Dual-Core system not so good for playback?

[papilio]

An earlier reply to my "File-size reduction suggestions and MC H.264 woes" suggested

"50% of the CPU on a Hyperthreading or Dual-Core system means that you've maxed out one of the cores... meaning you have a singlethreaded decoder, and your CPU is too slow to play it at full speed." (Discouraging, but I thanked him for setting me straight on that.)

I'd consider selling the Dell XPS 410 if anyone could suggest a/several machines (fast as possible, but within the general price-range of the Dell), which would get me away from the above-mentioned problem.? BTW, in case it's relevant, I'm using an nVidia 7600 GT.

One more thing -- don't the 2 panels on the TaskMan's performance tab display the CPU usage of each core? If I'm correct about this, then both cores appear to be sharing the load *relatively* evenly.


Thanks,
-- Michael

[foxyshadis]

They appear that way because the thread hops from one cpu to another. It's not exactly random, but it's close enough if you have a lot of other background tasks running on the system, even if they're not doing anything, and since it chooses 10-20 times a second, the graphs get smoothed over a bit unless you use something high performance, like perfmon. Switch the graph view to one for all cpus, and watch it stay pegged right around 50% the whole time, whereas a real multithreaded decoder will jump around.