The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

The only lag on my laptop (AMD-APU) is HDD based. Yes, the CPU is slow, but it's responsive. The graphics are more than adequate enough to handle Blu-ray playback Slap a Solid state drive in it, and I can be happy for a while. Lest I need to video encode :S

 

Maybe not for you which is where the issue becomes. LOL

 

Nor for anyone else I've ever spoken to in the last 10 years apart from you I'm afraid. You can open/close programs, watch the frame rate of a window-rendered animation, study opening times of applications, audio/video playback, you name it, you can watch the clock/voltage changes with something like Speedfan or even I think CPUZ might do it, but there really is no impact on the user at all.

As it's always been, you'll be seeing disk I/O related issues, and mistaking them for a CPU issue. Bear in mind of course if these are branded laptops, they'll come with all sorts of crapware that will introduce performance quirks.

 

Yup, sounds about right. The CPU often has to wait on HDD, Ram, Etc. And should the CPU have to wait, you might see the voltage drop, and take it as faulty energy saving techniques.

 

Nope wrong....

 

Care to explain?

 

Certainly. It's not the hard drive because the same hard drive doesn't do the same thing in my quad AMD Acer. It can't be more simplistic than that unless your bias prevents you from seeing the truth.

 

Bias? I'm simply trying to understand where you're coming from.

 

Did I answer your question? It's the CPU if that isn't plain enough. When I turn off most of the power crap the lags are less but still there. Mobile processors both AMD and Intel are worst than desktop CPU's for shutting things down and less processor power and that's a fact to gain battery life. It surely is no stretch nor should it be hard to understand.

 

It is understandable, that a CPU is far less in a Laptop. However, CPU lag should not be so apparent, depending on what one is using it for. Browsing the web should be pretty seamless. But if a hard drive isn't up to par, there could be lag. I've found in my laptop, the hard drive is the weakest link. As is typically the case in pretty much any PC environment.

Now my Mothers PC (Pentium 4), it's quite obvious that the CPU is quite dated. But again, the hard drive is also pretty pathetic. And it's running up to date software. The system is quite outdated. I do find her hard drive lags quite a bit. It's a mere 80Gb 2Mb cache drive. Typical of the 2001-2003 era.

The only time I see CPU lag on my laptop is high flash based gaming. And the CPU itself doesn't handle Blu-ray playback so well. The integrated GPU does handle it though(Hardware acceleration).

I've never had a problem with power saving schemes. Maybe your CPU has a problem. That's certainly a believable factor. I don't read about faulty CPU's very often though.

 

Should's....

I happen to know what I'm talking and have been in PC's building, testing, and using for more years then you've been alive almost. I didn't just fall off the turnip tree and I've built massively more PC's than any of you, all put together!

So you can say it's never happened to you or anyone in the world you know but that doesn't change the fact whether you see them or not.

My CPU doesn't have a fault that isn't by design.

 

Steve... I'm not trying to impose my knowledge or opinions on you. I'm simply throwing my 2 cents out there

 

No problem, its not you as much as I expected some of this from Sam and he has been good but I'm flustered with the golf outing, 2 day tournament I'm going on Sunday at Madden's on Gull Lake.

I've had four major issues to deal with before leaving on the trip, one being my bad back, and another being that I'm still waiting on components to build my new Driver with since I put everyone else in front of myself, their clubs are done and I had to over night the club head I'm waiting for. It still isn't here and I have to leave for work soon which means that I won't build it until tonight and won't be able to hit it before the tourney. My old drive broke last week otherwise I'd just use it so I'm screwed and there is more but not need to get into that.

Please forgive me Kevin for being so pissy.

Sorry Stevo

 

And you don't think I have or that I wouldn't know if I had? Sorry DDP but wrong....

 

I'm not ashamed to admit, I've built very few But I'm pretty observant! And I like to think I'm a quick study. But, I'm slow at times :S

 

This triggered enough interest to get me asking around. I may not have your level of experience in the industry, but since I work in the industry I have contact with numerous people who do have equals of your experience, if not more, including one of the original helpdesk operators for ARPANET. None of them have experienced this Intel-specific phenomenon. Lag with laptops that are bogged down with software issues and slow mechanical disks are common, but none of them have ever seen a consistent issue affect Intel CPUs and not AMDs (and nor have they seen the issue with every Intel machine they deal with, or even a small part), and I will take their collective centuries of experience over your decades.

I'm genuinely not trying to be pedantic and irritating about this issue, but it really is difficult to take a viewpoint that refutes all benchmark testing (and even, benchmark testing itself as an entity) lying down, with no other notable individuals to corroborate it. One user, no matter how trustworthy, is very unlikely to shake the world's view on things. The same is true of me - if something I post goes against the norm, I don't expect (nor do I actually want) people to accept it without question.

Intel are far from god's gift as a CPU manufacturer, the quality of their CPU products is declining, they're spoofing engineering batches to reviewers with chips manufactured completely different to the retail examples, and they're forcing the overclocking industry out of existence bit by bit. Fact of the matter is though, to a consumer, their CPUs while expensive are fanstastically fast, fair value for money in many cases due to the performance, and more importantly, do not suffer the sorts of issues implied here. Whatever's said about Ivy Bridge, the tiny stock heatsink you get with the modern i5s and i7s is ample to cool my LAN PC's 3470 with ease, very quietly (even in games, below 20dB). That CPU at its stock speed of 3.20Ghz is a real performer - 95% of the equal of my original i5 750 clocked up to 4.1Ghz, which achieves the same performance at the same temperature as the Ivy Bridge 3470, but requires the 120mm Thermalright tower cooler with a far more powerful fan to do so. Both CPUs run rings around the Core 2 Quad Q9550 in my file server, which is well known for being on a par with the higher-end of the Phenom II X4 spectrum in the form of the 955BE. On a per-core basis, Piledriver has only gone some (but not all) of the way to recovering the per-core performance of the Phenom IIs, ,leaving the X4/X6 series the best the competition has offered.
Per-core, my file server's 5 year old CPU can still hang with AMD's best in up to 4 threads. The other two CPUs (one 3 years old and needing a big cooler, the other 9 months old and only using a stock heatsink) are a good 75% faster. When encoding video that makes a big difference.
I can run a merge encode on a 6 hour 1080p file (something I actually do fairly often), the Q9550 takes 6 1/2 hours to run it, the i5 3470 takes about 4 hours, and the 4.1Ghz i5 750 about 3h50, but the latter will heat up the room fairly well when doing it. Progress. Despite the 54% overclock on the 750 having been applied 24/7 for over 3 years, the system still runs smooth as silk, with no oddities in performance. The other two machines are every bit as stable, but you'd expect that running stock.

I may have had my fair share of bad luck over the years with hardware, but so far (he says, touching wood) Intel CPUs have been one of the few things I have been able to rely on with absolute faith. Don't get me wrong, I was fond of my Socket 939 4200+ CPU, never had any problems with that either, but until I experience things first hand, I'm never going to accept the theory that all Intel CPUs suffer this performance defect.

 

Good presentation Sam - good luck on the golf tourney Stevo.

If things seem to irritate you from time to time, Stevo, (like happens to all of us) I'll be happy to have Amazon drop-ship an $11 book I have sent out to about a dozen people, which I have been reading for several years, The Power of Now. (My name here is also my email username AT my website - and my website is my name with a dot com at the end.) Give me your mailing address and we'll see what you think - much calmer and more in control is what it's done for me, lol.

Kevin, 150 is really really bright - and Sam, how could you have scored low on factual memory - you're virtually a walking encyclopedia. But as you say that was quite a while ago. Barack Obama is around 130 I think I heard? He writes a great speech.

That magnetic motor thing you liked us to Omega, what the hell was making that thing spin? Anyway, spend your $500 - it probably won't make you a dime, but having fun is worth something, right?

ASSASSINS CREED III
Speaking about fast cpus - I have been trying out Assassins Creed III, and it appears that the game does not use my graphics cards at all, just the 9450.





One graphic card reports back at 0% usage, the other at 30%, but one 9450 core is running at 80-90%, the others at around 30%.

In the snow, in a snowstorm, I dropped to 5 fps!! So if anybody knows what I can do to increase fps - other than drop resolution - let me know.

Still in the snow, but out of the blizzard, it went back to about 20,





(normally it's above 30 which is ok) and 5 months later, (right after that) it is now summer and I'm running normal 30-35 fps.

Jeff, help! (By the way Jeff, the 12-gun salute was a nice touch to remember our invasion of France when we went over there to assist our Limey brothers. Like Sam. Hey I take it with the gf, you're not planning to put on a uniform any time soon - what's her name? Does she go shooting with you?)

Since it's a third=person stealth, you can actually still accomplish things, like shooting wolves, etc, in the snow, even with those low fps numbers. It was remarkable - it really felt like I was walking in deep snow - how the walking was so much slower and more laborious - they handle most animations pretty well.

Except for killing a wolf - come on - you have a sword. He puts his sword away and takes the wolf with his bare hands - what a crock. That's when I found the musket works pretty well.

But as I say, it's now summer, and I am an Indian kid, running around and jumping/climbing trees (it's the continuation of the Prince of Persian series I have read)





and I have to give it a lot of props, I was never an Indian before - and they're talking all Mohawk dialog - (I have subtitles on.)

(I don't know what that email reminder on the screen is - I think it's an in-game little device, you're supposed to be in a computer simulation of some sort, re-visiting history through one of your ancestors, but I don't know if I'll ever check my email, hahaha.)


The graphics are very nice, even with everything turned down to "normal" - not too much less than when I was trying it all at high and very high, way before the snow. What do you guys think about these graphics - pretty cool huh?


The game is beginning to grow on me - you can climb all over the place, climb all the roof-tops in Boston, so unlike Dishonored, you don't need your special blink power, just hold down the right mouse button and head to a house, you'll climb up the windows, grabbing the wooden framework around individual window panes, and then leaping from roof to roof. You can also go horseback riding, and get a nice gallop on, and the map seems to be mega-huge - enormous maps - very open world.

I spent a couple years in Boston, and I had a car while I was there as a grad student, so I drove around to all the areas I'm in right now within the game - to go back and revisit that area 250 years ago is very trippy.

Anyway, my main question/gripe is - how do I get the thing to actually lean on graphic hardware acceleration and not keeping trying to run the whole game on the cpu?

Any ideas?

Rich

 

What was making it spin? I guess I would say, Geometric progression. But I don't think that would be accurate. I could be mistaken though. VERY impressive stuff. It does seem logical when you think about it.

Fun? Well, building anything is fun, but not why I'm doing it. I'm doing this for myself, and others benefit It'll work. Essentially, for mankind. But, I doubt I'll get any patent on it. I have a feeling the government is already aware of such a device. It's simply not advertised, because such a device won't help the world go round... Grrr!