What is my bottleneck?

[son1]

I have a dual core system..details in sig, and I'm wondering if this is the kind of performance I get from going dual core...

I play WoW alot and a lot of the time I tab out and read some forums/websites download stuff, listen to music via itunes or winamp.
Most of the time I have winamp playing music, atitools, ITE guardian, azureous downloading torrents, and WoW running. I find that when I tab out and try to open IE to surf, it takes around 10secs for IE to even open.
Today, I had the above running and wanted to find out if dual core is truly what they say it is, I had just finished a 2gb download from Azureous, so I decided to open the folder and decompress the rar file. It took 20secs for the folder to even open, and then I started de-raring via 7-Zip. I tabbed back into WoW and everything was unbelievably choppy, and needless to say I was pretty disappointed at my dual core.

What else could be my bottleneck? I have about $200 to spend and I was thinking of either getting a 2gb ram kit, or a 150gb raptor. Any suggestions?

 

[berkut7]

More likely than not you need more ram..

 

[dug777]

doesn't 7-zip use both cores? Set it to one core and WoW should be fine in that instance...possibly

 

[addinator]

i would certainly suggest getting a 2 gig ram kit, or just adding two more 512 sticks to what you have. especially with newer games, i find that 2 gigs is a necessity to have, and besides, it never hurts to have too much ram.

 

[TrevorRC]

RAM, and remember to set affinity

 

[Markbnj]

Yeah, ram or hard disk I would say. Regardless of how much CPU time is available, if the system has to swap a bunch of stuff to disk to make room then its going to take a few seconds. With my dually and 2 gigs I can alt-tab out of BF2 and run just about anything with no delays.

 

[Bobthelost]

RAM, WoW eats up around 700mb if it gets the chance (i think), with all the other junk you keep running it's going to be running out.

To confirm this check your peak commit charge in the task manager, bet you my postcount that it is larger than 1GB after you try that.

 

[Duvie]

In this case Ram and HDD....I though everyone already said to get mre then 1gb if you play games like WOW because of the maps they load...Plus Winxp will suck up 200+MB out of the gate...launch those other apps and you have nothing left...

 

[AkumaX]

hdd

put WoW on one hdd, unzip stuff on another hdd

make sure they're on separate channels

but don't expect you to be rar-ing and unzipping stuff on the same hdd

edit: just to let you know, i do the exact (or similar) things you do (WoW, Winamp, Azureus), + dvd shrink and nero (which takes up a whooping 700mb!). it is still very seamless, even though my pagefile spikes up to 4gb. i will get 2gb so i can turn off the page file, but i don't expect it to make a big difference. what made a difference was using channels SATA0, SATA2, Primary Master, and Secondary Master to represent each one of the hdds/dvdrw that i have

 

[andrewbabcock]

Get another gig of ram and it should be fine.

 

[potato28]

Originally posted by: AkumaX
hdd

put WoW on one hdd, unzip stuff on another hdd

make sure they're on separate channels

but don't expect you to be rar-ing and unzipping stuff on the same hdd

Also RAM with that. 1 gig wont be enough for wat your doin.

 

[Bad Dude]

It's most certainly the Hard drive, it's always the hard drive when you try to run dual core. You will find that the system will always gets bog down by hard drive responses. The next one in line would be the RAM if running games. So multitasking improvements are minimal over single core b/c of the hard drive limitation.

 

[Lord Banshee]

I find that in my system my Harddrive is the bottle neck too?

So is there anything like DualCores for Hard-Drives, i though Raid-0 but i don't think it will become more responsive with that, i could be wrong.

Maybe Raptor with NCQ??

Anyone know?

 

[Kakumba]

Get a 74 gig raptor (the 150 would be better, but it aint cheap), use that as your boot drive and store stuff that you really want high perforance from, and use the other for storing all your data/ apps that dont need such a fast HDD. and also get more RAM, it certainly cant hurt. a good 2 gig kit isnt too expensive, and by getting those 2 things, it will be like a whole new computer...

 

[Mogadon]

I concur, another HDD, the raptor is overkill if your budget is limited. Apps, games and OS on the faster driver, storage and stuff on the other.

That'll sort you out and then pick up a 2GB kit of RAM, again if you're budget is limited value RAM is fine.