Where is my bottleneck?

[Claudius-07]

Hi folks. I wonder if I can pester you all for some advice. I currently have my Intel Quad 9550 running at 3.4 GHz. 8 GB or RAM, ATI 4890 video card.

Games are on an OCZ Vertex 120 GB drive. OS (win 7 64), on an OCZ Vertex turbo 30 GB. All other files, storage, movies, music on a WD Caviar Black 1 TB.

I play games on my main monitor, a Samsung 42" LCD TV, via HDMI. From my video card, my DVI goes to my 28" ViewSonic monitor 1920x1200 where I am decoding, playing music and or playing movies I have ripped from my library.

At times, while playing Crysis or WoW or whatever game I play, if I am playing a movie on the other monitor, full screen and maybe have a video conversion going on in the background... converting an ISO to H264.... the movie comes to a halt. The game keeps playing but everything else comes to a grinding halt.

Am I asking too much? In other words, playing a game, and watching a movie and then converting? I have stopped converting and it does not seem to make much difference. Is it a CPU thing, a RAM thing or what?

I figured that if I was playing my game from a dedicated SSD, had my OS on another dedicated SSD and had my "work" files and movies/music on another HD, that at least I could eliminate that from the equation.

Should I just build a second computer for the other stuff and just play games on my main?

 

[alyarb]

Should I just build a second computer for the other stuff and just play games on my main?

yes.

isolating your workloads on a per-disk basis usually works, but something like crysis is going to get the most cores at the highest priority. playing the movie and encoding the x264 will slow down comparatively. if you want to segregate work based on CPU, you can use virtual machines to isolate your cores or you can see if task manager will allow you to manually set the affinity for certain programs. if you want to keep doing all this on the same computer then you should look into gulftown or thuban. otherwise do an i5 build for gaming and make this your encoding machine.

 

[Claudius-07]

Is what I figured. Thanks! I will try assigning cores.. that might be something to consider. If not.. some reason to upgrade and build a second comp!!! weee.

 

[themisfit610]

I encode video, play WoW, and watch video all at the same time (and sometimes all on the same hard drive).

These are all low bandwidth operations.

Crysis is a different animal, I'm not sure if it can play nice with other apps in windowed mode.

If you're having issues doing all this with WoW, there is something else going on.

As long as your video encoding processes are set to "low" or lower, and your game / media player are on normal, you should be fine.

~MiSfit

 

[Spikesoldier]

well if you are slamming the system with a demanding game at 1080p, you bet the encode job on the other processes are going to slip from 30fps to 2fps encode because the clocks are going to the highest priority process(es) at the time.

getting a second system is good too, i think i have things almost the way i want to at home. second pc is a e6420@3.0 with 8gb ram and hd3870. i plan to get a quad for it and have it be my workhorse, but for now it is just the pc that the girl always uses.

i use the 30gb ocz agility alone on it and even with 64bit install of win7, it is still a good (by my standards) system. i even debated getting a pci-e 4x RAID controller for it and getting a six member RAID6 array going; shifting it into the dedicated home server role.

cliffs: nothing beats gaming while the crunching is going full speed behind you on the other system.

 

[tweakboy]

Your 4890 is bottlenecking your rig. Get a 5970 or 5870

I suggest you get a ATI card next as well. Or else youll run into this problem thousands of people have run into which is,, when you change vendors, nVidia or ATI ,, then you need a format or else performance is way poor and slower.

So to avoid format , get the 5870 but you can certainly go all the way with a 5970 I believe is the highest model, gl That is your bottleneck,,,its your video card your CPU is a asleep and can process and you can do a rendering while gaming just need another drive .... or else there will be thrashing.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Your 4890 is bottlenecking your rig. Get a 5970 or 5870

I suggest you get a ATI card next as well. Or else youll run into this problem thousands of people have run into which is,, when you change vendors, nVidia or ATI ,, then you need a format or else performance is way poor and slower.

So to avoid format , get the 5870 but you can certainly go all the way with a 5970 I believe is the highest model, gl That is your bottleneck,,,its your video card your CPU is a asleep and can process and you can do a rendering while gaming just need another drive .... or else there will be thrashing.

Maybe you should take a break and sit the next couple of plays out.

 

[Arkaign]

Maybe you should take a break and sit the next couple of plays out.

Hah, yeah TB is a decent guy, but I think for this particular post he either forgot his brain in his desk drawer or is living up to his screen name and methed the hell out. That post up there made less sense than a Lady Gaga video.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Hah, yeah TB is a decent guy, but I think for this particular post he either forgot his brain in his desk drawer or is living up to his screen name and methed the hell out. That post up there made less sense than a Lady Gaga video.

rofl at lady gaga. I think TB means well, but I would hate to see a relatively new member be mislead by opinions stated as fact.

 

[WildW]

I've noticed media playing software can make a difference when trying to game and watch stuff at the same time. I've been watching movies while playing Civ4 lately, and found that Windows Media Player was all choppy, but playing in another program (e.g. DivX Player) was fine.

 

[Claudius-07]

Noted! Tried using DivX Player and it's as smooth as silk, or at least has been now for a while -- thanks! Thus, I know have to contend with a possibility of it being codec related (or I should say, messed up codecs), and software being used. I might actually try and use PowerDVD instead of Windows Media Player. Gona see if that makes a difference.