New Core i7 system

[BigAlNZ]

Hi Guys,

I recently updated to a Corei7 from my trusty old Athlon 3500+.

I got:

ASUS P6T SE mobo
Core i7 2.66Ghz
1x2Gb of Corsair DDR3 ram (yer I know I know, but I had a spare stick lying around and cash is tight, I will get 3 sticks soon)

I have 3xSeagate SATA drives. Just standard 7200.11 Barracudas.

Now I reloaded Windows XP, and sure the computer went faster, but not as fast as I had expected. It still takes a while to boot and occasionally really still makes noises like its working hard.

I have begun to wonder if I have done something wrong? Any ideas?

Also could XP not be using the system to its full potential? If so I may go the whole hog and migrate to it fully - ATM I am just booting a small partition on Win7 and have not loaded much onto it.

Talk to me people!!

Cheers

-Al

[KeriJane]

Re: New Core i7 system

Hi BigAINZ!

Congratulations on your new system!

i7 is kinda overkill for XP which was written a long time ago for vastly slower and more limited hardware.
For one thing, you're running that top of the line CPU in 32-bit mode which seems a waste.

XP can be insanely happy with practically any modern system as even 4-series Celerons are faster than the Pentium3 / 1st generation P4 systems with 128mb-256mb RAM that XP was intended for.

That said, Hard Drives aren't really that much faster than they were in 2001 and Windows does tend to use the Hard Drive a lot... even with Gigabytes of real memory your boot time and perceived speed is largely dependent upon the drive.

Also, you mention that not all memory slots are full. This may kick the system into Single Channel memory mode. That would slow the system down a bit too. You may be able to view the memory channel mode either in the BIOS utility or during the boot messages.

Enjoy that new system! I'll build an i7 system someday just to fill my empty Lian-Li box with something worthy of its glamor.

Have fun,
Keri

[BigAlNZ]

Re: New Core i7 system

Hey, thanks.

Youhave echo'd the sentiments of some other people I have spoken to WRT Win7 - and with a LanLi case you sound like someone after my own heart (though I got Antec case)

So I will start to migrate to my Win7 partition which is on the same disk as XP. Can I slowly resize the Win7 partition as I go so it gets bigger and the XP partition gets smaller till I delete to altogether?

Faster memory is coming :-)

-Al

[gdement]

Re: New Core i7 system

So I will start to migrate to my Win7 partition which is on the same disk as XP. Can I slowly resize the Win7 partition as I go so it gets bigger and the XP partition gets smaller till I delete to altogether?

There's software that can do that (partition magic is what I'm aware of). But resizing partitions is a dangerous operation, something you should try to avoid doing. Planning to resize them several times is living a bit dangerously IMO.

If you don't know what future needs will be, and your drives are big enough, then it's safer to just leave some space unallocated. Add the extra space later when you know what you need it for.

[willawake]

Re: New Core i7 system

did you remove the 1.5gb/s limiting jumper from the drives.
locate your swap file on another disk

your board can really use fast ddr3 triple channel bandwidth

in the end the system will be limited by the hdds. have to look to faster hdds, scsi, ssd to see the real performance.

[travistee]

Re: New Core i7 system

I have an ASUS P6T i7 920
corsair 1333 triple channel 3gb
XP pro

It runs just fine.
Lots of apps use all 8 cores.
Real fast for video editing or dvd ripping.

I don't like win7. Tried it with a q9300.

You can resize partition in vista or win7
For XP I use easus partition free software.