Old vs New

[Dave Rice]

Just had a probably 10 year old HP SFF desktop in with a HDD on it’s way out. Pentium E5400 2.7Ghz, 3GB ram and a 320GB spinner.

It runs W10 OK, especially now I’ve put 8GB ram in from the spares box. SSD going in this afternoon should give it a few more years yet.

Out of interest I looked up the CPU comparison with the modern equivalent of a budget CPU – a £40 200GE. The 200GE is 154% faster.

[keith with the teef]

A up Davey ravey gravey can you post the link to the cpu comparison chart.

Sounds juicy. 🙂

[JayCeeDee]

keith with the teef wrote:

A up Davey ravey gravey can you post the link to the cpu comparison chart. Sounds juicy.

Just Google “any processor vs any other processor” and up will pop the comparison sites. HERE is the result of the old time overclockers favourite of yesteryear the Q6600  vs todays biggie i7 9700K.

[keith with the teef]

I see when it comes to Moores law its only GPU’s at the mo, well for the past 7 years that have been holding the law up.

Diminishing returns for CPU.

[Dave Rice]

Inspired by the success of the PC the customer has asked me to look at a Satellite Pro i3-2120m that’s been in a cupboard for years.

The CPU comparison site reckons that’s only 20% behind the 200GE, we’ll see. It’s getting an SSD whatever. Probably got Win 7 on it, so W10 pro will be going on and if there’s any DDR3 sodimms in the spares box the 4GB ram will get a boost too.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-930-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7700K/m79vs3647

The above is quite interesting. It actually under scores my i7 930 because mine runs at 3.9 Ghz base turboing to 4.1 Ghz with the memory at 1440 and has done since the day I got it in 2010.

Even so the new CPU fails to double the score of the one they tested in any benchmark.

And look at today’s prices !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

When I finally replaced my 8 year old Pentium 3 the latest Core 2’s were scoring more than 12 times faster in benchmarks and I had no hope of playing the latest games.

At the moment  I play the latest Vulkan version of Doom with all the settings maxed out. If I enable show stats I see 60fps ( thats the max because I have Vsync enabled) and a CPU usage of 16%.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-E5400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-930/m4475vsm79

And just for fun ?

[Ed P]

The main CPU improvement has not been in raw speed but in power consumption. Unfortunately that has not translated to longer lap-top battery life as GPU demands have at least doubled during that period.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve argued that the CPU has been “good enough” for a long time, it’s the hard drive that’s been the bottleneck. We all know by now how much difference an SSD makes.

I’ve not had the chance to try an NVMe drive with something like a 200GE (still not sure how compatible they are) or more likely the 2200G. It’s been the latest gen i5, i7 and Ryzen 7 paired with NVMe and they really motor on. I suspect the magic sauce is the NVMe though.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I was thinking that sometime in the future, if the price drops enough, I might buy an NVMe to PCIe adapter card so I could have a really high speed data drive.

The hybrid UEFI BIOS on my MoBo is just to old to load the NVMe module that would make it bootable.

However I was just doing some reading up and it appears that the Samsung evo drives have an old style option ROM that lets them appear to a BIOS as a bootable SCSI device.

That keeps the BIOS happy but when the Windows installer queries the drive it reports its true nature and Windows installs the NVMe drivers.

There are a few videos online with this working with my exact motherboard. All at full speed too after the initial boot.

[Author]

Posts