can an AMD Athlon 2 X2 be snappier than an E8500?

[toyota]

How big are these dingo documents?

small but vicious. the size does not matter as it can be just one word in the text document and you can directly compare them. really I see zero difference between a few words or couple hundred anyway when opening them.

 

[Arkaign]

Do you have any idea how often you have to use text documents while slogging away in IT? I'd most certainly notice if the C2D series opened text documents even *slightly* slower than 5-year-old X2 Windsors Or calc. Or windows explorer. Or anything really. A working semi-modern to current system should open things near-instantly unless they're f'ed up or crappily configured.

You're not going to convince me that something so common as opening text documents is definitively faster on every X2 ~5000 based system than every ~e8xxx system based on your own unscientific methods.

I do believe you that the difference is there in the systems you use, but it's just not a widespread thing.

Think about it logically. What is opening a txt or doc file? You click on it (or kb shortcut/command to it), Windows sees a request, looks at the extension, launches the associated app, and boom, you're in. There's nothing unique about running that bit of code that wouldn't exhibit in any number of other similar situations with single-threaded apps and small memory allocations. Loading a 2k txt file, loading a 400k txt file, loading a 3mb pdf in foxit, none of these typical things ever was anything but instant on the old e5200 or any of a massive number of different systems I've used that worked properly.

Look at the fanboy wars that flame up whenever *any*thing, no matter how trivial, can be measured or recorded to make a point either positive for their 'side', or negative for the other. If you could reproduce what you say, and prove that C2D has a definitive delay from the time you issue a command to open a text file to the time that it was open and ready to go compared to much older X2s, then you'd have something that would have spread wildly during the contentious times of the early C2D era.

As Apoppin noted up there, your small test sample, and even my own comments regarding my much more extensive comparisons with the countless systems I've drudged with over the years, it's all anecdotal until you can run a scientific test on it. Testing response time to open apps or files is cake. If there were something to this, it'd be out there.

 

[Tsavo]

No lag on my 5200.

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Pardon me if this was answered. I only skimmed through the comments. Could it be something in the IDE/SATA chipset and/or BIOS settings and/or drivers? Could the delay be occurring because of a slight delay in the read operation from the hard drive, and not your CPU?

 

[Arkaign]

Pardon me if this was answered. I only skimmed through the comments. Could it be something in the IDE/SATA chipset and/or BIOS settings and/or drivers? Could the delay be occurring because of a slight delay in the read operation from the hard drive, and not your CPU?

It most definitely could be, and with Bios there are actually many dozens of settings that users can never access (unless they use some really obscure software at their own risk, or code their own), so even if you go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, sometimes things can be borked on a level that's inaccessible and spectacularly difficult to diagnose even for very experienced techs.

Don't bring too much logic into this

I'm sure many people have had the experience of upgrading a motherboard and reloading windows and their same apps, but suddenly their system performs much more responsively. And I'm sure once in a while the opposite happens as well. All with the same exact CPU.

 

[toyota]

well I will be around some more comps tomorrow so I will see if I can find some that are Core 2 based. I seriously doubt my E8500 and some random E6800 would act exactly the same as each other in something so specific if it was not somehow related to the cpu in some way. and the same goes for the X2 comps somehow both being faster at that same specific task. again we will see tomorrow and if it holds up then I will do my damn best to put a Core 2 side by side with an X2 pc and make a video. it will be you guys that are crazy if you tell me that several Core 2 comps doing the same thing is just coincidence.

 

[Arkaign]

Yep, and I'd be interested to see, might even be able to contribute a few vids myself.

It will be hard to make it even given the massively varying configurations one is likely to come across in the wild, but a good baseline given the limitations of not being able to reload units would be :

run msconfig, temporarily disable all optional startup items
make note of AV products (they usually have services that cannot be easily disabled)
boot from cold, wait ~1 minute, and open text file 1, close, open text file 2, close, open text file 3, close, open pdf.

Probable good sizes would be :

A single-word txt file.
A ~2-5k txt file.
A ~300-500k txt file.
A 2-5mb pdf file.

Obviously the ideal would be to take a pair of identical hdds, some identical ddr2 memory, identical gpus (disabling any onboard), load windows fresh on both using the same version, load current drivers, update windows, install foxit, and run the tests. That's a heckuva lot of work though.