Question for anyone who has gone from single to dual to quad CPU...

I went from an Athlon XP 2600+ to the C2D E6600 and finally upgraded to a Q9450 back in 2008. All which have been operating in Win XP.

First, while burning a DVD on my Athlon XP, I was still able to at least surf the net without any issues. Moving on to the C2D E6600 made multi-tasking much smoother. I was able to encode movies and play games at the same time; I'm sure I took a performance hit, but gaming was still definitely possible.

Stepping up to a Q9450 made thing run smoother and since there is extra "power" on tap I am able to game and encode movies using x264. When I decide to upgrade, the Q9450 will be going into my HTPC which currently has my old E6600 CPU.

Originally Posted by aamsel

I had asked this when starting the thread, because I had not been aware that burning of CD/DVD's would be a true example of heavy multitasking while doing anything else.

Is it?

You're on the right track asking a question like this. In the old days when CD burners first came out, there were the creme de la creme SCSI setups and if you were really rich you had SCSI hard drives too. There was a dedicated processor to handle the I/O operations, so if you were burning a CD you could do other things without the CD turning into a coaster.

We've gotten to the point where other CD burning tech has allowed us to minimize coasters, but we're still lagging, so what's the problem. Well, if you're doing random seeks on a hard drive (not all burnt data is sequential) and you're trying to use other apps (opening and closing, web caching, etc.) which is even more random seeks, the hard drive gets bogged down (which is the slowest tech in a modern PC.) A quad CPU will aid with being more responsive, but you're still going to wait for things to load up.

When I said I game, encode and burn, at the same time, while true, I do want to point out that my games take 2-3 times longer to load a level (30 seconds vs. 10 seconds big whoop), some food for thought.

a quad core is much better for multitasking. i use 2 different computers networked together. if i want to rip or burn something, i do it on my pentium D and it can take as long as it damn well pleases. meanwhile tf2 is chugging along on my E6600 at 100+fps the whole time. fine by me. if you want to do both burning and gaming on the same rig at the same time, go for a quad core. you will be glad you did.

and yeah, get an ssd if you can afford it. biggest single thing you can do to increase your computering experience right now.

Originally Posted by ekuest

a quad core is much better for multitasking. i use 2 different computers networked together. if i want to rip or burn something, i do it on my pentium D and it can take as long as it damn well pleases. meanwhile tf2 is chugging along on my E6600 at 100+fps the whole time. fine by me. if you want to do both burning and gaming on the same rig at the same time, go for a quad core. you will be glad you did.

and yeah, get an ssd if you can afford it. biggest single thing you can do to increase your computering experience right now.

Got the SSD, and I prefer not to use 2 PC's for daily tasks.
No gaming involved, except on rare occasions, just standard stuff,
but some of the delays have been annoying.

When I am burning a CD, I am usually surfing the web and doing some other work at the same time on my i7-860. Sometimes, it is something along the lines of managing a large music library, pictures, or videos and it still does not slow down. When I had my E8400, it did slow down a little but was still usable. On my x3 710 system, it really does not slow down but it is not as fast as the i7.

Go for the quad!

Originally Posted by lbwarped

Go for the quad!

Well, the question wasn't whether the quad is more capable or not, since it
obviously is.

Most of the stuff that people get a quad for I really don't do much of.

The slowdowns I have seen while DVD ripping/burning were situations that I thought
would not tax a dual core.

DVD burning on a t5600 (mobile Core 2 Duo) does not slow down Windows 7 x64 at all.

But I don't really game.

The general consensus is correct, hdd access is the limiting factor of DVD burning, especially while using hard drive heavy tasks (video encoding, file transfers, etc)

Originally Posted by jeremyshaw

DVD burning on a t5600 (mobile Core 2 Duo) does not slow down Windows 7 x64 at all.

But I don't really game.

The general consensus is correct, hdd access is the limiting factor of DVD burning, especially while using hard drive heavy tasks (video encoding, file transfers, etc)

I apprecate that, but this is simply surfing while ripping/burning files
that are on a Velociraptor, so I would think that would be fast enough?

Yes, going from my single core 800MHz P3 to my OC'ed Q9450 I gained a small amount of speed.

Originally Posted by NukeULater

Yes, going from my single core 800MHz P3 to my OC'ed Q9450 I gained a small amount of speed.

Ahhhh.... I loved the Coppermine.

Athlon XP 2400M @ 2.2GHz with 1GB DDR1 at home still.....when I'm burning something I just turn on my 360 or go do the dishes or something. The computer is still ok for surfing, email, downloading and playing shows (720p brings it to it's knees tho).

At work I've got an i7 machine with 6GB of memory and a few GTX285's to choose from, always have tons of stuff open and it's always smooth as butter. Even when I'm streaming Win7 images to my burner from our little C2D file server over gigabit, I don't notice a hit.

No one mentioned DVD drives itself, compare a dvd drives 12x from even 3 years ago to 24x and with sata, and how a newer motherboard io sees the drive. that could be a factor.

Multitasking while burning a CD/DVD is not going to be limited by the CPU in the vast majority of cases. About the only time this might be the case is if the drives are running in PIO mode instead of DMA mode. If that happens, the CPU will be hit very hard for any type of disk access. However, your drives should not be running in PIO mode and you'll need to fix that.

The major limiting factor with CD/DVD burning will be disk access. If you are running a game or another program from the same hard drive which holds the data you are burning, it's going to cause slowdowns with disk access. The program you are running will probably be reading/writing from or to the hard drive at the same time the burning program is reading data from the drive to burn to CD/DVD. The hard drive is going to have to go back and forth between the different I/O operations which will slow down your ability to multitask because access times will be higher than usual.

I did a 126GB backup to DVD last night and had no trouble with multitasking. At the time I was doing the burning/verifying, had a DC program maxing out all 4 cores, another DC program maxing out my GPU, browsing using Firefox and streaming a TV show from the network. I also have a lot of other programs running in the background but their disk I/O and CPU usage are minimal. I never had a problem with disk I/O sluggishness because everything disk related was spread out over different drives in my system. Not all of the programs were running from the same disk and the video was streamed from the network so it wasn't causing any disk I/O hits.

Generally speaking, you won't notice a difference between a dual or quad core while burning a CD/DVD as long as the disk I/O for burning is separate from the disk I/O for anything else you're doing.

Originally Posted by Flexion

You're on the right track asking a question like this. In the old days when CD burners first came out, there were the creme de la creme SCSI setups and if you were really rich you had SCSI hard drives too. There was a dedicated processor to handle the I/O operations, so if you were burning a CD you could do other things without the CD turning into a coaster. ... (omitted) ...

The architecture for SATA is very similar to SCSI of the old days. There is a dedicated processor on your SATA drive, and there is a dedicated processor on your south bridge. They take care of data transfer by themselves, and the processor does little or no work. I think nowadays you can max out the CPU while burning a DVD with no ill effects.

I think Flexion is saying that DVD burning is not a CPU-heavy task, and the bottleneck is in the (mechanical) disk. Therefore, upgrading from a dual-core CPU to a quad will not give you much improvement (if any), and, for the OP's purposes, upgrading to SSD may be more appropriate.

Edit: Oh, SmokeRngs said the same thing (only more eloquently) before me.

Originally Posted by aamsel

I apprecate that, but this is simply surfing while ripping/burning files that are on a Velociraptor, so I would think that would be fast enough?

Velociraptor is fast alright, but it is still a mechanical disk, and it has the same kinds of limitations as other mechanical disks: high random access latency because the disk heads (which are mechanical devices) need time to seek (i.e., physically move) to a new position. NCQ support, which helps with throughput, may also increase random access latency when the disk is already busy.

Originally Posted by chklin

The architecture for SATA is very similar to SCSI of the old days. There is a dedicated processor on your SATA drive, and there is a dedicated processor on your south bridge. They take care of data transfer by themselves, and the processor does little or no work. I think nowadays you can max out the CPU while burning a DVD with no ill effects.

I think Flexion is saying that DVD burning is not a CPU-heavy task, and the bottleneck is in the (mechanical) disk. Therefore, upgrading from a dual-core CPU to a quad will not give you much improvement (if any), and, for the OP's purposes, upgrading to SSD may be more appropriate.

Edit: Oh, SmokeRngs said the same thing (only more eloquently) before me.

Yep.

Burning a CD from an IDE drive took 100% of a trusty coppermine.

The computer was completely unusable.

I got a SCSI card with a SCSI drive (wierd types of connections... took me a while to figure out how to set it up properly) and it was a world of difference (not much, but I was a lot more patient then).

Granted that a single core is slower than 2/4 cores, we also have to realize that subsystem IO such has HDD has increased in speed too. Burning a CD 5 years ago and today are different as today the HDD are physically faster and better interface IDE --> SATA for example.

But yeah last 5 years have been great I myself had a prescott then an e2180 to a q9650. Each leap had a very tangible difference and the latest q9650 being really good that I am confident I can hold another 12 to 24 months w/o significant problems. The only foreseeable upgrade in the next 6 to 8 months is a videocard and an SSD but they are a luxury for me right now.

You can manually set the processor affinity or download programs that will do it automatically for given applications. The very little bit I experimented with this I didn't see much improvement, but it's something else to try.

I noticed this with my old dual system, an X2 5000+, but it does not occur on my i7 setup. Granted, I've made other upgrades since then (such as new HDDs), so I can't say it was the processor switch alone.