Dual Processor Specs ?

I currently Run
2 1 GHz P3's
Crucial 256MB ECC Registered
2 200 GB WD's In Striped Raid
2 80 GB WD's In Striped Raid
And a 60GB WD.
A MSI Via Pro266TD Master-LR Board

I am having performance problems. I run Gotcha for a security Surveillance camera, and it records when it detects motion and saves to any codec in .avi format. I've used 3ivx to compress video, I've used also uncompressed frames even. Well, I let this run over night and I use DVD2Divx to rip and do a intial Encoding of a movie(In 3ivx) and wave file(I've tried coping the vob's to one of my drives first instead of just from the disk/ showed minor increase (at about 10-13fps)). Well If they both run and Gotcha start's recording they take fun processing power of both processors; And when DVD2Divx is finished it has audio that is distorted in some places which causes their to become time delays. (P.S. I have set affinity for gotcha)

My Idea's:

1. Im looking at getting another stick of crucial to possibly help. But memory doesn't look like a problem.

2.Switch out memory and Get 512MB crucial ECC non-registered/non-Parity. Dont know if that would provide much of a power boost.

3. Possibly another motherboard? Any Suggestions as for another Dual p3 mobo with DDR?

4. Or New motherboard Processor memory setup. I would want Dual Processors and DDR of course. But would like the Processor's/Motherboard setup to cost around 200-300 if possible.

5. Am I asking one machine to do too much?


Thanks for any help

 

Hiya,

Four things come to mind:

1 - The onboard Promise Raid controller: have you got the correct/latest drivers? (the integrated Promise controllers had a lot of problems with earlier drivers, as the integrated chips were not full function chips).

2 - Where is your swap file located? and how big? and is it set to auto-grow? (only 256 ram, you will be using the swapfile a lot, with both programs running, especially the video capture which will be VERY greedy on memory & I/O)

3 - What sound card are you using? Creative Labs soundcards are known to have issues with Dual Processor systems.

4 - Have you run perfmon to have a look at what is really happening?

Hope this helps...

 

Never seen Gotcha, but if it can't use multiple threads then Dual CPU probably won't make it run faster, it will just let you do other things on the PC whilst that is running.

Getting more RAM will always help, especially when you are dealing with big files, the less paging to the Hard Disk the better, ECC will make no difference, so unless you motherboard has to have that just get standard, you could try 2 sticks of 512Mb (I assume you have an NT O/S? XP or 2000). Incidentally P3's are SDRAM as far as I remember, not sure if they ever went to DDR, even early P4 boards are SDRAM and RIMM.

Only know one person that had a Dual P3 and he said it was crap, he got rid of it and bought an XP3200 AMD system and said it was way faster?

I like AMD for the price they are very fast, but Intel have more Bandwidth on the Memory Bus, best bet is to get a 2.8Ghz P4 - Hyperthreading and 800Mhz Front Side Bus - fast and cheap. Get a Canterwood Motherboard and two matching sticks of PC3200 RAM - get two 512Mb if possible, it should run fine with two 256Mb though. That will be a faster system than a Dual P3.

I have no idea how quick Dual P3 is, but SDRAM on a P4 has a Bandwidth of about 500Mb/s I assume this is more than Dual P3. P4 with a single stick of DDRAM is about 1.4Gb/s and P4 (as above) with, DualDDRAM is gonna be about 2.5Gb/s.

Hope that helps more than it confused : )
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]I don't know what I am doing.[/small]

 

Well what I do is set the affinity of one application to one processor and the other, the other processor. As far as ram I was defiantly thinking of going higher. And my memory which is ECC+Parity/Registered is what I am concerned about. Parity ram basicly waits for the rest or the modules to catch up. I am just concerned how much of a benifit it will be without it.

Next The DDR, P3's do use DDR As well as RAMBus. I use DDR in this machine and I have a Dual processor Kayak XU800(minus one processor(The Only Machine that I have and ever will buy pre-made)) that runs RamBus.

I do understand that the newer setups will be faster for divx encoding but I need to be able to use multiple apps that Require a lot of juice.

P.S. I just Did A Re-install of 2K and did some tuning in Gotcha And Gain Quite a bit of power back but still in the need of more

 

Didn't know P3 ever used DDR, you learn something everyday, I never got to see one.

As far as Parity RAM goes I think it is for Error Correction, essentially a parity bit is attached to the binary code, and this is checked before the data is sent, something along those lines, it shouldn't really effect speed. It's the actual bandwidth of the old P3 chipsets that will be causing your bottlenecks, adding more RAM will help but I doubt it will give you much more speed. Although Win2000 ideally will run best on 512Mb and above.

If you get a "Hyper Threading" enabled P4 it is the same as having two CPU's, NT will install in Dual CPU mode and you can set different apps to use each one, but it is on one CPU, it seems to work quite well.

Then you can take advantage of the much wider Bandwidth that P4 offers over P3, which will be substantial, on a Dual DDR motherboard it will be 3 or four times more, and you will benefit from the much cheaper cost of standard DDRAM.
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]I don't know what I am doing.[/small]