CPU and GPU intensive tasks?

Hi, i want to know what kinds of tasks are cpu and gpu intensive. For example, it appears to me that word processing would be really light on both cpu and gpu. But what about huge powerpoint files? And PDF files?

And playing high definition movies?

And streaming videos via the internet?

I'd appreciate it if someone could teach me how cpu and gpu intensive these tasks can be.. bcuz im thinking bout buying a laptop with Intel® Centrino® 2 ULV Processor Technology (FSB 800MHz) CPU, and Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500 graphics core GPU, and I have no clue how well they would perform.

 

Well, games for one...

But anything that has to do with video, especially high definition video, is going to tax the processor. The GPU will come into play if you have some sort of technology that allows your graphics card to help with the decoding, such as nVidia's PureVideo.

You could also just run a benchmarking program. 3DMark06 is pretty standard.

And if you REALLY want to test out the CPU, load photopshop and open a large 2000x2000 image and run a couple filters on it and play around with the blur tool with a brush size of 1200px

 

Benchmarks:
- CPU: wPrime (multithreaded and utilizes all cores)
- GPU: 3DMark06 and Vantage

Both.... definitely use games, especially ones that are multi-threaded:
- Unreal Tournament 3 will fully utilize the multi-core CPU and videocard.

 

besides games, what other everyday tasks may require a higher cpu and gpu that the samsung currently has?

because my current laptop, which has a core 2 duo t7200 processor, lags a lil when trying to open a 150 slides powerpoint file. No idea what that means really.

 

the opening of the files in powerpoint is not your cpu, it is your harddrive.
Upgrading to a faster harddrive or a SSD, will make loading times practically disappear.
Programs like 2d/3D cad will eat up 100% cpu power when doing complex geometries and renders. In rendering a faster cpu is always a good thing, so the more cpu power you have the less time it takes to render.
I do not game, but in my experience, MAYA, 3DSMAX, V-ray, will use everything your cpu has to make a nice rendered image.

K-TRON

 

I have no idea what cad, rendering, MAYA 3DSMAX, V-ray even mean lol. So it prolly means i wont be using the cpu that intensively..

Data transferring, downloading, uploading, streaming video would all be dependent on the speed of the harddrive then? How much cpu usage is used doing these?

 

Download, upload and streaming are tasks for your network card and connection You wont stream faster if you got a better cpu

 

What is the rest of your current hardware besides the T7200. HDDs have improved a lot in the last couple of years. For example, compare your HDD with the WD5000BEVT. Or would you invest in an SSD?

I suggest that you use the monitoring page of RMClock to see what your current CPU is doing during various tasks. You will get a graph of the CPU speed. How much of the time does it exceed 1.4GHz? It is those peaks which will get spread out if the CPU is limited to 1.4GHz. However, the new Intel chipset in the X360 has a faster memory bandwidth than whatever you have now and this will give performance a slight boost.

John