How good are dual proc systems

[Byte]

Like when i'm copying big files from one IDE hard drive to another it takes a lot of CPU and stuff and makes the system crawl (even 1.5ghz+ systems). Will Dual CPU help this? I know SCSI will, but would like to know if dual proc will also.

 

[MasterHoss]

No... if any improvement, it'd be very minimal.

 

[Hoeboy]

when copying large files from IDE drives to IDE drives, isn't the bottleneck the IDE chain itself and not the processor? the only way to gain speed is to fix that bottleneck such as going SCSI as you suggested.

 

[CZroe]

They make good conversation peices (As my BP6 does) and database servers for SMP optimized database programs. But I actually lose FPS when I enable SMP in Quake3 :|

 

[CubicZirconia]

<< I actually lose FPS when I enable SMP in Quake3 >>



I don't know anything about dual-processing. Why would you lose fps?

 

[CZroe]

Well, I know in this case (Dual Celerons on a BP6) it's very typical to see a drop of about 4-14 FPS, but I'm not sure why. The SMP optimizations are really just enabling nVidia's SMP driver optimizations, so it's a relatively small part of the whole system that's actually utilizing it. Perhaps the video card is too much of a bottleneck in this situation (GeForce 2 GTS-V)...

 

[joohang]

No?

Hell yeah. It will definitely make a difference. It will NOT improve your raw disk performance, your system will definitely be usable. It will not crawl your entire system down like your current experience. With SMP, you always have an extra free CPU and it comes in very handy.

 

[CZroe]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that
Even without multi-threaded applications, multi-applications have more to run on
So if IDE is eating CPU resources, anything else you run will use the other CPU.
That's why my BP6 is my fileserver