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Old 09-04-2008, 07:23 PM   #1
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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?
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Old 09-04-2008, 09:21 PM   #2
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Does that motherboard allow you to plug in an external video card? That alone will solve your problem (assuming you get a good video card).
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Old 09-17-2008, 10:45 AM   #3
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You have not hit a hardware limit, you have hit a software limit

I do all of the above smoothly running a via M10000. You need to optomize the software some, and running a resource hog like DFX skin is going to cause a slowdown.
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Old 10-09-2008, 04:10 PM   #4
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I have a MII 10000 tweaked out with changes to Bios/Windows/Services. All the tweaks mentioned.

I also installed a 256MB Nvidia card (maybe overkill) and it didn't affect my CPU usage much. I thought it would make a difference but not really.

There is something different in the last update with RR and DFX 4. I know I don't have the fastest CPU but after update it increased about 10-20%.

However, I do like the DFX 4 features/options/style it provides, so I have to give on something.
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Old 10-09-2008, 04:41 PM   #5
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"My cold boot time is ~20 secs including POST"

That's a long time my friend. I originally had a nlited copy of xp streamlined etc but with compatibility issues, I just went with a full version.

It takes about 20 secs to boot up. The Nlite version...well I saw the bios screen, then would go black, I would see the XP logo for a second, then black again and then the desktop would be up!

How much space do you have on your hard drive left? Leaving atleast 30% free space helps.

What 7200rpm laptop hard drive do you have?? RPM does not equal data throughput!!
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