New Dell speed question

[Horsepower]

Upgraded the office system to an 8250 3.06gig and it doesn't seem any faster than the 1.5gig I replaced. Dell support sent me a bulletin about managing processor time (Q308417). AAMOF some of the programs take a long time to start. I'm starting to think there's a downside to hyperthreading?

 

[Regs]

Well I would not finger the processor every time a system seems slow. Most of the time its either the operating system or hard drive. The hard drive is very important. An old 5200 RPM hdd compared to a new 7200 RPM drive is like night and day no matter what cpu you have running on your system. In addition to what type of hard drive you have, it also depends on the condition of the hard drive. Like What does it sound like, how long does it take to save files, ext.

Plus, I make it a habit to install Windows every 6 months or so. Since I'm so compulsive I can download to many 3rd party programs that could really slow down windows and perhaps corrupt its programming.

 

[Horsepower]

She's got a Barracuda ATA V ST3120023A 7200 rpm 120gig drive.

 

[Philli]

What about for RAM?

 

[Horsepower]

512 megs PC 1066 RDRAM.

 

[Regs]

As in 1066 Mhz RAMBUS? What model motherboard do you have? Can you aslo check to see if the bus is running 533mhz?

 

[jacktesterson]

Intel is the problemo

 

[Horsepower]

Intel Processor Frequency app says it's running at 533. I do not know the mobo model because it's OEM Dell, but I assume it's Intel.

 

[Horsepower]

I had a hunch, removed Winfax Pro 10.03 and it regained some speed. Any ideas on a simple testing or benchmarking tool, that I can run?

 

[Wiktor]

Quake3?

Your problem seems to be software/driver side not hardware related.

 

[nick1985]

sisoft sandra

 

[mechBgon]

Here are a couple of simple real-world ones:

• Copy the contents of a game CD, or some other large amount of data, onto a folder on the hard drive. Now compress it at Maximum compression with WinZip or FilZip, and time how long it takes. The new system should clean house on the old 1.5GHz, and this benchmark is not sensitive to hard-drive speed/quickness, so it's mostly mobo/CPU/RAM.
• Do a timed virus scan of a folder that contains lots of files and sub-folders... again, copying the contents of one or two game CDs onto the HDD would give you a good target. This does depend somewhat on HDD seek-&-read speed, as well as the rest of the platform. The first run after a reboot is the relevant one... given enough RAM, the OS will cache a lot of the data in RAM and re-scan it from there, making the second run faster. If both systems have 512Mb of RAM then you can compare second-run results as well.

I suspect that the Seagate Barracuda ATA V is part of the reason your new system feels unresponsive... they have pretty slow seek times. If you can live with 18Gb of space, a Cheetah 15k.3 or a Fujitsu MAS-series would light a fire under it, guaranteed. edit: of course there are 36Gb and 73Gb models too, but the 18Gb is about at most peoples' pain threshold, at $200-210

 

[sharkeeper]

Intel is the problemo

Way wrong answer.

Dell is the problem.

Never seen one that was what I would consider speedy. Even the precision workstations with SCSI suck.

Intel Processor Frequency app says it's running at 533. I do not know the mobo model because it's OEM Dell, but I assume it's Intel.

Something is definitely wrong there. Try CPU id and report back what it tells!

-DAK-

 

[amdskip]

A hard drive with an 8mb cache would also help out.

 

[pelikan]

I wonder if there are a bunch of startup programs taking up resources. And if unnecessary Windows services are running.

 

[Jgtdragon]

First thing is to make sure you have no virus. Second, make sure bios and drivers are updated.
Run some bench and see like quake 3, 3dmark, or sandra.

 

[mechBgon]

Three other thoughts:

• New hard drives sometimes do write verification until they've been through a certain number of power-up cycles. I don't know if the Cuda V is one of the models that does it. Obviously you can hasten this along if you want.
• If the system has Intel Application Accelerator installed, make sure the drive's Auto Acoustic Management feature (if so equipped) is set for maximum performance.
• Defragment the hard drive... I think WinXP will try to optomize for the programs you use the most, and arrange them so the drive can do linear reads when loading them.

 

[broadwayblue]

i agree that dell systems just don't have a crisp responsive feel to them. i have a new 4550 at 2.66 and a slightly older 4500 at 1.8ghz...both with at least a half a gig of ram. however, neither of them seem any faster opening the control panel or other simple tasks than my 2+ year old 1.2ghz thunderbird system i built myself with an asus motherboard.

 

[boyz]

i 8te dell

 

[MistaTastyCakes]

What is your CPU utilization at? Some programs can eat up processor cycles that aren't even supposed to. I used to have an old Soyo mobo and the temperature monitor that came with it always kept the CPU at full load. Perhaps there's a program on the Dell doing a similar thing?

Intel is the problemo

-------------------------
Ill poop on my hand and eat it with my tongue before buying an Intel

I'm sorry, I can't resist.. are you serious?

 

[pelikan]

Originally posted by: MistaTastyCakes
What is your CPU utilization at? Some programs can eat up processor cycles that aren't even supposed to. I used to have an old Soyo mobo and the temperature monitor that came with it always kept the CPU at full load. Perhaps there's a program on the Dell doing a similar thing?

Intel is the problemo

-------------------------
Ill poop on my hand and eat it with my tongue before buying an Intel

I'm sorry, I can't resist.. are you serious?

You must be an Onion AMDHardcoreFan.
I don't mean any offense, I actually get a kick out of those kinds of posts.

 

[dexvx]

A whole lot of misconceptions. I think the problem is definitely driver-software related, either that or its the placebo effect

I would definitely install the IAA drivers (should be on the Dell disc), as it improves IDE performance by a long shot. It also depends on application. Also remember to defrag your drive (even if it is a new install). If your applications are not multithreaded, or you will never use multithreaded applications, then go to the BIOS and turn off HT. HT can incur a slight performance penalty when activated with applications that are not multithreaded (a rather serious loss to ancient fortran applications, i might add, but thats DP in general).

Benchmarking tools: I'd give the ZDNet Winbench (or whatever), SysMark office, Content Creation stuff a try. You'd have to look for similar test setups elsewhere as a reference.

I suspect that the Seagate Barracuda ATA V is part of the reason your new system feels unresponsive... they have pretty slow seek times. If you can live with 18Gb of space, a Cheetah 15k.3 or a Fujitsu MAS-series would light a fire under it, guaranteed. edit: of course there are 36Gb and 73Gb models too, but the 18Gb is about at most peoples' pain threshold, at $200-210

ATA V is slower than the faster HDDs. If your previous system had SCSI or say a WD JB, BB series or 180GXP, it would account for the loss of responsiveness.

Way wrong answer

Dell is the problem.

Never seen one that was what I would consider speedy. Even the precision workstations with SCSI suck..

The computer can only be as good as the person operating it. I suppose all the PowerEdge racks in my company's lab serving an entire ISP are a figment of my imagination. They only suck if the person using it sucks. There are people in my area that have a $5K Precision workstation running 50 processes at the same time and wondering why its slow.

A hard drive with an 8mb cache would also help out.

My IBM 15K RPM U160 drive has 4MB cache, and I can assure you it blows the crap out of any WD JB 8MB cache or WD Raptor 8MB cache drives, or even those 16MB cache almighty notebook drives. Cache is overrated, its like the Mhz myth... more correlates to better, but more doesnt mean better.

 

[sharkeeper]

The computer can only be as good as the person operating it. I suppose all the PowerEdge racks in my company's lab serving an entire ISP are a figment of my imagination. They only suck if the person using it sucks. There are people in my area that have a $5K Precision workstation running 50 processes at the same time and wondering why its slow.

They still suck. At first I thought it was all that unnecessary crap that EVERY mfr puts on their machines. Nope, even doing a fresh OS install and loading things up like I would on a built from scratch machine and the computer still chokes. It's like driving a 911 in limp mode. Car still looks great, runs pretty good but doesn't have that kick it should. I'll stick with SuperMicro boards and brand name components.

-DAK-

 

[RichieZ]

Originally posted by: Horsepower
She's got a Barracuda ATA V ST3120023A 7200 rpm 120gig drive.

This is one of the problems, I ahve this HD it replaced a WD 100GB 8MB cache model, it just sits in the same firewire enclosure but I can tell its MUCH SLOWER, takes longer to be recognized and sometimes theres lag when I click on a folder. Its amazingly quiet tho, and its my mass storage drive so I was willing to give up the speed.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: shuttleteam

The computer can only be as good as the person operating it. I suppose all the PowerEdge racks in my company's lab serving an entire ISP are a figment of my imagination. They only suck if the person using it sucks. There are people in my area that have a $5K Precision workstation running 50 processes at the same time and wondering why its slow.

They still suck. At first I thought it was all that unnecessary crap that EVERY mfr puts on their machines. Nope, even doing a fresh OS install and loading things up like I would on a built from scratch machine and the computer still chokes. It's like driving a 911 in limp mode. Car still looks great, runs pretty good but doesn't have that kick it should. I'll stick with SuperMicro boards and brand name components.

-DAK-

Dell precision boards are made by Supermicro AFAIK

Precision computers use premium parts that are not any more different than the parts I or you buy at newegg (minus the overclocking stuff).