Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
I could understand things slowing down if Windows has to slog through 20GB of files every time it refreshes the desktop (was this some sort of videoediting terminal) but My Documents is just thrown up on the desktop as part of the rendering process as a shortcut to whatever the registry says it should be. I would imagine that a big background pixmap would slow things down much more, and keeping the number of icons Windows has to render down in the 20-30 range is probably a good idea.
On my current Win2K box (which I am using to type this post) the desktop renders very quickly. I have a simple tiled background, 13 app shortcuts, the standard Windows shortcuts (My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents, et al), a ~2Gb My Documents/My Pictures folder, and an old ATI Rage 128 video card. My HDD is a SCSI Ultra Wide RAID-0 setup across 2 drives. Other than the hard drives, it's a fairly standard desktop system. I have no idea where you are getting your information, but I suspect there's something wrong with your system, or your assumptions are nothing more than superstition (My Documents displays on the desktop, therefore it must be inside the desktop!)
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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.
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
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).