I Can Not Manage This Task
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Thank you kindly. I do not fall in the happy group. If the machine were to deal w/ no more processes than cores than of course it is easy to be so happy. However such is not the case. There are tens hundreds perhaps even thousands of processes on my 4 Core machine. -Kind Regards
Right...but you won't ever get a single core dedicated to a single process, even if you could get 1:1 process:core ratio. And not all running processes have something to do all the time, so even though you have more processes than cores, and each core gets to do some work that a process needs to have taken care of...you'll hardly ever see all cores busy at 100%. In theory, if you were to add up the CPU utilization from all processes at a given time, *plus* the System Idle Process entry shown in Task Manager...you might get close to 100%. Are you thinking about this in terms of "caching is good, because unused memory is wasted memory"? I'd say it's not so with CPUs...pushing CPUs to their limit, all the time, would draw a lot of power, and generate a lot of heat.
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Right...but you won't ever get a single core dedicated to a single process, even if you could get 1:1 process:core ratio. And not all running processes have something to do all the time, so even though you have more processes than cores, and each core gets to do some work that a process needs to have taken care of...you'll hardly ever see all cores busy at 100%. In theory, if you were to add up the CPU utilization from all processes at a given time, *plus* the System Idle Process entry shown in Task Manager...you might get close to 100%. Are you thinking about this in terms of "caching is good, because unused memory is wasted memory"? I'd say it's not so with CPUs...pushing CPUs to their limit, all the time, would draw a lot of power, and generate a lot of heat.
Yes I am thinking in terms of "if 23% is good 99.999% is better." I am aware of thermal limitations but do not know if such is the reason for the 23%. Should I assume the remaining 77% of the time the CPU is twiddling its thumbs? As for my system Task Manager at this moment shows 0% for almost all processes and a quick guess of the sum of the others is as reported id est 30%. Kind Regards
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obermd wrote:
So if a thread is waiting for the disk, it's not using the CPU
Just to be difficult *cough* I/O Completion Ports *cough* Seriously though, I'm being a bit pedantic, but on modern OSs and hardware so many things are asynchronous without even using threads that a single thread can potentially be using multiple resources virtually at the same time, and when it does enter a wait state, it will be woken up by the first ready resource it's waiting on. That changes the calculus of what you say in terms of how it actually plays out, even if what you say is ... "basically" true. In essence, you're not wrong, but you're simplifying, maybe to a fault.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Do you know how thread waits are actually implemented in the kernel? Does the thread actually stop processing instructions, IOW, is the wait hardware based? I've heard the term used "spinning" related to threads, so I wonder if a waiting thread simply polls a value and if it's not the value it wants, it loops.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Do you know how thread waits are actually implemented in the kernel? Does the thread actually stop processing instructions, IOW, is the wait hardware based? I've heard the term used "spinning" related to threads, so I wonder if a waiting thread simply polls a value and if it's not the value it wants, it loops.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I mean, as far as I know, a kernel can wait and awake on a number of different conditions, some of them directly interrupt related, as in your drive finishes fetching, and it triggers a CPU interrupt, which eventually wakes up a thread to dispatch the waiting data. Another option is the scheduler puts the waiting thread to sleep, and awakens it on a software condition (such as a mutex being released) as opposed to an interrupt. When a thread waits, the scheduler does not schedule it for execution. It is effectively "asleep", not spinning a loop or anything. It does not poll. If it did, 3000 threads would quickly overwhelm the kernel.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Greeting Kind Regards I have no experience with threads. May I please posit an inquiry as to their use for one of my current projects. In particular I am currently running console level test code which runs autonomously needing no user interaction which is estimated to run for several days. It is of the form below. test_0(); test_1(); test_2(); ... The calls do not depend on any before and share no resource other than CPU. They merely perform integer arithmetic. They are called in sequence just as shown. No call to test_x is performed until the one prior is complete. So my inquiry is would the overall test complete sooner if each of the calls were in its own thread? Kind Regards
Up to a point, yes - that point being the number of threads being roughly equal to the number of virtual or logical "cpu cores" you have (hyperthreading effectively doubles that number on many CPUs because each core - p-core at least can run two threads). Any threads created after that are no longer truly concurrent, but may still make sense to create in some cases if they'll be waiting (I/O bound) - that's not the case with your current situation which is all CPU bound. Bottomline is if your chip has hyperthreading and 4 cores it can run 8 threads concurrently. After that it is divvying up one or more cores to do multiple tasks, which is extra overhead without extra benefit, again, in your situation. What I would do is use System.Threading.ThreadPool and simply call QueueUserWorkItem to run each of those functions. Let the ThreadPool figure out when to schedule.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
I had the same question about CPU useage, as seen through the Task Manager window, a few years back but didn't get really curious about it until I got a new computer running Windows 10. Because of the number of cores mainly and the uptick in the amount of memory I had at my disposal, I began to work on this new machine with Task Manager always open. This new view was quite an upgrade incidently; the more cores and the more memory, the more windows-in-windows ... some what of a phenomemon. Recall back in the days of using that Borland C-compiler being able to watch a debugging session (through WYSYWG perhaps/even!) after having set a few stops. All those glittering gold flashes. Very entertaining. Anyway, but it wasn't until I discovered Task Scheduler that my eyes were really opened! And to address what I think is the issue with background processes "ready" to dart into action. Notice all the tasks there in TS primed to go off. Many other shadow processes can be seen scratching their sigils on the various system folders. There's C:\Windows\temp for one. Always a side-show of files of unknown origin entraining themselves on the retina. There's AppData\Local\tmp ... for a good time tune in to that channel; what I found useful is just to delete the content of these folders now and again. Truth be told, my start-up time for Windows 10 went instantly from more than five minutes to a blazing minute or two after realizing that I could do that willy-nilly and get away with disabling some of the task scheduled by ad hoc installers, after being watchful for a while there too. [EDIT]: Let me also add that under Computer Managment Services, Stopping processes that are questionable, either by switching their Startup Types to Manual (from Running) or Disabled, doesn't always show itself accurately. For instance, when setting a service to Manual it can still start up on it's own (unknown process). And not only that but with the Computer Managment console open, the Start Type switch to Running (at the behest of the unknown process) will even ONLY show Manual. [END EDIT] So I guess my answer to the "why" is "Because it's there" :)
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At this moment Task Manager is reporting : Utilization 23% Speed 3.84 GHz Base Speed: 3.41 GHz Cores: 4 Logical processors: 8 Processes 356 Threads 4960 Handles 189319 The graph of each of the eight logical processors shows more or less the 23%. w/ so much to do why is the CPU deciding to utilize only 23% of itself?
Many operations on the motherboard do not require direct CPU utilization. Reading/Writing to disk files (HD drives have rotational delays, SSDs have bandwidth limitations depending on read or write, Pulling data from the Internet, moving data to and from your video card.) Many use hardware DMA (Direct Memory Access) to move the data and the CPU has to go idle while the transfers are taking place. Another area that can cause CPU to idle is if you exceed your physical memory and start using virtual memory. The the operating system gets involved in swapping data to and from disk and memory to give you the illusion of more main memory. Some opcode level instructions don't like it when the data they are referencing is beyond a certain physical distance. This can cause stalls in the pre-execution decoding that the CPU does and cause flushes of opcodes that have been decoded and stacked in the execution pipeline. Same goes with generated code that has an abundance of branches. Branch prediction can falter and cause CPU stalls as it has to reload the pipeline with opcodes from the target location. Depends on what your computer is processing. Are you experiencing slow response (stuttering pointer movement, keyboard lag)? That's all I can think of "off the top of my head" I am sure there are more reasons for low CPU utilization.
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
threads and cores, gentlemen, threads and cores /penguin
------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
I might have missed the question, but if "what does N% of time in Task Manager for a task mean" This just random-(semi educated guess) - the amount of time or executions that that task is allocated in a set amount of time. again, over simplified, but A single CPU core, only runs 1 execution at a time. There is a scheduler that orders the so so many things to execute. So over 1 second it can go oh, task 123 has done 103456 executions, then some maths to say that was .2 seconds, or 20% of 1 second. The amount of time it uses I am not sure. It could be in milliseconds. Or what ever the CPU make decides for that method endpoint to give back to the windows operating system. Add on multiple cores, and the Windows main Task Manager - 100% is total across the cores. If instead you are saying you are running performance tests, and not hitting over 60. Change the performance test that you are running. The program could have 100 threads, but only able to run them across 2 cores, instead of 4. i7 does not indicate fully what the CPU is. Also can add in GPU along with the other comments on here, on what could be limiting and having the cpu waiting on. Idle is not bad. Idle is good, it means that the cpu has more head room then the application can use. Or application needs changing to utilise more, which parallel programming is hard.
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
If you want to see what happens when the CPU runs at 100%, may I recommend the following tool: Free Stress Test Tool HeavyLoad | JAM Software[^] I've used it for a number of reasons, the most recent being to help answer the question "have I installed the replacement heatpipe and fan in my laptop properly, and has it made things better."
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
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Yes I am thinking in terms of "if 23% is good 99.999% is better." I am aware of thermal limitations but do not know if such is the reason for the 23%. Should I assume the remaining 77% of the time the CPU is twiddling its thumbs? As for my system Task Manager at this moment shows 0% for almost all processes and a quick guess of the sum of the others is as reported id est 30%. Kind Regards
BernardIE5317 wrote:
Yes I am thinking in terms of "if 23% is good 99.999% is better."
That's describing a 4-core system where one process running at 100%, and whoever wrote that program didn't bother to try to write it as multi-threaded. It may or may not be possible to do that. Or maybe it was decided it was just not worth it, given the overall time expected for the task to complete, vs the complexity involved in writing a well-behaved multi-threaded application.
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Greetings Kind Regards May I please inquire of your kind selves who of course are much more knowledgeable than myself meaning of Task Manager CPU Utilization reported percentage. I wish to know what it is in fact a measure of. All the answers I have found on-line are along the lines of "The percentage you see (e.g., 25%) represents the proportion of the CPU’s capacity that is actively in use. It indicates how much of the CPU’s processing power is currently allocated to running tasks and processes." Web search of term "capacity" seems to result as identical to speed id est bits or perhaps instructions per second similarly for "processing power". I am motivated to this inquiry as my intel i7 reported % is usually mid 60s even whilst performing several simultaneous tasks exempli gratia a build and two console programs each running random testing. Other than not knowing what in fact is being measured I do not understand why the CPU would not run at 100% as I assume doing so would complete assigned tasks sooner rather than later. Perhaps it is a matter of temperature throttling. My temperatures are typically mid 60s. So to paraphrase inquiry if reported % is exempli gratia 50 does this mean the CPU is sitting idle half the time? If so why? Thank You Kindly
The Task Manager inserts a task of it's own, with a stub that includes a known computation - the percentage for performance is the relationship between the CPU time the stub is allocated, vs the other competing processes. There are a number of reasons why you might see less than 100% CPU. One reason is concurrency. Not all tasks can proceed in parallel. Or the software might not effectively split the tasks up. Sometimes a task will need to wait for something else to complete. If that happens a lot, then it affects CPU utilization. Some tasks are IO or network bound. In those cases the CPU waits for the network or peripheral to respond which also affects the CPU utilization. Sometimes it's just poorly written software. Hope that helps.
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In large part, because your computer has multiple cores. You cannot just break a task down to use all cores. Add
2 + 2using two threads to divide the task between two cores. You can't. So if you add 2+2 your CPU will not spike to 100. If it had two cores, the best you'd get is 50%, 4 cores - 25%, etc.Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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There's another weird bit where some chips can't run all cores at full speed. I think the point is to have some low-power efficiency cores to dedicate to certain kinds of tasks. Not real sure how common that is and it's a newer deal.
Actually it's getting more common. Both Intel and ARM chips use multiple different class of core in their CPU. Intel uses two, and calls them "p-cores" (performance cores) and "e-cores" (efficient? core) The reason is heat, size and power consumption vs usage habits. The idea is that people don't use each core the same way. This way you have more powerful cores that kick in while needed, but you can run things off the e-core(s) most of the time ARM pioneered it** because phone advancements made it almost necessary. Intel caught on to what ARM was doing and was like "Excellent! I'll take four!" ** they may not technically be the first - i don't know, but they're the first major modern CPU vendor I've seen that does it.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Actually it's getting more common. Both Intel and ARM chips use multiple different class of core in their CPU. Intel uses two, and calls them "p-cores" (performance cores) and "e-cores" (efficient? core) The reason is heat, size and power consumption vs usage habits. The idea is that people don't use each core the same way. This way you have more powerful cores that kick in while needed, but you can run things off the e-core(s) most of the time ARM pioneered it** because phone advancements made it almost necessary. Intel caught on to what ARM was doing and was like "Excellent! I'll take four!" ** they may not technically be the first - i don't know, but they're the first major modern CPU vendor I've seen that does it.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
That all seems to mesh very well with my reality and understandings. :) I've just not had the expendable moola to grab new silicon in a bit and keeping Intel offerings straight in one's head is an exercise in futility. Nothing against AMD (though ARM, because of its sordid history with Windows can kick rocks). I just like Intel because it's literally all I've ever had and there's just a degree of comfort/security (likely a false sense). I have built machines for others with AMD Ryzen though and they seem to have worked out just fine. All this does seem to make the bit of calculating total processor usage a bit more of a complex algorithm though, if not a near-useless metric in context?
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That all seems to mesh very well with my reality and understandings. :) I've just not had the expendable moola to grab new silicon in a bit and keeping Intel offerings straight in one's head is an exercise in futility. Nothing against AMD (though ARM, because of its sordid history with Windows can kick rocks). I just like Intel because it's literally all I've ever had and there's just a degree of comfort/security (likely a false sense). I have built machines for others with AMD Ryzen though and they seem to have worked out just fine. All this does seem to make the bit of calculating total processor usage a bit more of a complex algorithm though, if not a near-useless metric in context?
Most of those metrics are useless by themselves. As hardware gets more complicated, so do the numbers, and the circumstances we find those numbers presenting themselves in. I've found if I want to bench a system, I find what other people are using to bench, and then I bench my own using a baseline. The ones I use right now are: Running Cyberpunk Bench (DLSS and Raytracing benchmark) Running TimeSpy (General DirectX 12 and CPU gaming perf bench) And Cinebench R23 - for CPU performance That won't tell you everything, and the first two of those benches are very gaming oriented, and focus on GPU performance. What running them tells me is that my desktop and laptop are pretty comparable at the resolutions I play at on each, but my lappy slightly beats my desktop in multicore performance What I'd like is for other people to compile the same large C++ codebase i am on other machines, which would give me a nice real world metric for the purpose i built this machine for (C++ compile times) As it is, I would buy an AMD laptop (power efficiency), but intel is my go to for desktops at this point, primarily due to general purpose single core performance. My laptop is also an intel, but if i bought again, I'd have waited for the AMD version of it and got better battery life.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Most of those metrics are useless by themselves. As hardware gets more complicated, so do the numbers, and the circumstances we find those numbers presenting themselves in. I've found if I want to bench a system, I find what other people are using to bench, and then I bench my own using a baseline. The ones I use right now are: Running Cyberpunk Bench (DLSS and Raytracing benchmark) Running TimeSpy (General DirectX 12 and CPU gaming perf bench) And Cinebench R23 - for CPU performance That won't tell you everything, and the first two of those benches are very gaming oriented, and focus on GPU performance. What running them tells me is that my desktop and laptop are pretty comparable at the resolutions I play at on each, but my lappy slightly beats my desktop in multicore performance What I'd like is for other people to compile the same large C++ codebase i am on other machines, which would give me a nice real world metric for the purpose i built this machine for (C++ compile times) As it is, I would buy an AMD laptop (power efficiency), but intel is my go to for desktops at this point, primarily due to general purpose single core performance. My laptop is also an intel, but if i bought again, I'd have waited for the AMD version of it and got better battery life.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I can tell you that if you aren't already, making sure all the related bits ride on SSD would be one of the most huge things I think might speed up linkage.
That's why I run two Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drives - fastest on the market. I also run my ram at 6000MHz/CL32 - stock spec for intel on DDR5 is like 4800 or something. My CPU on this machine is an i5-13600K. I would have gone with the i9-13900K but I built this to be an air cooled system, and 250W was too rich for my blood - at least with this cooler - and this i5 is a sleeper with single core performance comparable to the i9. I have the i9-13900HX in my laptop - which is basically the same as the desktop version but retargeted to 180W instead of 250W.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That's why I run two Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drives - fastest on the market. I also run my ram at 6000MHz/CL32 - stock spec for intel on DDR5 is like 4800 or something. My CPU on this machine is an i5-13600K. I would have gone with the i9-13900K but I built this to be an air cooled system, and 250W was too rich for my blood - at least with this cooler - and this i5 is a sleeper with single core performance comparable to the i9. I have the i9-13900HX in my laptop - which is basically the same as the desktop version but retargeted to 180W instead of 250W.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
What you may want to try regarding the RAM... It's a real PITA, because you'll lock/bluescreen your machine, but rather than aiming for just the highest clock-rate possible, try to tighten the latency timings or look for some sticks with the most excellent latency timings. These things tend to be somewhat inversely related (clock speed : CASL/others). I won't be so upset I just got a corptop with an i5 then (coming from an i7).
