Why is AutoGk so much slower than Fairuse for me?

[soggycrouton]

It uses 90% of CPU usually.

Does anyone know of a diagnostic test for determining if my CPU is on the fritz?

[txporter]

It uses 90% of CPU usually.

Does anyone know of a diagnostic test for determining if my CPU is on the fritz?

Not really a diagnostic test per se, but you should be able to use Prime95 to determine if your system is stable. Why do you think it might not be? Are you getting BSOD or reboots or something like that?

Jason

[soggycrouton]

No, but if my CPU is much slower than it should be, I'd like to know why.

[neomaine]

It could also be your hard drive. Remember its doing alot of reading AND writing to the same drive. You'll probably get benefit from having and external drive. I'm actually not too suprised with your numbers.

Single core 1.8 CPU, single hard drive, who knows how much actual RAM available (swapping/paging going on?) with who knows what other programs are running...

[txporter]

If you have a CPU issue, you will normally see things like reboots, lock-ups, lost/missing registry entries, issues with boot-up, that sort of thing. If you are not seeing that, it is likely not a hardware issue in that sense. In general, laptops are just not built to be speed demons. They are detuned for lower leakage/longer battery life not for processing power. I suppose it is possible that there are setting in your BIOS that are incorrectly set or non-optimized, but that is probably a stretch. If you are generally satisfied with the way your computer runs for browsing, word processing, etc, then it is probably just that your computer is older/slower and it will take a while to convert video.

Jason

[soggycrouton]

1gb of ram, no other programs running.

I'm fine if these are standard numbers, but if they're not, then this would imply there's something wrong with my computer.

[neomaine]

There are always programs running. What does your Performance tab in Task Manger show?

[jagabo]

A single core CPU encoding with Xvid should show nearly 100 percent CPU usage.

Bring up Task Manager (Alt+Ctrl+Del). Switch to the Performance tab. Under CPU Usage History do you see one graph or two? At idle, do you see near zero usage?

[soggycrouton]

There are always programs running. What does your Performance tab in Task Manger show?

Sorry, i meant no other major programs running (like firefox, etc. virus manager and all that is in the background, but not eating up much cpu). The computer is indeed using 100% cpu usage, with handbrake using most of that. That's definitely not the problem.

I'm not sure why autogk was so slow, but using Handbrake, I think the problem was actually the encoder. Handbrake, while allowing for xvid, defaults to h.264. This was only giving about 2.5 fps on the second pass (I guess it had some very high quality but slow encoding options set). Now using xvid in handbrake, I'm getting about 10 fps for both first and second pass, which should take around 9 hours. I'm much happier with this number. Seeing a preview of the two formats, I can't tell the difference.

[jagabo]

Yes, h.264 encoding is much slower than xvid encoding. Nine hours still sounds a bit long. Check your power settings. Make sure it's not set to maximize battery run time when plugged in. <edit>Oops -- removed some text that was meant for another thread.</edit>

[soggycrouton]

The only available options in the power section are ones dealing with how long before system standby etc. What did you have in mind?

[soggycrouton]

Huh. Now, though I don't know what I've changed (if anything), it's doing encodes at averages of 20-40 fps.

Very weird.

[RabidDog]

Fair use has its own built in xdivx encoder. This might explain some of your speed diff. Cpus generally either work or don't work...IF you have a P4 you might also be getting temperature throttling.. as the CPU heats up, the operating speed is reduced, in order to reduce the heat build up. However I don't think Intel P4's were used in laptops (wisely). Too hot cpu will melt and completely destroy your laptop.. and encoding is a very cpu intensive task.