Hello,

I have a question I hope someone can help me with.

I have two machines. I bought a dual cpu Dell to play with.

I am burning dvds right now on both machines. The same dvd. Running top gave me a question or two. I use icewm on both machines. I ran top because the cpu meter on the 2800 was solid red and the dual Dell was pretty much black. I wanted to see if it was broken somehow and not reporting the cpu usage correctly.

When I burn dvds using k3b and run top, I get the following numbers for cpu usage. They flutcuate but I got these numbers.

Dual 750 Mhz 1.5% user 2.8% system 0% nice 95.7% idle
AMD Sempron 2800 1.7% user 87.4% system 0% nice 10.9% idle

The 2800 system will drop to 43% every so often but only for a second. The dual never approaches that high a number for system usage. I watched it for a while and it didn't go over 15% system.

The 2800 is very sluggish when buring dvds. It was when I ran Win98se too. After talking to a few other people I was just under the impression that burning dvds was cpu intensive. I have run hdparm on both machines and the speed of the 2800 seems very good. It is much higher (2-2.5X) than the dual cpu Dell.

Why does the dual cpu system show such low cpu usage? Is it the 2.6.X kernel? Is it possible that k3b is wrong and the burn speed is much lower? The burn time seems about the same although I have not clocked it. It for sure doesn't take a lot longer to burn if any at all.

Both machines have a nec burner, dual layer. The Dell has a newer model. I can probably get both model numbers if anyone believes that may be the difference.

The machine specs:

2800
ECS KT-600A motherboard.
AMD Sempron 2800
Kingston Value RAM PC3200
160 Gig Seagate HD
512 Meg Swap
Nvidia BFG 256 Meg video Card
Debian Sarge 2.4.27-2-k7 kernel

Dell
Precision 410
2-750Mhz PIII
1 Gig RAM
27 Gig HD
1 Gig Swap
Old ATI video Card (16 or 32 meg RAM)
Debian Testing 2.6.12-1-686-smp kernel

Thanks in advance for any light you can shine on this.

Steve

I have a dual layer nec and a dual core cpu but I haven't checked the cpu usage while using k3b. My only idea is to make sure that dma is active for the burner on your 2800, but since you know about hdpram I am guessing that you have already looked at that?