New I7-2900 Win7 slow, low cpu usage

crobertson · 19 Jun 2013

I receive my New computer with I7-2600 @3.4Ghz cpu 4 core 8 thread W/ Win7x64. It is suppose to be fast from all my research. I used Intel cpu program to confirm.
My "Old" computer is a Pentium quad core @3.0Ghz w Win7x64 and is roughtly twice as fast.

It is a new install, no AV yet. Not much of anything installed. It has decent speed but here is the issue. When I'm installing or loading a file, I watch the performance tab and it does very little and takes its sweet time. I'm wondering if it is utilizing the CPU. I updated the chipset driver From the intel page, and it seems nothing seems to help.
I have no startup items, and it starts very quickly. Is there a cpu performance test someone can recommend to compare the two or how fast it is comparatively? it just doesn't seem to utilize the CPU.

I searched and saw several threads, but none were similar/exact and I didn't want to hijack another thread.

logicearth · 19 Jun 2013

Sounds to me the HDD is far too slow, compared to the CPU. Your problem is not the CPU but rather slow I/O.

Layback Bear · 19 Jun 2013

Use this so we have some idea what we are working with.
It helps us help you.
Take a look at logicearth specs and you will see a lot of info.

System Info - See Your System Specs

crobertson · 20 Jun 2013

Here is the system info
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Acer Veriton M4618G Motherboard
WDC WD5000AAKX-221CA1 7200RPM 114/118Mbps Read/write 16M Cache
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 7601 Multiprocessor Free Service Pack 1
4G ram DDR3 1333

I'm not sure what a good HDD speed is, but the rest is pretty decent.
I'm watching the performance tab of the Task manager and Ram only get to 1.5G and cpu speed never breaks 10%.
Is it just the Acer motherboard speed?

Performance Test Results
Processor 7.6
Memory 5.9
Graphics 4.6 (replacing)
Pri HDD 5.9

crobertson · 20 Jun 2013

I was shopping for a 2900 and got a 2600. I'm going to have to kill this post if I can't rename it.

Some results of testing, with passmark benchmark test. I compared it to a generic I7-2600 and another Acer motherboard computer. It is the same/similar to the Acer board computer (of course) but is far slower then the Generic i7-2600 computer.

This is what happens when you don't research enough. I did research the 2900 and ended up with this. It just doesn't have a lot of throughput on the motherboard.

theveterans · 20 Jun 2013

You can take a look at this to make your new Windows installation faster: Optimize Windows 7

I strongly suggest for you to buy an SSD like logicearth mention on post#2. With proper SSD and Windows maintenance, the power of your i7-2600 will be unleashed. SSD makes every I/O operation super fast, and program installation will be actually CPU bottlenecked in many cases.

Based on your system specs, you are running single channel DDR3 RAM which results to 5.9 RAM WEI. Buy another 4 GB stick and your RAM performance should bump up to 7.6 or greater

crobertson · 22 Jun 2013

Sound like good advice. I already had 4g on order. I have scripts to disable many services. I have a over a TB of data, so I'm going to get an SSD and put the OS/programs on it and all the documents on the old 2TB drive.

bobafetthotmail · 24 Jun 2013

Afaik, no i7 2900 exists (for desktops anyway, the only 2900 I see is for laptops). The i7 2600 is the biggest 2nd gen intel CPU Only marginally worse (in CPU power) than a i7 3770.
Here you can see a benchmark I use when evaluating how much bang I'm getting for my buck.

Check the cabling. SATA cables hate to be bent at 90°, must do smooth curves, or the data signal is garbled and performance sucks like in your case (and disk checking utilities return "CRC error"). Use compressed air to clean connectors on the mobo and the cable and HDD. Make sure that you are using AHCI mode in both BIOS and windows 7, this tutorial. THen you enable AHCI in BIOS (also called Setup in the white text you see when powering on the PC, should tell you what key to press to open it, do so fast)

Windows 7 does not need any optimization like XP, it is recommended to enable again most services as they don't impact performance (beyond a few seconds on booting anyway).

LMiller7 · 24 Jun 2013

Windows 7 does not need any optimization like XP, it is recommended to enable again most services as they don't impact performance (beyond a few seconds on booting anyway).

Agreed.
One of the nice things about using a modern OS is that you rarely need to get involved with managing system resources such as memory and CPU time. The OS does that for you, and usually does a very good job. Aside from some minor savings in boot time you gain little in performance from disabling services. Most system services take up very little CPU time anyways so there is little potential gain there. The memory savings in disabling services are deceptive. On bootup this might seem significant but the memory used will be trimmed back by the OS when needed for other purposes.

XP does, as you might expect, have some performance issues when dealing with hardware that did not exist when it was designed. An example being SSDs. Also understand that XP was designed to run in as little as 64 MB of RAM so there wasn't room for many of the optimizations built into later systems.

gregrocker · 25 Jun 2013

Is this the corrupt factory preinstalled Win7 which no tech enthusiast would run? If so I would do the vastly superior Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

New I7-2900 Win7 slow, low cpu usage

New I7-2900 Win7 slow, low cpu usage

System info

Actually i7-2600 NOT 2900

Speedup