CPU bottleneck?

[tomstulich]

I am looking to reduce loading screens significantly. I play mostly TW: Shogun 2 and The World of Warcraft. I've been spending a lot on new hardware recently but nothing has reduced load times much...

I have:
AMD 7970 graphics card
12gig ram 1333MHz (64 bit windows)
Corsair 6gb/s SSD (Windows is loaded on a disk drive)
--and AMD Athlon II x4 3.1GHz, 4x128KB L1 + 4x512KB L2 cache.

The loading screen is about 30 seconds for a battle in TW shogun 2, i'd like to reduce this to about 5 seconds. If I am correct to assume that a new CPU will achieve this, what would I need?

 

[abekl]

Load time if im correct are more a function of storage speed than cpu speed.

 

[tomstulich]

I forgot to mention my CPU is never near full usage in the performance monitor, the frequency is stays near 100% when loading though. Also it mostly uses "Core 0".

I need a larger CPU cache?

 

[amuffin]

Complete bottleneck with an athlon! Upgrade to at least a phenom, you need to install your games also on the ssd.

 

[egilbe]

Load time if im correct are more a function of storage speed than cpu speed.

What he said.

 

[tomstulich]

Load time if im correct are more a function of storage speed than cpu speed.

How do I increase storage speed?

 

[amuffin]

How do I increase storage speed?

INSTALL THE GAME TO YOUR SSD!

 

[tomstulich]

INSTALL THE GAME TO YOUR SSD!

The game is installed on the SSD...

 

[egilbe]

The game is installed on the SSD...

Only thing I can think of then is to buy a matching SSD and run it in RAID 0.

Why isn't the OS on the SSD?

 

[amuffin]

AHCI mode enabled?

 

[tomstulich]

Only thing I can think of then is to buy a matching SSD and run it in RAID 0.

Why isn't the OS on the SSD?

Its a 100gig SSD. Windows is 15gigs. Think it will make video games faster if i installed it there?
By RAID 0 you mean RAID labeled 0 on my mobo? they're all 6gb/s.

 

[egilbe]

Its a 100gig SSD. Windows is 15gigs. Think it will make video games faster if i installed it there?
By RAID 0 you mean RAID labeled 0 on my mobo? they're all 6gb/s.

RAID 0 is a level of RAID that reads and writes both drives at the same time. Your data is shared across both drives. The drawback is that if one drive fails, you lose all your data. It is faster than a single drive, but one SSD should be plenty fast. Yes, your OS should be on your SSD...just because, it boots faster.

Google RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and have some spare time. It can be time consuming.

 

[tomstulich]

AHCI mode enabled?

It was set to IDE.

 

[amuffin]

Change it to AHCI.

 

[tomstulich]

Change it to AHCI.

Reinstalling windows. Will this make a noticeable difference?

 

[amuffin]

Yes, however you don't need to reinstall windows. You can just adjust some registries...

 

[tomstulich]

Yes, however you don't need to reinstall windows. You can just adjust some registries...

I changed the Storage Configuration to AHCP through BIOS. However, when I press F8 for boot selection all the drives say "IDE:[drive name]". Is this correct?

 

[tomstulich]

Discovered that only one CPU core is being used mostly. The others are running idle thread. This program only has one "thread" to be processed?

 

[egilbe]

Normally, processors only run one core. Additional cores are added as needed. Some programs only utilize one core. Unless you are doing something that requires all cores to be utilized, they are idle.

 

[tomstulich]

Normally, processors only run one core. Additional cores are added as needed. Some programs only utilize one core. Unless you are doing something that requires all cores to be utilized, they are idle.

Too bad they don't make a CPU with only 1-2 cores that has a frequency and cache rating as high as the new i7-six-cores. Would suit my purposes nicely.