CPU Utilization during video processing

[Browncoat]

Hey all,

I've built myself a nice new system i7 860, 8GB dominator ram, radeon 5870 with windows 7 64bit. I've just installed all my frequently used programs such as clonedvd, anydvd, mpeg streamclip, tmpgenc express etc.. and after testing that they work I noticed that cpu usage from the 4 physical cores and the 4 logical cores(hyperthreaded) was very low ( around 10% - 15%) during transcoding/processing operations. Does anyone have any experience with this issue? Is there some way to force these programs to use full cpu load so I get the full benefit of my system?

CPU load goes to 100% when I run benchmark programs etc, so I know the cpu can run at full potential.

Thanks in advance.

[redwudz]

Unless you are using a multi-threaded program and one that is CPU intensive, you're not likely to see 100% CPU on all cores.

For encoding, it depends on the codec used. H.264 seems to use all four cores of my CPU at 100% with no problems. With Blu-ray>MKV it does that for about six hours per encode. Xvid/Divx varies, but usually less than 60%. MPEG-2 a lot less. Editing and transcoding, even less.

[Browncoat]

Thanks Redwudz,

Do you happen to know what programs are cpu intensive and/or hyperthreaded?

Seems odd to me that codecs would regulate the load on cpu.

[davidsama]

Ripbot is cpu intensive. At least it is on mine.

[Browncoat]

I'll give ripbot a try.

My old system was e8400 dual core and it regularly had both cores running at maximum load during the transcoding/processing operations. It feels like the old system was faster at these tasks...