Post-upgrade blues

[Traxan]

Several of you were helpful in offering advice on my recent purchase. But after a few weeks, I have to say I'm not seeing much change.

I went from a Q6700, 2.6Hz, to a Core i7-860. Stayed with 8GB, from DDR2 to DDR3. Same video card, the Radeon 5770. By and large, the experience is the same. None of my apps can utilize the multithreading or multi core much.

I feel kind of foolish. The BENCHMARKS are faster, but so what? In my day to day use, I see no difference and kind of regret the $600 investment now.

Anyone else get this buyer's remorse?

 

[WoodButcher]

Nope, I'm real happy w/ my Q6600 and my 8800GT.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I did just build another but went with a Q8400 in a mitx, just haven't found a real reason to upgrade since the Q6600. I'm sure many have found the upgrade-itis to be an expensive non-necessity.

I'm sure the big dog chips will be needed in the near future but not yet. My gf is still happy with my old P4. Granted, it's OCed to 4.0 but for browsing, recording TV and office apps it is more than adequate.

 

[alyarb]

I thought you were going to be encoding video. If you spend all your time in firefox then no it probably won't be faster.

 

[Traxan]

Yeah but thus far haven't found a decent encoder. TMPGEnc is single-core.

No other apps are faster, load times are the same, etc. I'd probably get a bigger boost with a SSD.

 

[alyarb]

unless you have some kind of special application, use x264 in handbrake. what exactly are you encoding?

 

[spdfreak]

I have a Q6600 and I use handbrake to encode OTA recorded HDTV to x264. I actually wish I had a i7 or Phenom X6 rig because it would be significantly faster. But, for almost all day to day tasks, there is no way you can tell any difference between a 6600, i7 or even an older C2D. Since most modern games are going to be GPU limited at any normal resolution, there isn't really that much reason to upgrade for gaming either- although a few games do benefit some.
We hit the "fast enough" level with the Q6600 generation chips and it will take specialized apps to really make people need to upgrade from there.

 

[lopri]

TMPGEnc is single-core.

??

Edit: Well, it may not fully use all the cores like Handbrake but it still uses every core available, afaik.

 

[Traxan]

Hm thanks for the tip on Handbrake. Playing with it now. Intel stock cooler FTW. CPU is 50c. Usually it's under 30.

I like TMPGEnc's cleanup features. Trimming edges, source and destination trimming, simple color correction, etc.

 

[Hacp]

Hm thanks for the tip on Handbrake. Playing with it now. Intel stock cooler FTW. CPU is 50c. Usually it's under 30.

I like TMPGEnc's cleanup features. Trimming edges, source and destination trimming, simple color correction, etc.

You might then want to transcode it to wmv at a high bitrate or just use a raw copy, then run it through something multi-threaded.

 

[Idontcare]

TMPGEnc is single-core.

I use TMPGEnc and it is most certainly multi-threaded.

Has been at least since 2006 when I first used it with my QX6700.

Are you setting the preferences to use multi-core?

And even if it was single-threaded (which it isn't) your single-threaded performance is probably close to 2x difference between a Q6700 @2.6Ghz and an i7-860 running with turbo-boost (which it would be if the app were single-threaded, which it isn't, so...).

The real crux of the issue is that if something took an hour on your old rig and now it "only" takes half an hour on your new rig the bottom line is that even waiting around for a half an hour to pass is going to make it seem like your faster rig is still slow. (which it is...if you want fast TMPGEnc then you need 5GHz OC'ed gulftown)

SSD is not going to help your TMPGEnc jobs go any faster, you are not hard-drive speed limited for encoding. Caveat: I'm assuming you know to not run virus-checking scans on your hard-drive while it is attempting to read/write an AV encoding stream, but there are a million and one ways to make something become a problem when it really should not be one.

I have Q6600 currently, and SSD, and TMPGEnc...the SSD is nice for making the system more responsive, my encoding jobs use all four cores of my Q6600.

 

[Bman123]

I learned the hard way once, spent about $500 and I won't make that mistake again. I'm much wiser now, (I think)...

 

[0roo0roo]

Several of you were helpful in offering advice on my recent purchase. But after a few weeks, I have to say I'm not seeing much change.

I went from a Q6700, 2.6Hz, to a Core i7-860. Stayed with 8GB, from DDR2 to DDR3. Same video card, the Radeon 5770. By and large, the experience is the same. None of my apps can utilize the multithreading or multi core much.

I feel kind of foolish. The BENCHMARKS are faster, but so what? In my day to day use, I see no difference and kind of regret the $600 investment now.

Anyone else get this buyer's remorse?

not sure why you would have expected any different. cpu upgrade at that level is for game fps or encoding speed. if you wanted app launch speed you should have invested in an ssd, or better raid ssd

i haven't been keeping up with tmpmeg or whatever but any encoder worth anything is multithreaded now. the quality and speed of handbrake is pretty amazing. but if you want video editing features you'll have to look at other packages, but those should also support multithreaded encoding.
for batch sound file conversion foobar spawns one thread per core etc, its fast.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

I upgraded from a Q6700 at 2.6 to an i7 860 at 3.8, and I can tell that things are faster. Not MUCH, but a little bit.

It wasn't technically "worth it" but I am OK with it. I think the 2.6 to 3.8 difference was big for me.

I notice that some things like loading in EVE are in fact perceptibly faster.

 

[justinm]

I have the computer in my sig and a Q6600 running on a DG965WH mobo and do not notice any differences in a lot of the things I do (e-mail, Firefox, papers, Website crap, and a few other non-intensive tasks) everyday. I do a lot of encoding and converting DVDs and crap on my i7 which is a lot faster and do some light gaming... I also had a Q9550, UD3P, and 8GB Gskill RAM that I sold to get the i7 setup and ended up coming out of pocket almost $100, so it was worth it.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I know my next upgrade will be an SSD. What I have now is sufficient for some time. Upgrades are always fun but a quantum jump isn't happening right now for most people - notwithstanding that both Intel and AMD have really good products right now.

 

[BD231]

You went from a quad core to a quad core???? I say we ban whoever gave this advice.

If you want a good free encoding app, i suggest AVI.NET. It maxs out all cores really well and it has a lot of visual enhancement options.

 

[TheRyuu]

For encoding videos:
-mpeg2 = HCEnc (I'm weak on mpeg2 knowledge, I suppose from the codec standpoint it shouldn't really be used unless it's some kind of special case (e.g. dvd auth))
-h264/avc = x264 (what you should be using if there is no special case)

Both are multi-threaded, x264 gains about 25% from SMT (Hyperthreading).
x264 is a cli app, honestly don't go looking for a gui to use it, just learn to use the cli. It's really simple with the preset system and the better input support.

I went from a q6600 to an i7-920. Granted my q6600 only ran at 3ghz and this is running at 3.8ghz, not sure about these numbers but the i7 should be easily 50% faster if not twice as fast.