i5 3337U feels slow

When I'm installing programs, Task Manger and CPU-Z will both show that the CPU has turbo'd up to between 2.3-2.7 Ghz, but the system still feels subjectively slow. At first I thought the disk was the bottleneck, but it seems that throughout the installation process, the SSD hovers between 5-10% active time.

Is there something wrong with the CPU, or are my expectations simply too high for a ULV chip?

 

What exactly are you doing on the system?

ULV's aren't that fast either.

 

There's nothing wrong with the CPU. Dual-core CPU's are slow. They're basically enough to use Microsoft Office and other daily tasking programs.

 

I have been using i5-3337U and nothing feels slow about. The quad cores are only faster if a program use more than 2 cores, but in single treated programs a dual core even faster due to higher clocks.

 

What hdd do you have, a slow one can really cause performance problems.

John.

 

Your cpu is not slow - but subjectively, it may feel like that if you're used to Intel quad core platforms - even when just installing programs. Which programs does it seem slow installing?

Which SSD do you have? What capacity? Have you OP'd it? Do you have Intel RST 12.8 installed? Along with the proper chipset/other drivers?

What O/S are you running? How much RAM? Have you 'tweaked' it for SSD use at all?


The disk utilization hovering at 5-10% doesn't mean anything if the SATA (IRST) driver isn't the current/proper one for your chipset/ATA controller.


Give us some more info please.

 

What installation process? Some Windows updates can be horrendously slow.

 

I've noticed it occasionally ever since I got this system a couple days ago, but the shocking difference came from installing Photoshop. On my desktop, Photoshop took maybe 1 minute to install. On this tablet I was waiting for nearly 10 minutes.

The SSD in question is a Toshiba THNSNF064GMCS. Being an OEM-exclusive drive, there is absolutely no information about or even much reviewer interest in this drive whatsoever. Tweaktown did a review of its 256GB relative, but results from the bigger drives rarely scale down to smaller capacities.

 

Here's the data on that SSD. Looks decent: http://storage.toshiba.eu/cms/media/products/datasheets/THNSNFxxxGxxS_datasheet.pdf

 

Actually, its quite possible what you are experiencing is real. I've realized recently I've spent too much time on High performance systems that when I happened to use my Aunt's machine which I set up a while ago (Sandy Bridge i3 @ 3.1ghz with my old Intel 320 120gb) over Christmas, it did feel noticeably slower, though definitely not the level of SSD vs HDD. Stuff tended to "glide" in instead of instantaneously opening plus there were moments where the was about a 1-2 second pause before an event happens. Granted, that system also had relatively slow 1333mhz RAM so maybe part of your slowdown is the fact your machine has a 64bit single channel interface (which is common in ULV systems).
I find that once you remove the I/O bottleneck in most systems (by installing an SSD), you tend to "feel" the CPU speed a lot more, even now, my desktop has a slow Plextor M5s 256gb but it is much much snappier than my Laptop (W110er with a Samsung 840 pro and i7-3610m) since the i5-2500k is at 4.5ghz, so I guess the magic words here are Single Thread Performance.

 

Although the 5-10% CPU activity wouldn't make sense. It might in a quad core with hyper threading when 1 out of 8 cores (even though 4 are partial cores, Windows still sees the system as 8 cores) would be 12.5%. But on a dual core (with hyperthreading), with single threaded performance taxed it should show about 25%.

The SSD is 50K/25K read/write 4K IOPS and 500MB/s sequential, so there shouldn't be any issues there.

 

Apologies if I wasn't clear initially - the 5-10% is SSD activity. CPU activity is usually hovering around 30-50% when I notice that the system is sluggish.

 

Ok, that makes more sense then. The processor is, well, processing. Although ten minutes seems bit long, although I would expect it to be 2-3 times that of a regular full voltage CPU.

 

Sound as though it is only using one thread (30-50% utilization). If so, this task wouldn't be much faster in a quad core Ivy Bridge unless it has a much higher clock rate.

 

Could be a number of reasons. Check RAM usage, is it paging out? Antivirus program ? Disk nearly full, alignment issues?

 

Not sure about that, you're talking about desktop full voltage vs laptop ULV (according to OP's later post). 3.7-3.9GHz vs 2.3-2.7GHz, more cache, and a much higher TDP to maintain peak performance for longer. Not to mention it is a tablet which likely has limited I/O performance compared with even a laptop counterpart.