Replies to post #56962 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[jhalada]

wbmz,

I am going to side with Tench on this one.

I don't think I was entirely disagreeing with Tench. He just clarified a some things for me.

I use cool n quiet so I can see what the cpu is doing in real time and I rarely see the cpu run faster than 1Ghz.

What utility are you using for showing the speed?

Joe

[dacaw]

HD constrained.

For the most part I agree that PCs are normally constrained by their HDs. Its not true when you are doing video rendering and gaming and you have enough memory.

I actually use quite an old PC for my normal office work but it does have a good disk system. The main drive(s) is a 120GB RAID mirror using a pair of WD drives on a 3Ware controller - an excellent board and the best $129 I ever spent - no more HD head crashes!

Then I have a "scratch drive" which is a high-speed SCSI Seagate Cheetah resued from a defunct Dell server. That drive hosts the temp files, spooler dir, pagefile, logfiles, event files, temp internet files - in fact anything that is unimportant and would be otherwise written to the RAID system. I really don't want stuff written to my system drive unless really necessary.

I recommend splitting drive storage between system, data & scratch - it improves performance, reduces fragmentation & wear on the drives.

Also do a search on power protected caching and the Microsoft utility dskcache. Make quite a difference if you have a UPS or a laptop.

[mmoy]

Using 7-Zip in Ultra Compression to a self-extracting archive will get my 3200+ up to about 70% CPU usage. I frequently copy
the files to compress to a RamDisk and can get 100% utilization
when doing that.