Re: Best value in motherboards and cpu's
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:07:14 -0400
Paul wrote:
curious guy wrote:It has been several years since I upgraded my computer. I currently
have an AMD Barton 2500+ on an EPOX EP-8RGA+ with one gig of ram. I
have three PATA hard drives, 750 gig, 300 gig and 120 gig. I use
Windows XP SP3. I do not want to run Vista. I do not play any games on my computer. I mainly use it to download
pictures files from newsgroups with Agent 5.0. Recently, many of the
pictures have been posted in rar or zip archives that have to be
verified and combined with Quickpar. This can take quite a while.
I want to get something substantially faster that would reduce the
time Quickpar takes by at least four times. What motherboard and CPU
combinations would give me the best bang for the buck? Thank you in
advance for all replies.
I studied the PAR2 thing a bit more.
First, there is a better version, here. phpar2.exe
http://www.paulhoule.com/phpar2/index.php
It is a command line version. You open a DOS box window, and
run the command there. You'd have your folder with all the par
files and a copy of phpar2.exe in it. Then, type the command
phpar2 r myparfile.par2
and it would repair the file set described by myparfile.par2.
The advantage of the phpar2 program, is it is multithreaded
(for some parts of the program's operation). It uses
some assembler code for speed. It is based on the other
command line program, but with some tweaks to make it run
faster.
I tested it on my Core2 Duo. When creating par2 files, it runs
on both cores. When repairing par2 files, during the "solving"
phase, it uses one core. During the "repairing" phase, it uses
two cores of my processor. So it is capable of speeding up
the process.
I also looked at file operations, and there is no thrashing to be
seen there. If the file set is smaller than total system memory,
then system memory will function as a file cache, reducing the
operations on the physical disk drive. If the file set is larger
(I tested with 4.8GB of files, on a 2GB RAM machine), the disk
drive is read relatively slowly during program operation. Only
about 8MB/sec or so. No special disk drive would be needed, so
my concern about thrashing is non-existent. It assembles the
repaired file in memory, and writes it out at full speed when
the repair is finished.
That means, buy a multicore processor. Buy enough memory to
hold the size of the thing you're repairing. (For example,
in my test, I had about 8% of my files missing, and I think
it needed 400 to 800MB of RAM for my big test case.) So
you could buy either 2GB or 4GB of RAM, and handle something
the size of a DVD project perhaps. You can get a quad core
if you want, and can afford one. There are some nice ones
out there.
Paul
.
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