New i7 is slower than old Core 2 Duo? Why? (BIOS programming)

Question

I've always wondered why the companies who make BIOS' either have terrible engineering psychologists or none at all. But without wasting your time further with random speculative questions, my real question is as follows:

Why does my new computer run slower than my old computer?

Old Computer:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 3.0 Ghz (stock)
4GB OCZ DDR2 800 RAM
Wolfdale E8400 mb
nVidia GeForce 8600 GT

New Computer:

Intel Core i7 920 @ ~3.2 Ghz
6 GB OCZ DDR3 1066 RAM
EVGA x58 SLI LE motherboard
nVidia GeForce GTX 275

Vista x64 Home Premium on both.

"Run slower" is defined as: - poorer FPS performance in the same games, applications - takes longer to start up - general desktop usage (checking email, opening up files, running exe's) is noticeably slower

At first I thought I must've not set something up in the BIOS or something. But I have no idea how to set anything in the bios except for "Dummy O.C.", which brought me to ~3.2 Ghz. But beyond that I have no idea. I've been reading stuff about "ram timing" and voltages and the like but I really have no idea about that stuff. I'm a psychologist who has a basic understanding in building his own computers, not a computer scientist. Can someone give me some wisdom that might guide me to the reason my new computer is worse than my older one?

I'm sorry if this is a bad question, or not appropriate to SO. I'm just pretty frustrated now and you all have helped me in the past so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

I can imagine your flabbergasted upgrading your system without much gain in performance, considering your upgrade in GPU alone should probably give you better performances.

Therefore, I don't see why your i7 processor (alone) would be the problem.

We have to determine whether it's a hardware or software problem, perhaps:

• there's a driver conflict causing one of the hardware parts to become a bottleneck to your system;
• there's a hardware component poorly supported for Windows X64 (like your GPU);
• your powersupply can't handle the load throttling down your performance;
• your bios needs an update

If anyone has suggestions on how to track these things, please comment.

You could give some benchmarks a try, to see how the performance of each individual part is. The downside is, you can't really compare it with your old computer unless you still have it running next to you.

Note: benchmarking tools only give you numbers, but that doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the performance unless you have something to compare it with.

Possible benchmarks:

• Passmark
• 3DMark06 Standard (but off course a 2006 version)
• SiSoftware Sandra
• Everest

Or check out programs like PC Pitstop, though I can't confirm/guarantee it will actually improve your performance

Answer 2

This could be interesting read,
Core i7 a waste of money for gamers, says Nvidia.
But, generally people have found the two processors similar in performance.

“You’re paying a pretty dear price to follow the Intel story of how to build the fastest PC for gaming”, said Petersen, as he showed a graph of how gaming performance scales with CPU upgrades. Petersen got his test results by adding together the frame rates from Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3, Call of Duty: World at War and Far Cry 2 at 1,920 x 1,200 (no AA or AF) and taking an average.
With a Core 2 Duo E8400 and a GeForce GTS 250, the average was 41.6fps.

He then showed how this increased as you upgraded the CPU (the blue line in the graph above), and compared it to how the frame rate increased when you added another graphics card in SLI.
The frame rate only increased to 42.4fps after upgrading to a Core i7 965, but jumped all the way up to 59.4fps after upgrading to a GeForce GTX 260 (216 stream processors) SLI setup.

Maybe, you should benchmark the two systems synthetically to find what is slowing down the i7

Answer 3

As others have said, all the parts of your new system should be at least as fast as the old so you are right not to expect it to be slower.

One important thing to check though is what temperatures it is running at. Most modern CPUs will ramp their speed down in the presence of an over-heat situation, so while normally you'd expect your graphics card to be the main bottle-neck in this system for current games that might not be the case if the CPU is getting too warm. The GPU may also do the same sort of thing.

If you find heat is a problem, then you need to improve airflow around the case. I you have no case fans then get some - these will make more difference than just replacing the CPU cooler as help move cool air into the case and hot out. If you don't have decent air-flow the CPU and GPU fans will end up just circulating hot air around like a desk fan in a hot room with all the doors and windows closed.

Once you've checked all your drivers & firmware are up-to-date and ruled out heat, you might have a faulty CPU/GPU/somethingelse. You could try swapping parts around where they are compatible (if you still have the old machine). For instance if the graphics card is at fault you might find the old card makes the new machine faster instead of slower as would be expected.

Once other thing to note: if WindowsUpdate suggests a graphics driver update, ignore it. You need to be using the latest (or at least something recent) from the manufacturer for performance and in my experience this isn't the case with the ones found via Windows Update.

Answer 4

Similar to the other answers, the once-common belief that a CPU upgrade will increase the speed of your computer is coming to a possible end. CPUs are so incredibly fast these days that to keep one pegged for more than a few seconds requires only processing intensive work. The bottleneck for your system, especially at boot or application load, is more likely going to be your hard drive, or to a lesser extent your RAM. For graphics, the CPU does very little anymore, and the GPU is the place to focus if you want a performance improvement (for some games, loading the graphics from the hard disk might also be a factor here).

For the average user, I expect the i7 to be vastly overpowered. Already a Core2 Quad is plenty for even a powerful workstation; in the next couple years, I'd guess that only server loads or specialized tasks will benefit from the new gains in CPU speed and cores. At least, until the other hardware bits have again achieved the speed improvements to keep up.

Answer 5

Use CoreTemp to check your CPU temperature and get the true clock speed that it's running at. Perhaps power management is improperly configured, causing your CPU to run at the lowest multiplier.

Answer 6

Bad hardware somewhere? I put together an i7 system recently and it absolutely smokes comparable speed Core Duos/Dual core AMDs, etc, even though it has a pretty old video card.

Answer 7

Instead of running games, try to run some heavy math programs/multi threaded applications. I can't really see why you bought an I7 if you're a gamer. I7 is great for multitasking and really big operations. I can convert a 700mb avi movie to dvd format in about 10 minutes. My old dual core needed like 20 but that isn't all, during this conversion I was able to watch videos, chat, surf on the internet, probably even game as well, if I did that. But with the dual core I wasn't even able to minimize the conversion program's window. (This was on the highest conversion priority)

Answer 8

My only suggestion, since this is a relatively new install, would be to make certain that you are using the newest video drivers from Nvidia.com, and not the Microsoft WDDM drivers that came included with windows. While these drivers always "work", I have found from personal experience that they suffer a tremendous performance penalty compared to the actual Nvidia drivers.

Answer 9

Remember the i7 920 CPU starts as a 2.66 and not a 3.2Ghz. So there has been some tweaking...which by itself is fine. This CPU should still go at a pretty good clip at 3.2 or even 4.0 without serious overheating problems given you have a half decent CPU cooler.

This is probably a software issue since it's slow straight from startup.

The quickest way to fix it? Buy a new hard drive(or format an old one), physically install it and do a clean install of W7 x64.

Before your install, you should get the latest drivers for the hardware you have so that only the latest drivers exist on the new hard drive.

There are a ton of reasons why software could slow your system. Everything from a registry that is a mess, to a keylogger or other malware.

Yes, a reinstall, or a NEW install can be a bit of a pain, but with your hardware, you should be able to do a full install of W7 in a about a half hour. My system took 15 minutes with the OEM version of W7x64.

What counts is this: you can have a faster running computer, or at least an answer to if it is a hardware or software issue, in under an hour. And if you install W7 on a new drive, then you've lost no data from your old drive. You can always just plug in your old drive, and add the new one to your system as a data drive.

As for an i7 being a waste for gamers - I have to completely disagree. There are a lot of games out there that are more CPU based than GPU based. Wolrd of Warcraft and Everquest 2 are prime examples of VERY graphically intensive games that rely primarily on the CPU and NOT the graphics card. True, these games also tax the main core of the CPU in the 95%+ range during game play and the other cores are not used much by the games, however, if you are listening to music, or have a website open at the same time, you'll want those other cores working for you.

"Games" and other programs are only going to be good as their programming. If the coding USES all the cores of the CPU, then yes - you will see a HUGE advantage. A lot of older games were designed to be CPU centric - with the gamble that it would be the CPU's that would get faster and faster as the years went on. NEWER games are actually utilizing the graphics engines more and more because it is clear that it's been the GPU's that have been growing in power. EQ2 for instance is patching in GPU shaders (currently ONLY being done with the CPU) and have other advances in GPU utilization comeing down the pike.

Outside of gaming - an i7 would allow you to surf the web, transcode a dvd, listen to Winamp all at the same time and still play your MMO without bogging the system down to a standstill. I chose an i7 specifically because it is very rare that any computer is only doing one or two things - crack open your task manager as you read this ::grin::