Determining PC hardware bottlenecks

[Paul Anderegg]

I have an Intel 946GZIS Motherboard with E6300 2MBL2 cache, 2GB 667MHz RAM, and a SATAII 16MB HDD and 7600GT PCI-E video card. I just upgraded the RAM to 2GB from 1GB after the price fell below $100. I would similarly like to upgrade the CPU when prices get low enough, but I would like to make sure I upgrade efficiently, taking into account any bottlenecks my MB may contain.

The subject of bottlenecks has become an issue to me, because I have major slowdowns on my PC, when it is only at 50% RAM and 15% CPU usage. I am unsure if my Intel 946GZIS MB has a 800 or 1066MHz FSB....the literature simply states I can install a 800 or 1066 CPU. Is my 946 MB a major bottleneck on my system? Am I correct in assuming my low resource usage figures are indicative of a bottleneck situation?

Also, when I transfer a file from my C drive SATA2, from or to my D drive a PATA, the fastest transfer speeds I ever see are 30MB/s. Would running dual SATA drives X4 my transfer capacity within my PC drive to drive? And what would be the highest rated current or upcomming Intel CPU that would best work with my 946 MB and 667MHz PC5300 RAM? Obviously a higher clock speed would be beneficial, but I dont want to be driving a Formula 1 car thats got only 1st gear, if that analogy works. If my CPU usage is low, does this mean the L2 cache is not a issue? If the CPU usage is 15% am I correct in beleiveing a faster CPU wouldn't help, because the little data being cruched is simply not leaving the CPU fast enough to the rest of the system??

Any help appreciated, I am on a very tight budget, and my "plan" dictates any upgrades I do should not cost more than if I had chosen them at the time of PC purchase......I like to be able to have a second PC from free parts after upgrading, hehe, my CPU was $200 or so new

Oh yeah, I mostly use the system with MCA to record and watch HDTV simultaneously, while running P2P app 24/7, works 100% perfect, can even watch 2 video players at once while recording HD.........

 

[Roguestar]

Sounds like you're worrying too much about the technical bottlenecks on an already good system, to be honest. Your CPU is fine (L2 cache is going to have no effect on HD to HD file transfers...), your RAM is fine, your drives are fine. If it really bothers you, you could get a new motherboard - get a cheap 965P chipset one, or another SATA drive. Get a Seagate 7200.10 or Western Digital KS/YS Caviar 16.

 

[aatf510]

The best you can do to bring up HD to HD transfer is probably upgrading your harddrive to a faster SATA2 Harddrive (a 150GB raptor, 1TB Hitachi for example). Then you might be able to bring your transfer speed from 30MB/s to 45MB/s.

 

[imported_shader]

the bottleneck in current pc's will always be the HDD. access & transfer time in ram is in nanoseconds (or faster) and access & transfer time for HDD are in milliseconds, nothing currently can be done about that. based on your usage, it seems like the majority of applications would be reading/writing to the HDD, so this is where you would recognize lag/bottleneck (coupled with paging, if you have several apps open at once). a faster processor would not help, more l2 cache would not help, faster ram would not be noticeable, more ram might alleviate any paging problems (probably not very noticable either). faster HDD (like was mentioned above) would help and would probably be very noticeable (at a hefty price tho). also IIRC transfer across bus for pata drives is much slower than sata (could be wrong here) so having all sata drives might help too.

 

[Paul Anderegg]

I have added my second harddrive SPECIFICALLY to solve te hard drive problems associated with extreme HD access. Running a P2P program full time, as well as the reading/writing of HDTV, was severely taxing my WD Caviar 250GB. I have set up my system so that different applications use different hard drives, so that they are not competing for recources. I dont think my HD is my problem for slow app launching and such, only because I wold assume Vista would be prefetching or whatnot enough to not cause a huge lag.

Moving in the next year or so to a faster 4MB L2 chip, what performance differences would I notice given the rest of my systems specs. When I go to start control panel menu "list", it takes about 1.5 seconds for the tiny icons to draw them selves...thats after a 1-2 second delay for the pull down list to even try to display...what would that be indicative of? My CPU goes to 50% during said action.

And regarding HD transfer rates, my IDE one says 100MB/s, my SATA2 says 3.0Gb/s (385MB/s or so).......is this same drive to same drive, or whats that all about how is it rated for what?

 

[imported_shader]

based on your usage, paging is probably causing the most noticeable lag. you said you have separate hdd's setup to handle different apps, are they also separate from the hdd housing the OS?

also for the HDTV, i imaging you have some adapter card which takes input signal, passes this info to the processor/ram, gets encoded/decoded, then either displayed or written to hdd - this process probably consumes a ton of ram (causing any other apps to page in/out)

and on top of that you also have a p2p app running, probably uploading and downloading. pretty much the same process is happening, recieve data/read from hdd, cpu/ram create/unpack tcp/ip packets, send/write to hdd - uses enough ram to cause paging to happen quite frequently.

getting a faster processor with more cache will help on multimedia encoding/decoding (might not be noticeable tho). faster hdd's and/or hdd's with larger cache/buffers should always make a noticeable difference. i see from your post that your sata drive has 16mb buffer, which is very good.

the thing with the menu list taking a few seconds is probably because of paging too. i'm not sure how vista handles it, but it probably doesn't keep that information in memory, so it has to get it from disk, if other applications are using the same disk, it will have to wait, if there is no room in ram, it will have to page out other programs to make room, then page those other programs back in when it is their turn to run.

i'm assuming your goal here is not to experience any (or minimize) any "lag" you notice when using your computer, correct?

one option (possibly not available to you) run the HDTV encoding/decoding on another computer, i mention this because you said you were probably planning to upgrade soon and i assume from this you might have extra parts/money for another computer - this would most likely alleviate any paging on your computer

another option, run everything in separate hdds (you might be doing this already). that is, have the os+pagefile on one hdd, p2p on another, HDTV on yet another. a raptor for the os+page, and 2 sataII's would probably make a noticeable difference

one way to test/confirm my ideas that the problem is the constant paging is to reboot your system, and dont' run anything, then click on the menu, does it still take a few seconds? (it shouldn't), reboot run the p2p for a while, then click on the menu, (still shouldn't take very long)

 

[cuti7399]

what can i do with pagefile to make it faster?

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: cuti7399
what can i do with pagefile to make it faster?

Not much. Putting it on a seperate physical disk, or even better, a separate ide channel will help some, but won't be noticeable I don't think. The best thing you can do if you're using the pagefile a lot is add more ram.

 

[Paul Anderegg]

I have my OS, HDTV, and TEMP folder for my P2P on the system drive, which is a fast SATA2 16MB, and I have my P2P storage files on my second Maxtor 200GB 8MB IDE drive. Additionally, I have my P2P cache at MAX of 1.5MB, in order to take the stress off the disk drives. I almost never exceed 60% RAM usage, even with MCE HDTV rec play same time at 200MB RAM usage. The RAM speed and my bus speeds are where I think I have my bottleneck........but I have no real time graph like I have for CPU and RAM to monitor them......perhaps someone can recomend a testing diagnostic app to try?

Is a 800MHz FSB and 667MHz RAM speed considered a bottleneck?

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: Paul Anderegg
I have my OS, HDTV, and TEMP folder for my P2P on the system drive, which is a fast SATA2 16MB, and I have my P2P storage files on my second Maxtor 200GB 8MB IDE drive. Additionally, I have my P2P cache at MAX of 1.5MB, in order to take the stress off the disk drives. I almost never exceed 60% RAM usage, even with MCE HDTV rec play same time at 200MB RAM usage. The RAM speed and my bus speeds are where I think I have my bottleneck........but I have no real time graph like I have for CPU and RAM to monitor them......perhaps someone can recomend a testing diagnostic app to try?

Is a 800MHz FSB and 667MHz RAM speed considered a bottleneck?

what CPU? and no.

 

[betasub]

Originally posted by: Paul Anderegg
And regarding HD transfer rates, my IDE one says 100MB/s, my SATA2 says 3.0Gb/s (385MB/s or so).......is this same drive to same drive, or whats that all about how is it rated for what?

These are theoretical interface limits. Current harddrive technology is nowhere near these limits for sustained transfer (see StorageReview.com for sustained and burst transfer rates)..

 

[Blain]

Before you spend $$ on hardware, try tweaking your OS to get maximum performance out of it.
It's FREE! :laugh:

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: Paul Anderegg
Is a 800MHz FSB and 667MHz RAM speed considered a bottleneck?

Let me guess, E4300 and DDR2-667? If so, the answer is no, not at all. You're not even using all of the memory bandwidth that RAM can deliver.

 

[oynaz]

@ OP

If I were you, I would concentrate on optimizing your software. Your hardware seems fine, but you might have some malware acting up.