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System Performace Tweaking?
A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "After being on a rather slow PC for some time now, I have finally made the jump to a 1GHz+ PC. Being fairly new at having a rather fast PC, I am not very sure where to go for system performance tweaking. A few friends pointed me to Monroe World and TweakXP. Both are pretty good sites, however I find that my system still doesn't perform as well as it should when running a benchmarking test like 3dMark 2003. My score is just under 2000. I know people who have slower systems than mine and get a score around 5000. So I am turning to the Slashdot community to ask: Where do you go to find out the latest and greatest hardware and system tweaks? Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?"
I buy a faster computer when I need more speed. Tweaking won't be nearly as effective as doubling your processor speed.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You don't seem to have mentioned the steps you took to improve your performance.
Have you shut down unnecessary services if you're running Windows XP? Do a google search and you'll find a page telling you which services it's ok to turn off.
What programs are starting up when you boot your computer? Stuff you dont need? Axe it!
Downloaded any "free" programs? Go get adaware and clean up any spyware that might have been installed.
There's plenty more you can do, go google for ideas!
Does it feel fast enough for the work you're doing on it? If so, great. If not, address the problems directly, not through synthetic benchmarks. If you're swapping, buy more ram. If your CPU is maxing out, upgrade it. What's the big deal? It's a tool, not a dick measurer.
I've had this sig for three days.
If you are concerned about 3DMark...buy a graphics card so expensive that you shed tears when you sign the check (funded by the sale of your firstborn).
Find non-graphics intensive benchmarks, and watch your friends decline to run them like the cowards they are....
...
3D mark doesn't measure CPU. Your video card must suck. Get a new one.
____________________
cheap web site hosting @ $3
Are your system resources significantly reduced or are your benchmarks just low?
Someone hates these cans.
If your not concerned with 3D performance, 3DMark isnt a good program to base your judgements.
You're not going to score 5000 points unless you can play all the tests. You'll need directx 9 hardware to run all the tests. A geforce 4 ti 4600 won't cut it.
;)
btw, to increase your score easily, just turn the quality all the way down
It would be nice if you would supply your computers specs then we can judge if your 3dmark 2003 score is good enough.
The 3dmark 2003 score is very dependant on your graphics card because it is designed to test DX9 features, not what current games are like. So if you have a geforce 4 and your friends have Radeon 9700's your score will suffer badly in comparison.
What do the games you play run like? As long as they don't have a shitty fps I don't really see the problem - benchmark scores aren' everything as long as the pc does what you want it to.
Phase 1: Stop trying to run 3DMark 2003 under Wine
Phase 2: Run 3DMark 2001 in Win98
Phase 3: You've just tripled your score!
You're on slashdot - so How about installing Linux? It will run faster. :) I'd vote for Redhat or Debian - though I hear good things about Gentoo too.
For Windows - add memory, defrag often, make sure HD write cache is turned on.
For Linux - make sure hdparm has good settings for your drive (eg: DMA, 32bit, etc)
For Both: Make sure Acoustic Management is turned off (for faster drive seeks). Turn off services you don't need. (don't burn memory or CPU time)
Good luck,
Ryan
Mention the OS and the programs you use.
Hardware tweaking is a waste. In almost any real-world situation, maybe you'll get up to 10% more performance.
A software tweak can buy you much, much more. Your system is *definitely* not running twice as slow as your friends because of a lack of "tweaking" the hardware (assuming you aren't doing something bizarre like running the processor at only half the rated frequency or something silly like that).
You'll have to mention the OS and the programs you're using.
Abstract benchmark scores pretty much mean nothing. Say "Apache maxes out at 150 simultaneous connections" or "I only get 20 FPS in foggy parts of Max Payne".
May we never see th
*Start of advice*
I am using another Operating System than Windows.
*End of advice*
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Or off so you kan keep in pratice.
A trick that really improved the performance of my PC was replacing it with a Sun Blade 2000 with dual processors, 8 GB of memory, and a 24.1-inch LCD display.
The unexpected bonus was the tricked out "Sun" headlight in front and color shifting paint.
Linux : Mac
Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?
[sarcasm mode on]
Well, it is kind of personal, but I like to take the nipple between my forefinger and thumb, squeeze mildly hard, and rotate just slightly. The tweek isn't too painful, and the nipple hardens up just nicely.
[sarcasm mode off]
OH COME ON! You can't tell me that was the first thing to enter your mind when you saw the word "tweak." If it wasn't, your mind is not far enough in the gutter.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
someone wrote up an interesting article on social network theory to go with the google/register post.
it's a pity it gets burried under all that cruft.
uh, oh yeah. as an anonymous coward who cannot have his or her karma decremented for being off topic, may i recommend dual processors. the bog you feel under a heavy load vanishes when two processors are present. vmware runs like a dream and linux doesn't drag at all. additionally during disk/processor intensive operations such as converting a mpeg to divx one processor will do the video while the other handles the file io.
Try them, you'll be amazed.
Well, what were you expecting...
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
The first one is for registry and group policy changes to remove the bloat and make more things memory resident:/ winxptweak/1.html
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides
The next is a guide to services, to aid you in knowing which ones that you wish to prevent from running automatically:
These do make considerable improvements in desktop applications and general speed of the system, but are unlikely to make any difference to 3D benchmarks.http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm
Here's another "good computing practice" tip that I can add to the list of great suggestions in the parent post: keep your desktop small.
:)
I've found that with nearly any version of Windows, the bulkier your desktop, the slower your performance. I'm not just talking about the icons that appear on your desktop, I'm talking about all of the files contained within your "desktop" directory (e.g. c:\%windir%\desktop, c:\documents and settings\%profile%\desktop, etc).
Keep the contents of your desktop to an absolute minimum. Again, this doesn't mean create a folder on the desktop and move all your crud in there; that won't help, as those files are still in your Windows desktop directory. It's not about what shows on your desktop, it's about what's inside your desktop directory.
Move non-essentials out of the desktop completely. I've "treated" complete dog systems whose only real problem, aside from an adware app or two, was the fact that the owner had no concept of drive structure, and placed every file he owned somewhere within his desktop. I've seen machines with literally 20 gigs worth of files in the desktop directory. The solution is as simple as creating c:\My Stuff, moving the gigs worth of cruft from the desktop there, rebooting, and - as Emeril would say - BAM! Kick it up a notch, it's like booting a brand new computer.
My Windows desktops typically have five items: My Computer, My Documents*, My Network Places, Recycle Bin, and a shortcut to PuTTy (if I didn't run PuTTy so damned often, even that wouldn't be there). Period. Sure, it's more convenient to have your 20 gig MP3 collection and shortcuts to all your apps right there on the desktop, but this will slow you down like crazy. I don't know why, but it does, and it always has.
Trim down your desktop and you'll speed yourself up
*Remember that stuff in My Documents winds up within your desktop. Keep that clean as well. I strongly recommend a c:\My Stuff directory as a repository for your saved documents, pictures, and miscellaneous junk; just pretend that My Documents doesn't exist.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
What's all the fuss about benchmarks? It's just like dick length: don't fret over it. If she's all cuddly and smiling in the end, it's big enough.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
This has probably already been mentioned or too obvious, but worth repeating.
Make sure to stop all programs that you don't need from being started up.
There are programs out there that will tell you what is being started and from where, can't remember any names.
The poster describes his PC as a "1GHz+" machine.
First of all 1GHz is old news. Modern machines go up to 3GHz. And the speed of your CPU matters little in 3D Mark, compared to the speed of your graphics card. Are you sure you're running the same card as the other folks? A "1GHz+" system with a Geforce2 will always perform much much worse than a "1GHz+" system with a Geforce 4!
A difference of 3000 3D marks definitely sounds like your graphics card sucks and theirs dont: Tweaking, in the past, has gotten me 3 or 5 hundred 3D Marks, but never 3000...
You might want to "tweak" your graphics card then.
Download the latest drivers, since they often give performance bonuses. You can also overclock it: Dont forget that people who get top scores in 3DMark often are nutcases who have their test computers running at twice the original speed, with weird liquid nitrogen cooling schemes...
I used to use Powerstrip for overclocking but now all the drivers come with speed adjustments. And, like the other posters said, check your software first.
...,darling, i'll teach you:
...) and the latest BIOS for your board ;)
1. download the latest drivers for all components (chipset, controllers, graphic,
2. backup all important/personal data + new drivers
3. format harddrive (physical)
4. remove all components but psu, mb/cpu, ram, hdd, cd, graphics card
5. repartition hdd with software of choice (1 system partition, 1 app. partition, 1 data partition)
6. option: now's the time to think about multi-boot-systems
7. install new os (if it's windows, remove all bloat)
8. install:
8.1. new BIOS
8.2. chipset drivers and all os-specific tweaks
8.3. graphic drivers
9. add one component after the other and repeat:
hardware installation - drivers installation - reboot(!)
10. install your apps on the app. partition, put your data on the data partition, leave the sys partition as it is!
forget c:\programs!
forget c:\<whatever ms wants you to put your files in>!
nothing beats a fresh system.
have fun!
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
Here are some tweaks I remember doing on my w2k system (search google for actual details).
* Turn off all unnecessary services (I have like, 3 services started automatically, and a few on manual which automatically turn themselves on. Remember, do NOT "disable" RPC services, you will be hella screwed. Also, I found if you turn off "protected storage", then BASIC Auth in IE will take like 5 minutes...go figure)
* I seem to recall doing some registry tweak to turn on DMA for my cd rom
* There are well known disk cache, and nt kernel paging registry tweaks...only really necessary if you are limited on RAM.
* Get a utility with which you can modify your "Startup" items (not in the start menu, but in the registry). Lots of sneaky programs like to hide shit in there and start up every single freaking time (no thank you Quicktime!).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
on different partitions?
The apps are integrally tied to the DLLs in the system, and you're gonna want a ghost image of both the system and the apps.
I have two machines under this monitor / keyboard / mouse connected via a KVM. Both are Dell low end servers,
... lets just say I was pretty upset at the performance of the 'faster' machine.
: ... please.
... the machines are effectively the same speed. After 100fps, nobody really cares because it isn't going any faster. If your code compiles in 11 minutes vs. 11 minutes 47 seconds - the machines are the same speed. A PII 266 is exactly as fast as a PII 300, and a Celeron 1GHz is exactly as fast as a PIII 1.2GHz and an AMD 3000 is exactly as fast as a P4/3.06GHz with HyperThreading.
1. Dell PowerEdge 500sc 1.2GHz Celeron with 1G of PC133 ECC/Reg SDRAM and two WD800BB (Western Digital 80G drive),
2. Dell PowerEdge 600sc 2.4GHz P4 with 128M of DDR266 ECC/Reg RAM and ST340016a (Seagate 40G drive)
When I uncrated the 'faster' machine and benchmarked it against the 'slower' one, the 600sc was not only not faster in most respects, it was generally much slower. Compile massive volumes of code, move big files around on the hard drive, you know - doing work. Both have server video chipsets in them and are completely unGameWorthy but for doing work
First problem was the hard drive in the new box, I pulled one of the WD80s from the other machine and put it into the 600sc, installed everything onto it and that made a massive difference. Now that machine is much faster right up until I have 128M of stuff happening and while that machine is throttled, swapping in and out to disk the other 'slower' machine blows right past it (performance wise.)
Moral of the story? Doubling the processor speed is a good way to increase performance, but so is adding RAM to a RAM bound machine (ie. going from 64M or 128M to 512M or 1G) or putting in a faster hard drive if the one you have is fairly slow. Ditto video cards if you are looking for graphics performance. There is no substitute for cubic inches.
Other tweaks include
1. Turn off your virus checker if you are not installing / receiving new files (ie. your system has already been checked.) A virus scanner that checks every file accessed is easily a 30% performance hit.
2. Turn off all the other crap in the tool tray. Weather checkers, ICQ/AIM/whatever, network activity monitor, task manager, whatever.
3. No desktop image. Any image you throw up as wallpaper is converted to a MASSIVE bitmap file and sucked right out of your main memory. Also the video card has to keep redrawing it when you move stuff around.
4. Active desktop - turn it off. I mean
5. Comet Cursor or whatever - don't install it to begin with.
6. Defrag your hard drive, and buy DiskKeeper 7.0 so you can defrag the NTFS MFT at boot time (back up your system first.) Makes a BIG difference.
7. (Assumes you are on Wintel) : If you are running Win98 or WinME, upgrade to Windows 2000 Pro or XP. XP seems a LOT faster, but YMMV.
Another thing is expectations - you are not going to notice a 6% increase in speed. If you have to benchmark it or get out a stopwatch
Faster means the code that used to compile in 11 minutes compiles in 4 minutes. THAT is faster. Going from 26fps in your favorite game to 103fps at the same settings. THAT is faster. Going from a system that can host 4 players in UT2003 to hosting 12 players in UT2003 - THAT is faster.
If you want to go faster, forget OC'ing the chip or video card by 12% - if you have to benchmark it then it really isn't going any faster. Forget the difference between DDR266 and DDR333 and DDR400 - they are all the same speed for all intents and purposes. You want to go faster, upgrade from 128M of RAM to a full 1G of RAM. Replace the hard drive with a WD200 with 8M of cache. Replace the GF2mx with a GF4Ti4600 or a Radeon 9700 or whatever. Get a P4/3.06GHz machine with all of the above to replace your 1GHz machine.
Honestly if you have less than 256M of RAM, throw in a 256M stick or two. Cost you maybe $50 total, and you will effectively double the performance of your machine. Not only do you not have to swap memory out to disk, but any excess is used as a disk cache by Win2000/XP. As I saw, a 1.2GHz box with 1G RAM can be faster than a 2.4GHz box with 128M.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
There are several things that can vastly affect performance:
Warning: This stuff ain't for the faint of heart, nor the weak of will.
Know your machine.
What processor does it have
What type of RAM (DDR/SDRAM/RAMBUS/etc...)
How FAST is the ram rated for (PC2100,PC3000...)
What type of hard drive do you have? is it UDMA66/100/133?
What type of motherboard do you have? Does it support dual channel ddr (interleaving banks of DDR memory, gives a nifty boost to ram read speeds)
What are the settings in the BIOS set to? Do you know what that stuff means? Do you know how to agressivly set those, but keep some system stability?
In Windows, there are many many many factors which are going to affect the 'speed' of your computer.
Primarily: How much memory did your system have when it was installed. Windows tends to set certain values depending on what your system looked like when it was installed.
Secondly: What software is running. Are you running a virus scanner that checks every file as it's written. Do you think that is helping the speed of the computer? Try to limit the unneccasary software that's running. Open up the task manager. go to the performance tab. Howmany processes and threads are running. Check this versus your 'friends' computers to see how it relates. If your computer is running 450 threads over 41 processes, and his is running 200 threads over 25 processes, which one do you think is running too much crap.
Services: Processes in Windows that run, as parts of the OS, to provide 'services' to the OS. If you are running Windows XP Pro at home, there is a crapload of services running which are providing you with zero value. Find out what each service does, and determine whether it is useful to you.
This stuff is hardly rocket science, and there is no 'magic' button to press to automagically get you the best settings, you are going to have to learn what the PC is doing in order to make it work better.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Please. Script kiddies and Counterstrike cheaters 'tweak'. People with any credibility optimize. Since you have mentioned nothing about what your system DOES, and only a synthetic benchmark, any serious discussion is automatically terminated.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
1. Get two hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, and all your apps and data on the other hard drive.
Or, if you're really keen...
1. Get three hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, all your apps and data on the second hard drive, and put your swap file on the third hard drive.
Note the distinction: different hard drives, not different partitions. That way you get the benefits of multiple dedicated heads for each major function. Of course, you could also look at striping -- but remember that different RAID levels give different performance/reliability benefits depending on what sort of traffic you have going across the controllers.
As with anything else, you really need to understand where the bottlenecks are. You can have the latest whippy-skip computer with superfast everything...but it'll still suck if you're pulling scads of data across a network on a slow Token Ring NIC which is beaconing (which is perhaps rather unlikely in your scenario, but I wanted to make my point).
run in text mode, use screen to max out your VTs.
if you _HAVE_ to have a GUI, use ratpoison.
use nano-tiny to write your word macros in.
look into embedded systems - there's where the tweaking is going on.
and as a last resort: slow yourself and anyone else looking at the benchmark down. you could try cold, or alcohol, or cold alcohol.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Is VERY dependant on graphics card, and much less so on processor. A friend upgraded from 1.8ghz to 2.4 ghz and saw a only 10% gain in his 3d mark score. The best "hardware tweek" is to go down to frys and drop 70 bucks on a GeForce4 MX if you really want cheap graphics preformance
Yawn.
Definitely get more RAM, but don't believe it will give you double your current performance. For the most part unless you have a single application that consumes more Memory than your computer has, more RAM will only make task switching faster.
You need to give us more info. From what you posted, I would have to agree with the posts recommending you upgrade your video card. However this isn't always the case. There are lots of untweakable hardware reasons that you are getting bad performance. I have seen a oc'ed 2Ghz Celeron get beat by a 1Ghz P3 using the exact same hardware besides Motherboard and CPU (SDR RAM and low cache held it back) on 3Dmarks 03.
A great resource is www.winguides.com. They have a good app you can demo for free that has lots of Win Registry tweaks it will apply for you. The program also does "live update" from their site, so you get new tweaks people figure out.
I echo many of the other statements below: turn off all non-essential services/programs/tray extensions etc. (unless you like the functionality more than performance).
One of the biggest performance suckers is the "Sytem Restore" crap that takes "snapshots" of the system everytime you change anything. It eats hard drive space too. Unless you are a compulsive fiddler, and don't want to have to reinstall a driver manually, turn that right off.
Finally, in XP, you absolutely must turn off all the crappy eye-candy. Go to "System->Advanced->Performance Settings" and select "Fastest" or whatever. That turns off all the dumb GUI effects. Using the old Windows "theme" also seems to improve GUI performance significantly.
Finally, run AdAware, and keep careful track of what is getting installed on your system. (e.g. turn off Google Computing if you run the toolbar!) In the Windows world, everyone is always trying to put their junk on your box.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
Know the motherboard, the chipset and what it comes with. Know who manufacturered it, what's the bandwidth of the bus for memory and such.
If it's an intel board, you can go to intel's website and download the chipset utility to find out what kind of board you have. There's usually updates for bus drivers and accelerators.
Memory wise. Keep it under one manufacturer, keep it on one speed (continuity is important). If your board can support 266mhz or 500mhz whatever, buy the fastest RAM and the right one; ECC are technically slower b/c of the error cache correcting.
Simple things, like your ribbons to your harddrives. Check it they're the right ones and support the speed of the bus. Plus, raiding your drives can do wonders. IDE raiding, make sure you have your drives on its own seperate channel.
Don't add so much crap. The more peripherials and add-ons you have on a system the more it has to work with. Don't need sound, get rid of the card! Don't need video, toss it and ssh to it!
If you're running windows, there's always services you don't need or use that you can set to manual and shut off.
my old 366 celeron w/ 64mb ram was great for playing diablo 2 single player.
Any time a large number of bad guys was approaching, the machine would start paging and you would hear the hard disk going just like an early warning system.
Upped the ram to 128mb and now hardly ever get any paging during diablo 2.
Disable any daemons that you don't absolutely need.
This not only speeds up performance as well as shortening boot time, it also enhances security.
I'm not sure where in Windows you switch off extra services (control panel?) but on my box I would run Mandrake Control Centre.
Yuri
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
find out if you've got Cas 2-2-2 ram, if so, set it as such in the Bios settings.
Turn DMA access to the hdd on in the windows device manager, this will speed things up.
Is the system's front side bus going at the full speed the motherboard can go? For example, if you've got a Duron cpu with the bus set to 100mhz and the board is rated as being able to do 133mhz, then unlocking the cpu, increasing the fsb, and lowing the cpu's multiplier so it isn't too overclocked will speed things up quite a bit.
Having the fsb overclocked can be good: eg, if you've got a 133mhz fsb and you overclock to 143mhz, this will increase the throughput to the video card and ram which can be surprisingly good at stopping bog downs in programs.
Do you have your ram running at its rated mhz speed?
Have you overclocked your video card? They can almost always go faster than their factory rated speed so long as your case's cooling is good enough.
Get enough ram. A 512mb system is a heap faster than a 128mb system.
And always, know what you're doing, or else you've break your system, or just find someone who does to do it for you.
What's a 1Ghz+ PC mean? Quality hardware, or cheap?
3dMark 2003 is almost entirely dependent upon video card speed. I have a 1.2Ghz PIII. When I had a Riva TNT2 in it, I got maybe 1500. A Radeon VE received around 2000. Now I have an GeForce4 and I see something like 4500.
As for Windows XP specifically. I have two tweaks which I have found make a great difference. One involves removing the CTF subsystem, and the other involves installing the recent patch which dealt with slow memory allocation under SP1.
Beyond that... lot's of RAM, fast harddrive, fast video card. My main desktop has 512Megs and dual WD 80 gig drives(the special edition with 8 Megs cache). Basically it screams, even though it's well over a year old.
...should be that you don't need to tweak it.