Optimization

[PonyBoy225]

Here is my build:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370P-D3

CPU: Intel i3-8100 Coffee Lake (4 Cores @ 3.60GHz)

GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1050 2GT OC

RAM: Ballistix Sport 2666MHz 8gb (16GB total, dual channel)

Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80 Plus Certified

Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 1TB Hard Drive

 

So, my question is, what is your guys' opinion on the best BIOS settings to enable or disable for my build? I want it to be as fast as possible, the activities I use it for is occasional gaming (Warframe & CSGO), and I am trying to develop my own chatbot using python and want to be able to make the database & training data as fast as possible as well as actually training the model using Tensorflow (The GPU version). I am not able to buy an SSD although I know that would drastically speed up the process (the problems of being broke as a joke). Thermals are not an issue as I have a hyper 212 evo cpu cooler with dual fans installed, as well as the dual fan version of the GTX 1050. Any help with other things other than the BIOS would be greatly appreciated as I do not want to wait months (may be an exaggeration) to train the model. Any help with things like tightening the timings for my ram and messing with it's voltage or anything else would be great. However, the CPU I have has a max RAM frequency of 2400MHz so overclocking the RAM's frequency wouldn't do much as far as I know so I'm focused on timings and maybe frequency.

 

The data I am using is from a post on reddit where the creator posted a dataset for all of the publicly available comments from 2007-2015 here on reddit. The total number of comments in the entire collection is 1.7 Billion. I am using this data to filter through those files and create a database containing specific information organized in a specific way in a table. If you are curious to know exactly what I am doing, I am sort of following along with sentdex's tutorial on youtube or you can comment below or shoot me a pm and I'd be happy to explain.

 

Note: I am not including Sentdex's youtube video to promote his channel (but huge thanks to him) it is just in case people are wondering exactly what I am trying to optimize. Thanks!

[minibois]

You could still try overclocking the memory, the CPU can take up to 2400Mhz, but annoying beyond that is an overclock done by the motherboard. You don't want to up the timings too much though.

 

Other than that, there is not much that can realistically be done to speed up the system (I'm of course not going to mention the SSD... But that really would help).

[SammyV]

For your specific task and system, there is very little that can be 'optimized' with BIOS/hardware settings to produce any meaningful increase in performance. This is all about how you implement your program: appropriate data structures, multithreading and minimizing I/O operations are the obvious candidates.

[PonyBoy225]

7 minutes ago, Minibois said:

You could still try overclocking the memory, the CPU can take up to 2400Mhz, but annoying beyond that is an overclock done by the motherboard. You don't want to up the timings too much though.

 

Other than that, there is not much that can realistically be done to speed up the system (I'm of course not going to mention the SSD... But that really would help).

I may just take the SSD out of my macbook pro and only use the hard drive I have in it instead of both, but then again the SSD I have is only 128GB .

[PonyBoy225]

7 minutes ago, SammyV said:

For your specific task and system, there is very little that can be 'optimized' with BIOS/hardware settings to produce any meaningful increase in performance. This is all about how you implement your program: appropriate data structures, multithreading and minimizing I/O operations are the obvious candidates.

Can you provide an example of how to implement multithreading and minimizing the I/O operations? It would be greatly appreciated .

[SpookyCitrus]

3 minutes ago, PonyBoy225 said:

I may just take the SSD out of my macbook pro and only use the hard drive I have in it instead of both, but then again the SSD I have is only 128GB .

Is the SSD in your macbook pro compatible with your motherboard, depending on what kind it is some Apple SSDs are like M.2s but don't have an M.2 interface so you would have to get a PCI-E adapter in order to use it. 

[PonyBoy225]

4 minutes ago, SpookyCitrus said:

Is the SSD in your macbook pro compatible with your motherboard, depending on what kind it is some Apple SSDs are like M.2s but don't have an M.2 interface so you would have to get a PCI-E adapter in order to use it. 

It's compatible, I have an older macbook pro (mid 2010 15") so all i'd have to do is reformat the disk to ntfs in order to use it but im not sure if it would be enough space. Maybe just use it to "speed up" my hard drive?

[SpookyCitrus]

1 minute ago, PonyBoy225 said:

It's compatible, I have an older macbook pro (mid 2010 15") so all i'd have to do is reformat the disk to ntfs in order to use it but im not sure if it would be enough space. Maybe just use it to "speed up" my hard drive?

Honestly SSDs are so cheap now that I feel it would be more worth it to by a modern 480GB for $50 or a 240Gb for $30 then use a 9 year old apple "SSD". The old one from you mac would improve it a bit but honestly I feel the difference would be negligible. Where as a new SSD would be 3 to 4 times faster. It's night and day how quickly everything from starting the pc, opening applications and documents, to shutting the computer down is improved from a standard mechanical drive.

[SammyV]

47 minutes ago, PonyBoy225 said:

Can you provide an example of how to implement multithreading and minimizing the I/O operations?

Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with Python or it's API/libraries to give you straight examples of these, but I can provide the basic principles (in case you are not familiar with them):

 

Multithreading is, essentially, performing operations in parallel by spawning multiple threads with pre-determined tasks. Say you have a large collection of objects that you want to manipulate in a certain way, as fast as possible. Instead of processing them sequentially in a for-loop for example, you can create several processing threads, each with their own range of objects from the collection -- many pairs of hands do the work faster than one.

 

I/O operations are slow, especially on mechanical hard drives, so you want to avoid accessing external I/O devices as much as possible. The fast and dirty way to minimize I/O operations would be to read as much of data on disk to memory before performing any operations on that data. That of course means you need to use more memory to temporarily store the data into objects/variables before processing, but you eliminate overhead from a huge number of separate disk accesses.

 

You might also want to look at efficient data structures for string and character data, such as tries and packed tries.

 

These are very common topics, I'm sure you can find lots of clear examples and tutorials for python just by googling or heading to stackoverflow.

[PonyBoy225]

2 hours ago, SpookyCitrus said:

Honestly SSDs are so cheap now that I feel it would be more worth it to by a modern 480GB for $50 or a 240Gb for $30 then use a 9 year old apple "SSD". The old one from you mac would improve it a bit but honestly I feel the difference would be negligible. Where as a new SSD would be 3 to 4 times faster. It's night and day how quickly everything from starting the pc, opening applications and documents, to shutting the computer down is improved from a standard mechanical drive.

The SSD is newish, I got it free from my stepfather's work. Not sure the exact model but I'm sure it is fast enough.

[seagate_surfer]

18 hours ago, PonyBoy225 said:

The SSD is newish, I got it free from my stepfather's work. Not sure the exact model but I'm sure it is fast enough.

Run CrystalDisk, it usually shows the model number at the top...

[Mira Yurizaki]

21 hours ago, PonyBoy225 said:

So, my question is, what is your guys' opinion on the best BIOS settings to enable or disable for my build?

Just to add an answer to this question: Messing with BIOS outside of setting CPU and RAM speed settings does almost nothing to help with performance once the OS takes over. All the BIOS settings are doing is configuring the hardware.