I need something legitimate to do with my fast CPU and plenty of RAM

[soccerballtux]

but I'm currently (at this minute) not motivated

• to write software
• do video editing
• play video games (no tunnels while carpooling)

I don't really care for folding electric bills

I want to feel efficient and productive without having to work at it

maybe I should buy an apple device?

I probably just need to sleep, then the software development will be more appetizing

there's no replacement for inspiration, salt, and light...

I guess I'll try to see how far I can overclock it, or maybe install updates to slow it down

any other suggestions? I don't really need 8 cores

 

[BonzaiDuck]

but I'm currently (at this minute) not motivated

• to write software
• do video editing
• play video games (no tunnels while carpooling)

I don't really care for folding electric bills

I want to feel efficient and productive without having to work at it

maybe I should buy an apple device?

I probably just need to sleep, then the software development will be more appetizing

there's no replacement for inspiration, salt, and light...

I guess I'll try to see how far I can overclock it, or maybe install updates to slow it down

any other suggestions? I don't really need 8 cores

You got me interested. How much is an octo-AM3+ processor? I was on track to build something else. See-E. I'm really trying to put it off and schedule it for 2015. And I DON'T know what I'm going to do with that many cores.

Could you be a government contractor to NSA? Nah-- they've got supercopmputers with hundreds of iNtels or AMDs. Hmmm.

Seti@Home?

 

[ninaholic37]

It is good future proofing I guess. In 10 years maybe Windows will become so bloated that it will take 8 cores to run MS-Word.

 

[jhu]

Since when is 16 GB considered "plenty of RAM"???

I have 16 GB of RAM on my computer, and I keep hitting memory limits on my renders. It's annoying.

 

[soccerballtux]

You got me interested. How much is an octo-AM3+ processor? I was on track to build something else. See-E. I'm really trying to put it off and schedule it for 2015. And I DON'T know what I'm going to do with that many cores.

Could you be a government contractor to NSA? Nah-- they've got supercopmputers with hundreds of iNtels or AMDs. Hmmm.

Seti@Home?

heh I'm not willing to test whether running Windows Update was the problem as there's no going back!
it's possible with old CPU and MOBO if I had just reformatted everything would be just as fast. Personally, I think it was some combination of Windows Update, AMD leftover bits all over the place from Radeon video card driver updates (in the future, I will always uninstall, reboot, install); and Chrome having bloated in the last 2 years necessitating 16GB of RAM (previously, 8GB was fine). Oh, and keeping my swap file disabled makes everything super fast. I don't know why but even with 13GB free Windows will still swap unused in the last couple days programs entirely to disk, rendering the RAM useless. Anyways I was getting some weird stuff like super laggy Windows Explorer delays when entering/rendering a new folder. Didn't used to be that way. And when I switched from NVidia to AMD I immediately started having OOM errors at 5.5->6GB RAM usage; before on NVidia I used to be able to bump right up next to 8GB without a problem. Windows Update changed vmem allocation algos somewhere? AMD drivers? I'm not willing to find out, but installing VS2010 will probably make at least some updates mandatory.

I think I might have managed to figure out the turbo on this processor and Overdrive. AMD Overdrive is a really buggy mess. Disabled most features just made sure Turbo was enabled. That didn't help too much, but using AMDMsrTweaker to turn off APM and turn it back on from within Windows seems to have been what everything needed. I'm not sure why, I chalk it up to the shoddy mid-tier Asus BIOS (they actually go to the trouble of having different codebases for their product tiers, direct words out of friend's mouth when discussing this last night with him, he's a UEFI dev at AMI).

I paid $75+S/H/Tax for my FX-8310, 95w TDP is nice and cool, stock 3.4ghz but now that Turbo's working correctly bounces up to
actually, no, it's not correctly working; so I'll have to Task-Schedule P-State Pb1 to bet set to 21.5x@1.4125v on resume from suspend. Thanks Asus. It's a shame, Pb1 is 3.7ghz and Pb0 is 4.3ghz, but the ONLY way to consistently get it to boost to 4.3ghz is run the Windows Experience Index performance evaluation tool, and then it only does that when the CPU is being stressed. Go figure. I'm pretty sure this is a BIOS issue with Turbo or APM implementation; I'm going to see if I can't make Asus file a bug report for me so they can BIOS rev. I have to decide whether I want it to turbo to 3.7ghz or 4.3ghz (can't choose both).

Anyways I paid $75 + S/H/Tax which is about what I made from Ebay selling the FX-6300 I got in a mobo-combo bought from MicroCenter a day before TigerDirect had a Paypal $25 off $100 thing.

It's...fast for the money. I can't believe people in General Hardware were saying it doesn't make sense to go with AM3+ being a dead platform. AMD is a dead company, there will not be any more non-APU chips with the performance that CrapPileShoveller and Dulldozer have for at least a long time. I average 210FPS encoding with the linked, non-recent-nightly-build Handbrake from this thread. Intel spammers were regularly recommending I jump to a cheap Intel mobo; the cheapest CPU (i3-530) was a $110 dual core that even if overclocked to 4.5ghz would only get me about 120FPS in handbrake, which .is what I was getting on my old Ph2-965 4.0ghz@2.6ghz CPU-NB. IE, it would have been a complete sidegrade. I just don't get how people can be so evil like that. I've only seen it from Intel and NVidia fanbois.

 

[soccerballtux]

Since when is 16 GB considered "plenty of RAM"???

I have 16 GB of RAM on my computer, and I keep hitting memory limits on my renders. It's annoying.

it's not [plenty]. At the rate Chrome is going I'll need 32GB in another 2 years. Right now it's plenty for what I need, which 8GB was plenty for up until about 1.5 years ago, which is basically up to 30 tabs of Chrome that I work through over the course of a week listening to SoundCloud mixes or wikipedia articles on Machine Learning and Neural Networks that I'm reading; and various other programs running in the background like O&O defrag, Firefox is what I use for Facebook which I leave open; FreeMind (MindMap software), Winamp, Foobar, a Ubuntu Virtual Machine, etc.

the difference between us, is I have nothing worth rendering to render. So, it's enough for me.

In 2008 when I built the PC and had 8GB of RAM I checked out and built the entire CM7.2 ROM for my OGDroid in under 30 minutes, because the disk space it was reading the files from was all virtualized [gave it 4GB] by VMWare (the Oracle VM software is terribly unstable BTW, don't use it; VMWare is much better) so the CPU just stayed pegged to 90%+ compiling the entire time. Which is weird because doing it under Ubuntu natively was slower due to no disk virtualization using RAM.

 

[soccerballtux]

It is good future proofing I guess. In 10 years maybe Windows will become so bloated that it will take 8 cores to run MS-Word.

I don't think I'll ever upgrade from Windows 7, not because I like it, but because I don't like what they do with Windows. In fact, I might not ever update from SP1.

And I have half a mind to at least repartition and go back and install XP-64b and if I can get it and drivers working, going back to that. XP is from the better-old days when USB-HCI devices and Windows Task Manager were always highest priority tasks so that if you needed to kill an app, you could always get to Task Manager. In 7 (possibly Vista), it and the CTRL-ALT-DELETE window are just a normal-priority task that other tasks can steal resources from. Before I formatted, I was busy defragmenting, running low on RAM, and something was eating all my CPU but I couldn't get to Task Manager because no single program was getting enough computing time to de-swap from the disk and respond to input. So on my monitors what it looked like was a bunch of windows shifting a quarter inch down and to the right greying out with the "(Not Responding)" message appended to the Window Title because the swapping was aliasing with the kernel CPU time scheduling..

It feels like everything was a huge step backwards from the relatively clean NT kernel we had in 2000/XP and now it's possible to enter a state where everything is so mutually starved (including Task Manager) that you can't do anything at all, you just have to wait for it to finish or hard reboot your PC-- I did the latter. I wanted to video screen record the process to show how screwed up it was but, obviously, that would take more CPU power hehehe!

 

[escrow4]

An FX is the opposite of fast compared to something like the 4770 I have in my daily box and 16GB of RAM is standard now if you want an all rounder to last. Those issues you mentioned with turbo seem like a substandard product implementation somewhere, my 4770 has no problem shoving up to 3.85GHz at will max turbo with no fiddling . . . . and disabling swap is a bad idea, its not 1995 let Windows manage the memory by itself.

 

[soccerballtux]

and disabling swap is a bad idea, its not 1995 let Windows manage the memory by itself.

...

 

[cbn]

You got me interested. How much is an octo-AM3+ processor?

FX-8310 with cpu cooler is $105 + shipping:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...634&CatId=7339

But if you use Tiger Direct's $20 off $100 Visa Checkout offer---> http://www.tigerdirect.com/sectors/c...kout/index.asp (Good for one time use till 12/20/2014 or until funds run out) , the price drops to $85 + shipping:

 

[jhu]

It's winter, so you can have it run prime95 to keep your room warm.

 

[soccerballtux]

It's winter, so you can have it run prime95 to keep your room warm.

no way! it's resistive heating which is about a third as efficient as your HVAC heat pump

 

[exar333]

I can say I really appreciated my CPU speed when converting all my MKVs onto the NAS using handbrake. Your 8310 is pretty fast at file conversions and you could make use of that if you are looking to load your movies/tv shows to something like a Plex server.

It was some effort, but was definitely worth it.

 

[soccerballtux]

I can say I really appreciated my CPU speed when converting all my MKVs onto the NAS using handbrake. Your 8310 is pretty fast at file conversions and you could make use of that if you are looking to load your movies/tv shows to something like a Plex server.

It was some effort, but was definitely worth it.

why would you convert them?

 

[DA CPU WIZARD]

it's not [plenty]. At the rate Chrome is going I'll need 32GB in another 2 years. Right now it's plenty for what I need, which 8GB was plenty for up until about 1.5 years ago, which is basically up to 30 tabs of Chrome that I work through over the course of a week listening to SoundCloud mixes or wikipedia articles on Machine Learning and Neural Networks that I'm reading; and various other programs running in the background like O&O defrag, Firefox is what I use for Facebook which I leave open; FreeMind (MindMap software), Winamp, Foobar, a Ubuntu Virtual Machine, etc.

the difference between us, is I have nothing worth rendering to render. So, it's enough for me.

In 2008 when I built the PC and had 8GB of RAM I checked out and built the entire CM7.2 ROM for my OGDroid in under 30 minutes, because the disk space it was reading the files from was all virtualized [gave it 4GB] by VMWare (the Oracle VM software is terribly unstable BTW, don't use it; VMWare is much better) so the CPU just stayed pegged to 90%+ compiling the entire time. Which is weird because doing it under Ubuntu natively was slower due to no disk virtualization using RAM.

This would annoy me to no end.

 

[soccerballtux]

This would annoy me to no end.

sorry, which?

 

[tential]

I can say I really appreciated my CPU speed when converting all my MKVs onto the NAS using handbrake. Your 8310 is pretty fast at file conversions and you could make use of that if you are looking to load your movies/tv shows to something like a Plex server.

It was some effort, but was definitely worth it.

OP could purchase a Ceton InfiniTV 6 and start recording every show he likes and encoding them into a more storable size (with limited quality loss).

But well, I decided not to continue doing that until I get Skylake-E

 

[2is]

why would you convert them?

This... If you need a different format there are programs that will simply change the container which will operate as fast as your drives will allow it to and use virtually no CPU time, you also don't have to worry about quality loss that comes with an actual conversion.

As far as actual encoding goes... I use Quick Sync

 

[sm625]

Try getting to around round 50 on bloons monkey city contested territory. That game will show you how slow your cpu really is, assuming you can even make it to round 50.

 

[pw257008]

anti-malaria DC

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Compiling code and video conversion are the 2 main things I do that take full advanatge of my 1100T. I guess the only other thing you can try is running some virtual machines and use RAM for the virtual hard disks.

 

[alexruiz]

Try getting to around round 50 on bloons monkey city contested territory. That game will show you how slow your cpu really is, assuming you can even make it to round 50.

Off topic and reviving an old thread.
I am curious, what CPU and GPU do you have?
How slow are rounds 50+ for you?

On my laptop (HP Probook 6475b, A10-4600M Trinity) CT tier 8 starts chocking at around round 45. My desktop (A10-7850K witth DDR3-2133) handles better all the way to the high 60s rounds. By round 80, even on my boy's desktop (FX8320 + R9 280) there is lag. I have the latests flash and the hardware acceleration work fine.