[Discuss-gnuradio] Upgrade (downgrade?) to a Q6600 CPU

[Marcus D. Leech]

I've been running my radio astronomer receiver software for a couple of
years on a Dual-core Pentium P25 CPU, with
  2GB of 533 Ram, with the CPU clocked at 3.2Ghz.   This has allowed me
to do 8Mhz dual-polarization continuum and
  spectrum, with very few overruns (uOuOuO)

I "upgraded" this system to a Quad-core Q6600, with 4Gb of 667Mhz
ram.    It's only able to do 4.5Mhz in situations where
  the previous system could handle 8Mhz.  This is, of course, a big
disappointment, since I was hoping that multiple cores
  would increase the ability for me to add more complex signal
processing, but maintain the same bandwidth as the old system.

Apart from the obvious hardware upgrades (move to a MOBO that can
overclock the Q6600 into the 3Ghz region, and use
  dual-channel RAM), are there software tweaks (I'm thinking
particularly of USB buffering or something) that would allow me to get
better
  performance, without overruns?

Note that I'm using the latest trunk code, as of a few days ago.

-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator, Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org