Was I expecting too much from this processor?

[jakobkraft]

I got my wife a new laptop recently to replace her quite old PIII 900 MHz IBM Thinkpad, since she's going back to school. I got her a Dell XPS M1330 with Intel C2D T5550 (1.83GHz, 667Mhz, 2M L2 Cache) and 160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive. It's cute and light so she can carry it around (and not be intimidated by these kids and all their new-fangled gizmos). And it seemed a solid performer so far but I was surprised today when she tried to back up one of her nephews DVDs using CloneDVD-the movie was The Incredibles, and it took 44 minutes! Anyone who uses this program would know it's probably the fastest of its kind out there, not for quality-seekers but for those who just want to make safety backups fast. So 44 minutes?

This made me curious, so I tried to backup the same DVD on my previous desktop, which I still keep for work and other miscellany. It's a P4, 3.2GHz, 120GB Sata 7200 RPM. I used the same version of CloneDVD and the backup only took 21 minutes. WTH?

I thought the Core 2 Duo T5550 was a better processor than an aging P4 3.2GHz. My hard drive is also 7200 RPM, also SATA. It's running a dedicated video card, GeForce7900 256, unlike my wife's laptop which is running integrated video (I asked her if she wanted something stronger for games but she's a loyal X-box junkie) but the video card shouldn't affect how long it takes to backup a DVD, should it?

Maybe there's another problem I need to look into...or is this simply the best that this processor can do?
Any info would be greatly appreciated -- thanks in advance!

 

[Capitalizt]

The processor is fast enough..Problem is you have a Dell and most Dell's come loaded with crapware that wastes cpu cycles and ram. Make sure you disable all the junk starting up every time you reboot and you'll see a nice improvement.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

A few things I can think of, and no the video card isn't going to affect the cloning process:

1. CloneDVDs may not be multi-threaded, in which case your P4 @ 3.2 GHz would be more similar in application speed to the T5550, although the T5550 should still be faster with only one core being utilized.
2. The program may not take advantage of the extra instruction sets in the Core 2, which would have the same effect as #1.
3. The laptop may not be recognizing when to increase the CPU speed, since they are designed to adjust the speed and power requirements of processors on the fly to handle various degrees of workloads. So the processor may be running much, much slower than 1.8 GHz. I think it can be running as slow as 800 MHz, which would definitely make it slower than a P4 3.2 especially in single-threaded environment.
4. The laptop hard drive is most likely 5400 RPMs, but this should not be the only reason for a 23 minute difference in DVD ripping since the desktop hard drive is not going to be twice as fast as the laptop's hard drive.
5. There's a lot of programs or processes hogging CPU resources, like Capitalizt said.

Open up the task manager and monitor CPU usage when you clone and when it's idling.

 

[boomhower]

The problem is the dvd drive. The optical drive in the notebook is likely much slower than in your desktop. The laptop likely tops out at 8x and your desktop much higher than that. Take that for both the rip and burn process and that would be about right. CloneDVD doesn't need a bunch pf power run run. My system doesn't do most movies much faster than you P4 system, it is limited by the speed it can rip and burn.

 

[DSF]

Dell puts crap on their computers a lot of the time, but I think the effect it has on system performance is often overrated. Boomhower's explanation makes more sense.

If you check your CPU usage during the process and it's not 100%, the bottleneck is definitely somewhere else, whether it's DVD drive or hard drive or whatever.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, my laptops dvd drive is much slower than my desktop as well.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: boomhower
The problem is the dvd drive. The optical drive in the notebook is likely much slower than in your desktop. The laptop likely tops out at 8x and your desktop much higher than that. Take that for both the rip and burn process and that would be about right. CloneDVD doesn't need a bunch pf power run run. My system doesn't do most movies much faster than you P4 system, it is limited by the speed it can rip and burn.

This is most likely the problem. Cloning a DVD (expecially if all you are doing is copying the dvd straight over) is really only limited by the burner speed. Processing speed has very little to do with it as even an old P2 could decrypt DVDS at a reasonable rate.

Now, if you where transcoding, then I would say you have a problem

 

[jiffylube1024]

Laptop DVD drives are much MUCH slower than desktop ones by and large. That's the problem. Try ripping it to both PC's and then after they are ripped try running DVD shrink to compress it to 4.3GB on both machines. The laptop will blow your old desktop away.

 

[jakobkraft]

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024
Laptop DVD drives are much MUCH slower than desktop ones by and large. That's the problem. Try ripping it to both PC's and then after they are ripped try running DVD shrink to compress it to 4.3GB on both machines. The laptop will blow your old desktop away.

Crap, you're right. I ripped it first to her laptop, then did the backup, which took 8 minutes!!

Then why the hell do these manufacturers cripple fast laptops with slow dvd drives, what's the logic there?

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: jakobkraft

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024
Laptop DVD drives are much MUCH slower than desktop ones by and large. That's the problem. Try ripping it to both PC's and then after they are ripped try running DVD shrink to compress it to 4.3GB on both machines. The laptop will blow your old desktop away.

Crap, you're right. I ripped it first to her laptop, then did the backup, which took 8 minutes!!

Then why the hell do these manufacturers cripple fast laptops with slow dvd drives, what's the logic there?

that would be battery life.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was under the impression that using the dvd drive on a laptop would kill your battery life regardless of speed.

 

[jakobkraft]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I was under the impression that using the dvd drive on a laptop would kill your battery life regardless of speed.

So was I...which is why the whole speed thing doesn't make sense to me...

 

[MrStryker]

Usually the theory is the faster the RPM is, the more power it takes to spin that, and that's what hurts the battery life. So some things for laptops are gimped...

 

[cmv]

Sometimes there is an option to disable "quiet mode" on a laptop CD/DVD. That should increase speed too. But really, it's a laptop. Battery performance and other factors are as important or more important than raw CPU and IO speed.