Multitasking with Quads

[echo75]

So i get a quad core overclock it but then when i run my AVG scan while playing World of warcraft i can still see it affects my gameplay and its not as smooth as it should. ok, there is 1 or 2 firefox pages open too , 2 windows explorer but nothing serious. i do notice however that its the antivirus scan that affects performance.

I look at the cores abd none of them are running more than 30% , why is that so?

i thot that my quad CPU can now allocate tasks so each core manages a task without interfering with the other cores business.

At least multitasking smoothness is supposed to be thier strong side isnt it? is there something i didnt set properly somewhere like core affinity or something?

[twicksisted]

you can set processor affinity (set which cores the programs run on).... so that AVG uses one or two cores and your game uses the other 2...

also, your harddisks could be affecting the game... as that scan will use up a lot of disk time.

[DanTheBanjoman]

It's not your CPU, it's most likely the harddrive.

[echo75]

so if i am scaning the same harddisk that my game is running from then i cant but see effects?

since its not my cpu, so no need to adjust processor afinity i guess, right?

[psyko12]

Yup definitely the scanning of the hdd where the game is installed is affected.
Was playing a game and forgot that my virus scan was running atm and felt lag on the game.

[Cybrnook2002]

well, its not the affinity thats effecting you. Its the fact that AVG is going through your files one by one while your game is loading files from the same HD. It has make a queue for your files and they become ready as they are available. Not to mention you also have your pagefile im sure running one the same drive, so the game is also loading files from this section as well. You could have fastest super processor in the world and still feel the effects of being limited by your drive.