I've got an old PC outperforming it's new replacement. Any suggestions on what I could do to alleviate this?

I've recently purchased a new fairly powerful PC (when compared to the PC I used in the past). The old machine used a Xeon E3-1245 V2 @ 3.40GHz with 32GB RAM while the new machine uses an i9-9900K @ 3.60 GHz with 64GB RAM. The old machine has a typical 1TB standard drive while the new machine has an NVMe 1 TB drive.

I use the machine ffmpeg for A/V editing and for entertainment, I usually go with iTunes.

I am having 2 problems with this new PC.

• First, ffmpeg (and all other software) is running noticeably slower on the new PC than it did on the previous PC.
• Second, iTunes downloads are taking about twice as long to finish as they do on the old PC on the same network.

A friend suggested I use System Explorer to compare the resource use between the PCs. It shows the old PC using up 100% of the CPU (after setting ffmpeg to realtime) while the new PC hovers around 50%, at best, even set to realtime.

If the processes were finishing in equal times on both machines, I would assume ffmpeg was maxed out, but it runs faster on the older PC so that doesn't seem to be the issue, same thing with iTunes downloads.

What could I be missing that's causing this much more powerful PC to work slower than the weaker PC?

The Xeon is a server-class CPU, The i9 is desktop class. Perhaps this affects compute-intensive tasks such as ffmpeg.

The Xeon has 4 cores and 8 threads, the i9 has 8 cores and 16 threads. More cores/threads is only a benefit if the workload has significant concurrency or is designed to take advantage of that number of threads. There may be some reason why your main task is not able to use more than 8 threads.

Your iTunes downloads are probably greatly affected by the details of the storage medium. For example, HDD speeds, numbers of HDDs, maybe amount of cache in the HDD etc (your OS has to read stuff while your iTunes download is writing)

I would

• Use the performance monitor to see how the workload is split across the processor cores.
• Review the HDD specifications. If the new machine is using SSDs it ought to be faster.
• Maybe do some performance tests on the HDD/SSD.
• Look at the number of other background tasks (AV, vendor-supplied software, etc).
• Check that the new machine is connected to the Internet in the same way as the old - this generally shouldn't be an issue but if one is using GB Ethernet and the other using a congested WiFi channel - maybe that would be worth checking.