Build to do more than one thing at a time?

[philthygeezer]

Seems like no matter how fast or how many cores, I still can't seem to do more than one thing at a time on a computer. I always wind up waiting for it on a processor intensive task.

What kind of a build would run an intense database script and render a movie at the same time as I'm making a powerpoint presentation on the work? Would two or three separate CPUs do it, Or is it windows that stops me from doing two or three things at once?

Please suggest a build that would let me multitask with no slow-downs. I'm sick of hourglasses and glacial application response times when another program or two is running.

[LarkStarr]

Rendering a movie on it's own is intensive, but if you manually manage the priorities and processor affinities of the processes in task manager you can minimize interference with your more everyday tasks. How intense of a database script are you talking about?

What build do you have now?

It really sounds like you could use two separate systems, though, to be honest.

[enaberif]

You need to tell us what it is that your doing first off.

What software do you use to render the movie.. what type of database? etc.

[philthygeezer]

It's mostly number crunching in proprietary geostatistical software: three dimensional mathematical computations on large point databases often with a few million records. Also running scripts on text files up to about 2 Gb in size. I must be one of the few people on earth who can grind a machine down with text files. Sony Vegas Prostudio for the movie making. Typically have the first running with a second stats package doing graphs and documenting everything in Word, Powerpoint and/or Mindjet Mindmanager. Of course, Outlook always wants to be sucking resources and half the time I'm messing around in Access as well. There are a minimum of four applications up and running at any time, with at least one churning out something.

Maybe a four-core eight-threaded processor with a crapload of ram would do the trick. But maybe Windows can't handle it no matter what. I'm running everything off a high-end (M 560 processor at 2.67 ghz) laptop now but running XP with 4gb of RAM. XP is one of the problems, but I notice the same phenomenon with Vista and even Win 7 64 bit. Seems like computers can only do one thing at a time no matter what you throw under the hood.

[enaberif]

Your trying to do all that on a laptop and you wonder why your having issues?

Buy yourself a good i7 with lots of ram and raid a bunch of drives for speed and you should see far less issues.

Rendering is usually ram/processor intensive and database is usually more hard drive.

[LarkStarr]

Roflmao a laptop?! You need a manly desktop to do all that, typically a server or dedicated box does intensive calculations like that. Buy a 2600k with 16 gigs of ram at LEAST, if not consider getting a higher end server box, dual xeons or the like. (4x4gb - assuming the database could and would use all the ram), And an SSD would be even better for the database then RAIDing some drives together, though you would need a mechanical drive for sure with movie rendering for the sheer amount of space required for temporary uncompressed materials. It wouldn't be Windows that couldn't handle the power, it would be the applications themselves, poorly coded or threaded.

Computers can do a lot more then one thing at a time, but not if that one thing requires a lot of resources. Again, use task manager to manage the priorities and cpu affinities of the intensive applications to make the computer a little smoother (at the expense of slower crunches)

[Dzzope]

Firstly, /agree with the posts above.. You need something beefy to do the kind of things your trying to at the same time and ideally seperate boxes.

Multi-tasking is usually much much lighter apps / processes than your looking to do.. ie browse 12 pages and listen to music while in 4 different chats and possibly photoshop or something else too..

Your trying to do stuff that generally have dedicated boxes or VM's for that sole task.

If you only want a new pc and not go down the server route, I will again like in other threads suggest waiting on the new AMD's.. AMD claims they are FAR better at multi-tasking than intels (though intels will crunch numbers faster). And if they are anywhere near as good at it as they claim.. they will be awesome for multi-tasking..

Best solution for you IMO is get yourself a server.. Have it a quad(or more, hex or dual cpu even) core and use 2 vm's... each with 2 cores or one with 1 core the other with 3(as one is much more cpu intensive) and split the available ram in which-ever way you need.. have the VM's on separate hdd's so that you don't have them both trying to do stuff at the same time.. either that or learn to manage your processes better.. basically it will free up your lappy for you to use and the server will sit there quite happily chugging through the numbers and not interfering with your work.