Hardware upgrade not making any difference

[bizt_uk]

Hi there,

I have just purchased the following hardware:

- Gigabyte 8TRS350MT Motherboard (upgraded from a Gigabyte GA-81DMNF)
- Intel P4 3.2GHz 800FSB S478 (upgraded from a P4 1.5GHz 400FSB S478)
- 512MB DDR PC3200 RAM (upgraded from 256MB SDRAM PC133)

Other rellevant hardware I have includes:

- nVidia GeForce2 64MB Graphics Card

I also have Windows XP Pro installed


Although the upgrades are quite, when I do anything that is very processor intensive (ie. encode XVid file to DVD/VCD format using TMPenc Xpress) the time is about the same as before I upgraded. Also, with some other tasks (ie. extracting sound from a XVid file using Virtual Dub) it takes longer.

Can anybody tell me why this might be? Cheers

Bizt

[iooi]

Try swopping to a 8meg cache hard drive that might/should speed stuff up a bit.

[guns1inger]

If your CPU supports hyperthreading, make sure it is working. You can check this by loading the task manager and looking at the performance tab. Under XP you should get 2 CPU graphs.

What software are you using ? Not all software will use both CPUs, even in a true dual CPU environment, in which case the performance increase will be less. I would expect something like tmpgenc to show a pretty good performance increase though.

If you have a single drive, then you are screwing yourself, even if you have multiple partitions. You are still reading and writing to the same disk, which will negate pretty much anything else you do. Add a second hard drive (with a large cache, as mentioned by iooi) and process from one to the other, then the drive isn't so much of a bottleneck.

[bizt_uk]

I understand what your saying about the bottle neck of the drive. How would I find out the cache of my current drive? I was planning to buy another drive anyway.

Also, I have checked the task manager and it appears that hyperthreading is working. I will need to try it while it is encoding to see if both CPU graphs are ticking (just off to work now, will try later).

What is strange though is when I use Virtual Dub to extract audio and save as a WAV. When before this process would take about 3 minutes for an hour of video, when I was using it on a 2/3 hour movie it was estimating about 50 minutes. It didnt appear to be decreasing much either. Could this be a codec issue? I used AVICodec to get the video codec and it runs fine in WMP.

[mikesbytes]

While the hard drive is probably the major bottleneck. You could try disabling the hyperthreading. This will give you the maximum speed in a single thread and it is likely that your video software is only using a single thread.

Intel have hyperthreading disabled for their video encoding performance specs. Check their site.

[junkmalle]

I have just purchased the following hardware:... 512MB DDR PC3200 RAM

How many sticks of memory do you have in your new motherboard? You need to have two sticks and they have to be in the proper slots for the P4 to take advantage of the 800 MHz bus. Performance really takes a hit otherwise.

[bizt_uk]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies...

How many sticks of memory do you have in your new motherboard? You need to have two sticks and they have to be in the proper slots for the P4 to take advantage of the 800 MHz bus.

I only have the single stick in memory. I do plan at sometime to buy another but not any time soon. How badly does this effect performance? Does it just perform as a sinlge 512MB stick would without taking advantage of the 800FSB or does it have an effect on what the single stick alone is capable of? Surely even if the bus is only running at half the speed (same as my old system), the fact that I have twice as much memory and DDR this will still make an improvement.

You could try disabling the hyperthreading.

I tried disabling the hyperthreading. That seemed to work slightly better in TMPenc. I am starting to get better encoding results but not quite as much as I expected. Early days yet.

Im still a little concerned about virtual dub though. Its performance has dramatically decreased. I found an article explaining how it doesnt work too well with hyperthreading:

http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=18

Could this be overcome? I havent had too much experience in dealing with virtual dub. Im going to read up on this but if anybody has or knows much about this it would be great to hear.

[junkmalle]

It's been a long time since I've seen benchmarks of the P4 with one vs two sticks of DDR (nobody bothers to test with single sticks because they know it will kill performance). I recall something like a 30 percent drop in performance in some programs.

[budz]

I would suggest getting another 512mb of memory. I have a pent 4 3.0c pc with 1gb of pc3200 ram. Only takes me 1 1/2 - 2 hours to encode with TMPGE plus. I have HT enabled & I turn off any programs that are running in the background.

[bizt_uk]

Only takes me 1 1/2 - 2 hours to encode with TMPGE plus.

Is this to encode DVD quality?

[budz]

Is this to encode DVD quality?

yes.

[jimmalenko]

I found I raised performance significantly (around 30%) when I reconfigured my RAM so that I was using slots 1 & 3 instead of slots 1 & 2. Apparently, having two identical sticks in slot 1 & 3 or slots 2 & 4 allows you to take full advantage of the Double Data Rate of your RAM, or so I'm told.

[Jester700]

Just a note on the hard drive - make sure it's 7200RPM, and it helps if your source file(s) and end file are on different physical drives. But IMO 8MB cache doesn't really help that much here - the files are big and there are few of them - throughput is king.

[bizt_uk]

Hi,

My current HDD is a Western Digital WD400EB-00CPF0 (40GB). It is 5400RPM and has a 2MB buffer/cache. I hadnt really properly appreciated the fact that the end file will be built up on the hard drive, I was more thinking about the processing between CPU and system memory.

I probably buy next another 512MB identical stick for the 3 DIMM slot and an 80GB, 7200RPM hard drive.

Cheers

Bizt

[vcd4ever]

Hi bizt_uk,

I have done some tests with my P4 3.2GHZ HT 800MHZ FSB S478 512MB DDR PC3200 RAM (one memory stick) and this is my test results: It takes me about 40sec to extract and save the audio from a 45min long xvid to wav with virtualdub when saving the wav to my 7200RPM HDD. It takes me about 10min to extract and save the audio from the same 45min long xvid to wav with virtualdub when saving the wav to my IOMEGA ZIP 100 drive (IDE). I find it hard to believe after this test results that a 5400 RPM HDD can be the reason for the bad performance that you are having when extracting the audio and saving it to wav.

vcd4ever.

[junkmalle]

Yes, the change in audio extraction time is way beyond differences in drive speed, CPU speed, etc.

I wonder if this could be the problem:

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=68&var2=0

On a hyperthreaded CPU the secondary virtual processor would still be able to perform a little work so the computer wouldn't appear to be locked up. But any CPU intensive tasks would get very slow.

[vcd4ever]

I wonder if this could be the problem:
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=68&var2=0

This would be a real performance killer when extracting and saving the audio to wav.

vcd4ever.