Why is my Sempron laptop so slow?

[ShawnD1]

Over the past year I've purchased 2 laptops. One has a Sempron 3400+ CPU with garbage integrated ATI graphics. The other is a Celeron 520 (1.6ghz) with garbage integrated Intel graphics. Both have 1gb ram.
Basically they're the cheapest laptops sold in stores.

Sandra says they should be roughly the same speed for both integer and floating point operations, but they're clearly not. The Celeron laptop can play a certain AVI video with BSPlayer and use about 10% cpu power to do it. To play that same video on the Sempron takes 40% CPU. What the hell? The Sempron laptop has that same problem with Mozilla. Looking at a youtube video takes upwards of 40% CPU power from the Sempron, while it only takes maybe 10% on the Celeron.

Is my laptop broken or something? This doesn't seem right at all since I also have an Athlon 2200+ and it takes the same 10-20% range as the Celeron, and that's a computer that I bought literally 6 years ago. For reference, my C2D 6600 plays that file using 1%.

 

[jaqie]

It has to do with the video card not doing something the flash player wants, so the OS reverts to partial (or total) software rendering, which eats up CPU cycles. Until recently, my main laptop was a toshiba TE2000, P3M 1Ghz with a Trident Cyberblade XP AI1 video card. Now, a P3M 1Ghz may not sound like much, but if the video card paired with it was capable of doing in hardware what things asked, it wasn't even heavily loaded with things... but the trident was not, so I could barely play flash video and even then it was losing about half the frames and eating 100% of the CPU.

In a nutshell: the problem is in the video card and flash, they don't play nice together.

 

[0roo0roo]

flash or whatever web videos use is all cpu isn't it? i know it uses a lot more cpu than a video of its size should. esp if enlarged. i don't think video card makes much of a difference, it uses a chunk regardless of whether i've used igp or decent video cards.

 

[jaqie]

it's not whether it's integrated or addin, it's the 2D acceleration it offers, and the level of such. Older cards don't offer a lot of 2D features that new apps require (and the 2D acceleration features of any card are just plain not advertised)

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: jaqie
it's not whether it's integrated or addin, it's the 2D acceleration it offers, and the level of such. Older cards don't offer a lot of 2D features that new apps require (and the 2D acceleration features of any card are just plain not advertised)

No this has nothing to do with it, because youtube videos are not hardware accelerated. Also, 2d acceleration is not what is used in video acceleration, otherwise any graphics card capable of accelerating 2d operations (basically any video card in existence) would be capable of accelerating video. This is not the case.

The OP's sempron is using 40% because of load throttling. Mobile Celerons like the one in your laptop are locked multiplier Pentium-Ms and thus run at full speed all the time. Semprons, the low end-mobile-Celeron-equivalent, do NOT have a locked multiplier. So, when your laptop does not need the full speed, it sets the multiplier to 4 on the Sempron, which will give your CPU an effective speed of 800Mhz (assuming your Sempron 3400+'s bus is 200Mhz, which going by the model number, I believe it is, but I could be wrong).

I've noticed this on my Sempron laptop as well. Just use a program like Rightmark to throttle the CPU yourself, and set it to full speed. Then try watching that video again and see what % of your CPU it is using.

 

[jaqie]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
youtube videos are not hardware accelerated. Also, 2d acceleration is not what is used in video acceleration

You need a bit of a course in reality. Here you go:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fl...o_flash_player_05.html
Read it.

 

[0roo0roo]

idunno, that checkbox has been there for years now.
flash always took more cpu than you'd think. so its not accelerating that much. or is inefficient.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
idunno, that checkbox has been there for years now.
flash always took more cpu than you'd think. so its not accelerating that much. or is inefficient.

It's inefficient. If it were actually hardware accelerated as jaqie and adobe claim, a fullscreen flash wouldn't be skipping frames. Key here is that youtube doesn't use h.264 by default. Also, flash games are not hardware accelerated; as evidenced by more frame droppings and a cool as in idle GPU.

In short, jaqie is a noobie (joined 4/06/2008).

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Over the past year I've purchased 2 laptops. One has a Sempron 3400+ CPU with garbage integrated ATI graphics.

HP Compaq 6515b? I recently worked on one of these with the Mobile Sempron + ATI X1250 (RS690M) and it is a dog, even after upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB (running XP Professional no less). Could be the ATI display drivers. I had to use the HP drivers from November 2007 because I couldn't get any newer ATI drivers to install. I didn't want to use any modded driver sets like Omega.

The 6515b is available with optional Turion X2. The owner wants me to upgrade it when he gets some extra cash.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Over the past year I've purchased 2 laptops. One has a Sempron 3400+ CPU with garbage integrated ATI graphics.

HP Compaq 6515b? I recently worked on one of these with the Mobile Sempron + ATI X1250 (RS690M) and it is a dog, even after upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB (running XP Professional no less). Could be the ATI display drivers. I had to use the HP drivers from November 2007 because I couldn't get any newer ATI drivers to install. I didn't want to use any modded driver sets like Omega.

The 6515b is available with optional Turion X2. The owner wants me to upgrade it when he gets some extra cash.

You know I recently wiped my laptop of XP (running sempron, with 1gb of ram) because it was running insanely slow too; and put Ubuntu 8 on it.
I had to reinstall XP for a time to flash the bios, and I noticed it was lickety split fast again, right after the install. Soon as I installed all the updates, it slowed waaaaaay up, even though the windows partition I created was on the outside most part of the drive.
Wonder if your client is experiencing what I experienced.
Supposedly SP3 has some performance enhancements, might want to wait until it comes out to see if anything improves (or go ahead and upgrade now so you can charge him heh).

 

[0roo0roo]

old drive? i know the way to spiffy up old laptops is to buy a new harddrive for it.
old drive might have bad areas. mostly its slow rpm+low density platters=bog slow.

 

[Roguestar]

Flash has only been hardware accelerated for the CS releases IIRC, has it not? So anything older will still be an older version of ActionScript and still use only CPU, right?

 

[jaqie]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
In short, jaqie is a noobie (joined 4/06/2008).

Excuse me, are you really so ignorant (look up the definition in a dictionary, it is not an insult) as to think that just because I just joined this particular corner of the net that I was born yesterday into the computer world? I'm sorry, but that's just not the case.

Yes, it uses 2D acceleration, and yes, as I have shown, it does use hardware acceleration for video. The proof is everywhere, you are just ignoring it and instead of disproving me you are attacking me personally...which is against the rules of this forum. I showed proof it does, if you wish to try, show proof it does not.

Yes, flash is terribly inefficient, but yes, it has hardware acceleration.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: jaqie

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
In short, jaqie is a noobie (joined 4/06/2008).

Excuse me, are you really so ignorant (look up the definition in a dictionary, it is not an insult) as to think that just because I just joined this particular corner of the net that I was born yesterday into the computer world? I'm sorry, but that's just not the case.

ok

Yes, it uses 2D acceleration, and yes, as I have shown, it does use hardware acceleration for video. The proof is everywhere, you are just ignoring it and instead of disproving me you are attacking me personally...which is against the rules of this forum. I showed proof it does, if you wish to try, show proof it does not.

no

Yes, flash is terribly inefficient, but yes, it has hardware acceleration.

no

 

[jaqie]

obviously you feel you can make unfounded statements and personal attacks here and have people think you are right. Sorry, this is not that kind of forum (thank goodness).