I grabbed an old PC from my collection that was originally built with left over / junk box parts, maybe 5 years ago. I tossed in one of those "Anniversary Edition" Pentium chips when they came out in 2016. They were well regarded as a good bang for the buck chip due to their overclocking performance. I used the machine for a while, then it wound up on a shelf where it has been for at least two years.
On paper it should be the worst performer I have despite being over clocked. It has no video card, only on chip Intel Pentium video, two old hard drives and an old Intel 180 GB SSD boot disk. There are two unknown brand DDR3 Dimms, but they do have fancy heat spreaders attached.....so what does it Passmark at?
The total performance is 52%, with a wide spread in the individual numbers. Passmark's "book spec" for a Pentium G3258 at stock speed is 3895. Mine with an unknown overclock (believed to be in the 4GHz range) is 4499, putting the CPU in the 38th percentile. The on chip 2D graphics are a respectable 91% while the 3D graphics score a blazing 29%. Memory is 85% while the aging SSD gets 62%.
Sometime in the near future I plan on dropping a core i5-4690K into this PC with no other changes to see what happens. That chip was pulled from a dead motherboard about a year ago then forgotten, until the "basement computer store" convinced me to open up all sorts of junk boxes.
On paper it should be the worst performer I have despite being over clocked. It has no video card, only on chip Intel Pentium video, two old hard drives and an old Intel 180 GB SSD boot disk. There are two unknown brand DDR3 Dimms, but they do have fancy heat spreaders attached.....so what does it Passmark at?
The total performance is 52%, with a wide spread in the individual numbers. Passmark's "book spec" for a Pentium G3258 at stock speed is 3895. Mine with an unknown overclock (believed to be in the 4GHz range) is 4499, putting the CPU in the 38th percentile. The on chip 2D graphics are a respectable 91% while the 3D graphics score a blazing 29%. Memory is 85% while the aging SSD gets 62%.
Sometime in the near future I plan on dropping a core i5-4690K into this PC with no other changes to see what happens. That chip was pulled from a dead motherboard about a year ago then forgotten, until the "basement computer store" convinced me to open up all sorts of junk boxes.
I popped the cover off and made two important observations. The MB had a PCI slot (not PCIE). That's why I saved the PC. I have a couple of old M-audio four and eight channel audio systems that work very well but need a PCI slot, and these don't appear on modern MB's.
It also became obvious that I could swap the CPU by removing only the ram and the top mounted cooling tower I used for the overclock. So.....time to play musical CPU chips....
Before cracking the case I opened the BIOS to crank down the CPU speed. It was set to 4.2 GHz with the 3.2 GHz Pentium chip. I set it at an arbitrary 3.8 GHz for the 3.5 GHz rated i5-4690K chip (my 5 to 10% rule).
The memory is Corsair "Vengeance" DDR-3 memory rated for up to 1866 MHz. It was set to 1600 MHz so I left it there.
The new Passmark rating is 59%, a boost of only 7%. The "book" CPU mark is 7799. The mild overclock mark in this machine gives 8695. The graphics and memory scores went down slightly probably due to the lower overall chip clock speed. None of these specs matter for audio recording, but system stability does, so it stays at 3.8 GHz, or slower if needed.
At this time I don't know if W10 will support a 15 year old audio system or it's required PCI slot, so this machine will probably stay W7 forever.....or maybe get Linux if W7 does become the cloud of virus that MS claims it will when their excellent support ends. For now it's catching up on 2 years of updates, then it goes back on the shelf until I can put my secondary audio recording system back together.
> on chip 2D graphics are a respectable 91% while the 3D graphics score a blazing 29%.
My on-chip video numbers for 2D are fine; 3D not so hot.
I don't know if I do *any* 3D graphics? I'm a flatlander. My "game" is a 1992 Junod solitaire in an XP Virtual Box. My spice sim "game" is not a lot newer.
I suspect 2D video is so mature that "any" this-decade implementation is plenty fast; the leading-edge is 3D and maybe I do not care.....
My on-chip video numbers for 2D are fine; 3D not so hot.
I don't know if I do *any* 3D graphics? I'm a flatlander. My "game" is a 1992 Junod solitaire in an XP Virtual Box. My spice sim "game" is not a lot newer.
I suspect 2D video is so mature that "any" this-decade implementation is plenty fast; the leading-edge is 3D and maybe I do not care.....
I guess I don't care about 3D performance either. The current video card in my main PC can do 3 simultaneous 4K/60Hz displays (plus a 4th HDMI audio feed) with no glitches. It's probably reasonably good at 3D, but I haven't bothered to check it out. Dunno where I'd find the time for video games.
The last video game that I played on a PC was Space Quest 2 on one of my hot-rodded 80286 machines. I built and sold PC's back then, an accidental occupation that found me. I came to a point where the game appeared to be unbeatable. The alien spacecraft flew faster than my laser cannons. A call to the Sierra hint line prompted the question, "Have you modified your PC?" UH, yeah......."Run it at the stock 8 MHz speed. The game depends on the CPU clock for timing." That was 1987.
So am I, since PC board layout and music creation are definitely 2D kinda things......so are the "movies" I make by splicing thousands of still frame images from a DSLR together, but....
The process of making a video timeline and "rendering" it into video, especially at 4K, uses the GPU engines on the graphics card. The older version of Blender used the CPU, but this was relatively slow since there are only a few cores. A modern mega-gaming graphics card has hundreds of lower powered cores. NVIDIA calls them Cuda Cores.....These are just the ticket for applications like video rendering and Bitcoin mining since there can be a couple hundred cores chewing away an little bits of the problem simultaneously. Blender, as of V2.8 did away with CPU rendering and puts all the work load on the GPU.
Modern high end GPU's are designed for game play. The benchmarking tools are written to test how well they play games. Some of the scenes used in Passmark are lifted from popular games, and performance is measured in frame rate for a particular resolution. These numbers are also a good indication of how well that GPU will perform at other applications that work the GPU hard. The Blender web site, and its forum has more details about which video card to use if you are looking for serious performance, and I'm sure the cryptocurrency guys have their own preferred lists, but my budget does not align with any of the serious gaming video cards. I built the whole PC for the price of one of the serious gaming graphics cards. I picked some cards from the middle the Blender and Resolve lists and shopped for price...Now if only I get all the promised rebates.....
Yesterday I got the old Pentium based PC upgraded to a core i5-4690K and overclocked it. I also went through some of my oldies, and not so goodies.
I found a PC that I made quite some time ago for use as a DVR. It had a real AMD HD6450 video card in it as well as a Asus Xonar DX audio card. Even with all the goodies that machine scraped its way up to the 30% mark. The CPU was 52% range, but 3D graphics killed the average with 16%. 4K TV was not even a thing when I built this, but it did good at 1080 and had decent sound when feeding a Tubelab SSE.
There was this big box sitting in "cold storage." Cold Storage is a derelict mobile home trailer that came with the property. it has no power, water or sewer, and it's falling apart, so it's classified as uninhabitable, and pays virtually no taxes. It is an 850 SQ foot shed, and is full of stuff like tubes, the bones of dead projects, and a couple of computers.
I remember building the Big Box when I had a good job with a fat paycheck, in 2006. It had the best of everything including a Core 2 Quad-6600 chip, and Windows Vista Ultimate. I had this thing hooked up to an Emu 1820 sound box that cost nearly $500 could record 8 simultaneous tracks and even had a built in phono stage for ripping Vinyl at 24/96. Unlike the XP machines in cold storage, this one was still intact, or so it looked.
I dragged it into the basement, hooked up and hit the go button. What seemed like an eternity went by but the only thing I saw was the blue lights from the fans and power supply, so I reach for the power cord anr prepare to yank it, when the Vista boot screen appears. This thing hasn't seen power since 2014 (last search for updates). Hitting the search for updates icon brings up a "Windows can not search for new updates" message......I guess that's what we will be getting with W7 soon.....so I spent a good chunk of yesterday letting some machines that had been sleeping for a while eat lots of W7 updates.
I forgot to do it yesterday, but maybe I'll run the benchmark on the Big Box.
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Is it a 32 or 64 bit processor? Most Linux distributions are dropping 32 bit support.
My computer is a dual boot W10 and Linux setup. I spend 95 percent of my time on the Linux partition.
It's a 64 bit chip. The problem is the 15 year old M-Audio Delta 1010 sound system. M-Audio has changed hands at least 3 times since the Delta series came out, and all support has vanished. The last driver was written for W98 / W2000, and XP. Most users including myself can get it to work on W7.
Reports are mixed, mostly negative on W-10 and highly dependent on the MB and other components using PCI, but odds are it won't work. That box won't see the internet, so W7 might be the right choice.
I put together a Linux box with a MB and CPU from the same time period and Manjaro KDE. The generic drivers that the distro installed work OK for two of the 8 channels only at 44/16, but no luck making the other 6 work at all. That box might wind up with a two channel card instead. I have a 4 channel version, an 8 channel version, and several two channel versions, all should work at 24/96 and one of the 2 channel cards does 24/192.
I fired up the old Vista box and ran the benchmarking software......what was probably in the 80+% range in 2007, doesn't cut it today. The CPU meter stayed pegged for most of the tests, but it only managed a measly 26%. The motherboard is a P5Q pro, which seems to be rather common among the Hackintosh crowd. Now if I can find a Core 2 Quad - 9900 cheap......
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A PC DRAM module packed up on my pc.
I was getting quite a few BSOD's which always happened in the middle of compiling a big program.
So took one out at random to see if that fixed it and it did.
So bought a new 8GB unit to go with the old 4GB unit.
PC is pretty quick now.
I also changed from built in graphics to graphics card and redraw is much quicker.
Also bought a new android phone.
I can't remember correctly from that long ago. I know that there were 3 possible CPU's for that board, one was about $300, another was about $500, and the third chip was over $800, I picked the middle chip.
A little Googling says that these would have been the Q6400, Q6600 and the Q6700.
Reality says I'll let this sit around until May, them sell it cheap at the Dayton hamfest.
I guess I'll have to go through my pile of operational computers. Some are i5, some dual core and a few 486 machines for specialty hardware. I have one i7 I need to put back into service. Aside from the two machines I use for internet and PCB design work, nothing else has any need for speed. Faster boot would be nice though. I should buy the smallest SSD and use those in my slow computers. At least Win98 will be up and running before it knows what hit it. They are on a separate network for the lab. No internet access.
-Chris
-Chris
Linux famously supports old hardware. Distributions are just snapshots according to one groups opinions. Any that go this way, and only a few will for now, can always be changed back by the person that installs them.
but I didn't buy anything
Did not buy a new dishwasher.... but spent 4 hours today stripping 20+ years of lime/food/fibrous stuff 1/8" thick covering all the innards, as well as the chopper sump, which was completely gummed up and not working. Explains why the wife's been complaining about the dishes not getting clean.. could be because none of the spray bars were turning.
After lots of homemade lime away, muriatic, brushing, and dis-assembly of the washer basin innards (but not the pump or electricals) our 22 year old Whirlpool Quiet Partner III is back to its showroom condition.
Didn't even loose any parts, or have anything left over. There was a pile of cat food and accompanying detritus in the insulation on top of the unit (we haven't had a cat in 6 years, so probably been there awhile (stolen from the cat, but the ubiquitous mouse house).
Figure, with avoiding a service call and/or equivalent new dishwasher, I probably made at least over $100/hour
Did not buy a new dishwasher.... but spent 4 hours today stripping 20+ years of lime/food/fibrous stuff 1/8" thick covering all the innards, as well as the chopper sump, which was completely gummed up and not working. Explains why the wife's been complaining about the dishes not getting clean.. could be because none of the spray bars were turning.
After lots of homemade lime away, muriatic, brushing, and dis-assembly of the washer basin innards (but not the pump or electricals) our 22 year old Whirlpool Quiet Partner III is back to its showroom condition.
Didn't even loose any parts, or have anything left over. There was a pile of cat food and accompanying detritus in the insulation on top of the unit (we haven't had a cat in 6 years, so probably been there awhile (stolen from the cat, but the ubiquitous mouse house).
Figure, with avoiding a service call and/or equivalent new dishwasher, I probably made at least over $100/hour
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