Dual Core Processing is sweet

wow thats pretty sweet!

Under 5 seconds ,, mine did so to untill I put my plugins and custom brushes etc into it , now its on a par with CS2 maybe a little quicker , do you have plugins ?
I run a dual core AMD4800 , where I love dualies is in running 2 big apps at the same time , they are awesome for multitasking ,, quads on my wishlist

Rod

RodBarker wrote in post #3185514
Under 5 seconds ,, mine did so to untill I put my plugins and custom brushes etc into it , now its on a par with CS2 maybe a little quicker , do you have plugins ?
I run a dual core AMD4800 , where I love dualies is in running 2 big apps at the same time , they are awesome for multitasking ,, quads on my wishlist

Rod

Yeah I've got quite a few installed along with some custom actions. I can boost the speed up just a tad bit more by changing the RAM command rate to 1T but it locked up after a while so it went back to 2T. I wonder if upping the RAM voltage just a tad above 2.10v would help that out?

Lord_Malone wrote in post #3183513
My system is no slouch either. I put in an extra 2gb for a total of 4gb of RAM also. But I'm running a 32-bit OS, so I'm only seeing 3gb while the other 1gb is allocated to system resources. Does that make sense?

32 Bit OS's actually support 4GB of "system RAM" total. So you have to take into account video RAM as well. It's odd though, you mention you have 4gb, but Windows only see's 3Gb...or is it 3.5 or 3.75.

What is basically supposed to happen is this

Say you have a video card that has 256M of onboard RAM, and 4gb of "system RAM". If you are running a 32bit OS, the "system RAM" value will show roughly 3.75Gb of RAM since the 2 operate on the same bus (4GB - 256M on the video card).

At least thats my basic understanding of the 4gb limit in 32 bit windows.

Tsmith wrote in post #3182536
Budget for now. The board supports Quad Core and those prices are suppose to drop in August so I'll be keeping an eye out.

PRICE DROP NOW woot to bad i dont got the cash. I looked less than a month ago and they were 900-1000 on tigerdirect when i build my parents a engineering computer for their business. So tigerdirect send my a processor loyalty update and ya i was MAD! the quad core i could have picked up for 540. but ya i dont 100% know if that was a special for customers or if that was in general

BunLengthHotDog wrote in post #3187088
32 Bit OS's actually support 4GB of "system RAM" total. So you have to take into account video RAM as well. It's odd though, you mention you have 4gb, but Windows only see's 3Gb...or is it 3.5 or 3.75.

What is basically supposed to happen is this

Say you have a video card that has 256M of onboard RAM, and 4gb of "system RAM". If you are running a 32bit OS, the "system RAM" value will show roughly 3.75Gb of RAM since the 2 operate on the same bus (4GB - 256M on the video card).

At least thats my basic understanding of the 4gb limit in 32 bit windows.

Windows doesn't really work like this does it ?

From my understanding (gained more from Linux than Windows, but most of this is hardware) :-

The CPU has a memory management unit that supports n-bits of address space; last I heard it was 36-bits (64Gbytes?). Now that doesn't mean your 32-bit code can address that much space; just the MMU can. The MMU sets up a virtual address space for each "process" that runs which contains a mixture of memory and space for I/O (like 256Mbytes for your framebuffer).

Even this 4Gbyte address space is split ... between address space dedicated to the program you're running and "system resources" need to support that.

In short, a 32-bit os can run on a machine with more than 4Gbytes of memory. Unless a program is very tricky, it won't show any of that extra memory, but it can still be used.

Going from AMD 3500+ to X2 4800+ more than doubled the speed of my batching RAW to JPG in CS2, and for other apps it's dang handy to be able to use the machine while it's doing big batch jobs. I'll probably keep this a couple years and upgrade to an 8 core model... hopefully the software can keep up, writing code that can take advantage of multiple cores is tough, though with batch jobs like RAW to JPG conversion it's easy - just have it doing 4 unrelated conversions at once.

i thought the clockable clock speeds was depending on date of manufacture? i.e. earlier true allendale cores were a lot easier to overclock in terms of less heat, whereas newer ones were harder? I read a lot about this at the overclockers forums

Ed, from what I'm seeing the Conroe chip on my setup does run rather warm, around 47 degrees Celsius on the stock Intel heatsink. I'll be changing that in the near future.

hmv wrote in post #3187694
Windows doesn't really work like this does it ?

From my understanding (gained more from Linux than Windows, but most of this is hardware) :-

The CPU has a memory management unit that supports n-bits of address space; last I heard it was 36-bits (64Gbytes?). Now that doesn't mean your 32-bit code can address that much space; just the MMU can. The MMU sets up a virtual address space for each "process" that runs which contains a mixture of memory and space for I/O (like 256Mbytes for your framebuffer).

Even this 4Gbyte address space is split ... between address space dedicated to the program you're running and "system resources" need to support that.

In short, a 32-bit os can run on a machine with more than 4Gbytes of memory. Unless a program is very tricky, it won't show any of that extra memory, but it can still be used.

The 36 bit info you are speaking of is called Physical Address Extension, which would allow for 64G of Ram to be used as virtual address space.
As far as I understand, Vista 32 Bit does not contain the Windows mechanism AWE to allow for such an extension, so 4G is the limit on 32 bit Windows OS's

PAE-extensions have been available from Intel and AMD for quite some time, but I understand them to not quite work as well as advertised.

It's odd that MS has chosen not to take advantage of said functions in their consumer oriented OS's, but I guess they figure the Home audience will do fine on 4G (barring the obvious confusion of "Oh noees, where did my Ram go") on a 32bit OS, and don't want to invite any more headaches than are already present in a Windows environment by adding such unstable feature sets.

Moral of the story, if you want more than 4G usable in Windows, go 64 Bit

Geez I feel stupid. And me with a computer that is acting like it's going TU.

I hate buying new equipment, never know how to go.

BunLengthHotDog wrote in post #3190880
PAE-extensions have been available from Intel and AMD for quite some time, but I understand them to not quite work as well as advertised.

I'm not aware of any issues with it except for the obvious problem that a single process can't address more than 32-bits except by asking the os to fiddle with the MMU for it ... not an optimal solution. Some of my medium sized servers have up to 16Gbytes of memory and some are for various reasons limited to running a 32-bit os.

BunLengthHotDog wrote in post #3190880
Moral of the story, if you want more than 4G usable in Windows, go 64 Bit

Or go to a server flavour of Windows; pick the variety based on how much memory you have. The more memory you need in your server, the more expensive the flavour of Windows you need. I'm not entirely sure why