before anything though. the conroe should be a ton faster than that Prescott CPU/DIY barbeque.
 
ThreeDee said:
lol , I'm pretty sure he knew that

;)

so ..has op re-sat his heat sink yet?


[F]old|[H]ard
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What's funny is I actually DIDN'T know it was a typo :) But now that I know that it makes a lot more sense to me :) heheh
 
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