Thread: CPU usage, have I hit the hardware limit?

First off, I’m really sorry this is so long, if you haven’t clicked “back” yet, please bear with me

I have the Jetway J7F5M1G5D-VDE-PB motherboard with a 1.5 GHz processor. I purposely bought this one over the J7F2 series because of it’s ability to share up to 128 MB memory for video. I have 1 gig ram installed and 128 set to share in the cmos. When I run Roadrunner with the DFX skin, with music playing my cpu usage fluctuates in the teens % usually. With the visualization in the background of the main screen, my cpu usage is at ~50% and the scrolling title/artist area is not perfectly smooth. If I have iGuidance running at the same time, CPU is at least 80%+ and the visualization is pretty much worthless. I’m just running one of the spectrum analyzers, not any crazy multi-color intense visualizations. Also videos with iGuidance running are not smooth. I’m running DFX with the still photo & compass in the center of the screen.

Now I’ve read the threads on optimization and speeding up Roadrunner, here’s what I’ve done:

Updated Bios (less than one month old I believe)
Nlited Windows to around 350 MB installed, minimal services running.
Updated driver’s on everything (video drivers are less than 2 months old, agp & chipset maybe 3 or 4 I forget)
Disabled my page file
Turned down video acceleration. (tried all settings, one or two notches down works best)
Flash 9, Flash 9 with renamed ocx file from guino’s thread, Flash 8, Flash 8 with renamed ocx from guino’s thread (these are the correct full flash installs as per the install exe file, not a browser plugin)
Video at both 16-bit and 32-bit (roadrunner thread recommends 16-bit is faster, winamp AVS actually says 32-bit is faster because of floating point math)
“Wait for retrace” turned off and slider between 1/4 and 1/2 way in visualizations config

I’ve got a fresh install down to a science now after doing it at least a dozen times in the past week. The only things I install after windows are winamp 5.13, roadrunner binary then weather fixed version, dfx 4, flash, iguidance, xport, ffdshow for video codecs, firefox. I’ve got a 7200 rpm laptop drive in there although I don’t think that would effect the cpu usage in this case. My cold boot time is ~20 secs including POST, and I’m actually to a point where minlogon didn’t make any difference for me. Basically I’m super streamlined.

If I give roadrunner high priority in task manager, videos will run alright, visualizations aren't smooth, iguidance gets slow. If I give roadrunner and iguidance high priority, visualizations are worthless, and music will start skipping. If I give winamp high priority, visualizations run perfect but title/artist info get really bad and iguidance is almost unusable.

Basically I’m wondering, have I really hit the hardware limit of this board already? I haven’t even gotten OBD-II running yet, but at this rate there’s no point since I don’t think the gauges would display in realtime. I've tried switching back to 64 MB video in the cmos and didn't even notice a difference, which doesn't seem right. I've also tried various options like setting video ram cacheable to enabled, with no luck.

Any suggestions?