Where is the dual core increase in performance?

I need to talk this over with some one so i'll be explaining the whole
situation.

I feel that today CPU's are far more powerfull that an average person
could exploit and i had a AMD64 2200MHz Venice on a Asus A8N-E 754 with
2GB RAM + nForce 6200 that i was convinced i'd never change. Part of
this conviction was due to my believe that the benefit of dual core
processors is that each core could only proces a different thread. I
use my computer primary to encode or play video, so i though when the
application encodes video only one core would hadle the task and the
other core would be more or less idle, updateing the clock or maybe
play music...

Eager to test the system how it would handle HD video a bumped into a
file encoded with h264 at average 8500+ kbps and resolution of
1920x1080. To my surprise the system could not keep up with this video
and would show delay of maximum 800ms when played at 100% CPU load.

Smileing to myself i went to my friend who has a E2200 on a 945 board
to see what happens and i was surpriced to see that it could play the
video without delay, but my jaw droped when i saw the equal core load
at about 65% each. I was expecting something like 90% on 1st core and
10% on the other core which in my opinion would waste time on the
firewall and antivirus.

In a second i have switched belieive to the other extreme side that
dual core processors are able to hack one single thread and share
the load and somehow that they are made that way, by some inner logic
out of anything that i can understand, that even in ms-dos they would
performe the same way. In that same second i have decided that is time
to sell my PC and buy a new dual core PC and not to make funny on
technology any more. Thought i give it another try this time
overclocking the system to 20%, even that i knew this may play the
video but it will fail in near future when i bump into a 9500+ kpbs
h264 file.

I had a full copper cooler and had overclocked the system beffore a
couple of times with minor increase of the CPU temperature. By my
calculations the video would play smooth and the CPU would show 90-95%
load. Instead again it was delayed, this time by max 300ms, which made
me to belieive that the poor throughoutput od the N6200 was to blame,
but the decision was made and it was made in panic to buy a new system.

I went to some PC dealer who gave me the offer of exchangeing this:
Asus A8N-E, AMD64 Venice@2200MHz, Susurro copper coller, Hitachi 80GB
133PATA, nForce 6200, 400W power suplly and 2x 1GB Buffalo DDR400
modules, for this: MSI P43 NEO, E5300@2600, noname coller, Maxtor 500GB
SATA, 500W power supply and 1x 2GB Transcend DDR2/800 RAM; and had to
pay him 100euro for the exchange as i did. I had me a MX200 64MB PCI
card so i did have to pay for a new PCI-E card.

Instaled XP SP2 and when i play the video i get 100% load on one core
and the other is about 10%.
The video plays almost without delay, that almost due to poor GFX card.
Where is the equal core load that my friend had??

I start another player and play a second (different) video at the same
time and the other CPU core does not show an increase in load, but the
1st core is @100% load and this time it delays the inactive video
player window by mutch. Why the second core does not kick in??

Finaly i start the anti-virus and the other core hits 30% load, while
the 1st core is at 100% load playing the video. Whait a minute now,
this was what i expected to seen in the first place when i was thinking
"who needs a dual core procesor?"

Next,i start to do my work. Run VirtualDumMod and encode the video from
h264 to xvix at full resolution. This i have done before with my old
system and now i get almost the same frame rate.
I check the CPU load and i get a flat 50%. Both cores, with variations
of 10% run at the same load. Why they don't hit 100% each and give me a
double of frames rate per second conversation?

I change the xvid codec that i always use with the newest version, do
the encoding and find out that it is better by 10-15%. Now the dual
core hits 65-70% CPU load. How do i sqeze for more?

I feel a fool and i am sad. The way i see it, my older system was a
better quality one, although it was somewhat slower, but not more that
20% from what i see.

On this MSI P43 board i cannot install anything but XP sp2 whereas on
the old i was running win2000 sp4, win98se and FreeBSD completly with
everything working. Even win2000 cannot start on this system, because
the installation cd sees the partitions on this new HDD as bad or
unformated.

Does anyone know if there is a problem with this STM3500418AS kind of
500MB Maxtor HDD and should it be a wiser solution for me to exchange
it with a WD3200AAKS 320MB Western Digital Drive they have, since i
won't be using even 15% of that 500MB drive??

Thanks.

 

Screenshots of you capping one core and only hitting the second for 10%?

What video program are you uisng?

Is it multi threaded, and is it multi core aware?

 

Well, first of all, you have way too many questions here. Anyways, I had the N6200TC card running on a s939 Venice 3.0GHz w/1GB RAM. It ran videos just fine but don't ask the machine to convert videos or another intensive task as this would even kill normal browsing or viewing to the point that the machine was basically useless until the other task finished on the CPU.

I then saw an s939 X2 Athlon 3800+ for a great price and my A8N-E mobo supported it, only needing a chipset and BIOS update. It was like night and day for me! Do not expect double the performance of a single core but %60 is reasonable.

I hope the story helped you a bit.

 

Here are the files.

1280a.jpg and DUBa.jpg show the video playback with ffdshow-rev878_20070204_xxl.exe and encoding with XviD-1.1.3-28062007.exe

1280b.jpg and DUBb.jpg with ffdshow-rev3124_20091103_clsid_icl10.exe and XviD-1.2.2-07062009.exe, respectively.

There is a noticable improvement, especialy in the core load of the playback.
Why is the CPU occupancy max at 70% when encoding?
The system is doing nothing else. That 6-7 FPS while encoding is what i used to get on the AMD64 Venice.

I'm now 99% certain that an AGP nForce 7600GT would have nullified the problem of video playback, but what is done is done...

Any sugestions on the HDD? I've seen too many Matrox drives crash, should i try the Western Digital or leave it this way?

 

I really doubt it man as I also put in an eVGA 7600GT to replace my ASUS N6200TC and there was absolutely no difference in video playback performance! You'll have to look elsewhere sir.

As to HDD's, any 7200 RPM PATA or SATA drive will suffice unless they are defective. Run Matrox's diagnostics on the drive in question and if they don't have one then run WD's Lifeguard.