How do I make my PC obsolete? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Papal_Stick
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 06:34:05 pm
content: Right now I'm using a PC with Intel E8400, 4 GB of DDR2 and 500 GB HDD. That thing was bought in late 2008 and it runs SolidWorks, MATLAB, KiCAD, gcc, foobar2000 just fine. However, everywhere I look, be it computer hardware stores, magazines or websites I get the feeling that one needs the latest Core i-something just to browse the web. Tell me, how to make my PC obsolete so I can really feel the need to go and buy some new fancy CPU or GPU chip or whatever it's called nowdays. There was a time, especially in 2000s when 5 years old computer was a total POS. Now, it seems that hardware evolution completly stalled, CPU from 8 years ago still does the job and does it amazingly fast.

author: TorqueRanger
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 06:45:30 pm
content: Play with a SSD

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 07:18:46 pm
content: There's nothing wrong with it.Add a solid state hard drive and install the OS and any programs which are slow to start on it.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 07:27:39 pm
content: Whilst not my everyday machine, I still use a HP/Compaq 6710b laptop running Windows XP. The only thing I've done is replaced the original 120GB hard disk with an SSD. I think my one has the 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor.Still a good machine that runs perfectly fine. Has older I/O which comes in handy sometimes (9-pin serial port, intergrated card reader that takes some of the older type memory cards, Type I/II PC Card slot...).The battery is long gone, lasting about 2 minutes, just enough time to unplug and move somewhere else without powering down ;-)Specsherefor any obsolete computer aficionados.My daily machine is a desktop with 8GB RAM and a Xeon processor. About 4-5 years old now but still perfectly good for CPU intensive tasks. The video card isn't anything special, but I don't play games anyway.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 07:32:11 pm
content: Install any modern game...

author: AF6LJ
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 07:38:34 pm
content: Play Fallout 4

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 07:48:27 pm
content: Yes, some games would be a problem, but just the ones that rely heavily on 3D acceleration. Fallout 4, Just Cause 3, Alien: Isolation, etc. that sort of game.This computer I'm using now is a Core2Duo from 2008 that was built for high end gaming at the time. It is now outperformed by a Gigabyte Brix that was built for $175. However, the C2D no longer has the original whiz-bang Nvidia beast of a video card and the original speed demon memory has been replaced also.

author: Papal_Stick
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 08:19:12 pm
content: Quote from: VinzC on January 24, 2016, 07:32:11 pmFortunately my family banned me from playing any computer games when i was a child so I'm not a gamer at all.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 08:32:14 pm
content: As others have already said, get an SSD. Note the difference in the primary hard disk rating (max is 7.9). The C2D has a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor, which was about as good as it got in 2008. The Brix has a $39.95 SSD.

author: GekkoNZ
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 09:37:06 pm
content: Quote from: Papal_Stick on January 24, 2016, 08:19:12 pmMy sincere condolences.Back to the topic at hand, ill add that if there is nothing that your computer does that you wish it could do faster, then the answer is quite simple:Do nothing.Why spend money on something you do not need that offers you no advantage in any way?If your HDD is fast enough for your personal liking, do nothing. If it isn't, upgrade it to an SSD. The same goes for any other part of your computer.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 09:48:17 pm
content: How about trying to browse an Internet page full of flash adverts? I find that installing an ad blocker speeds up my browsing considerably as it removes all of the flash player staff that is drowning my processor even though I am running over 4 GHz.Solid state drives are very nice not always as fast as they purport but certainly an improvement on a mechanical drive and if you're feeling lazy put some into a RAID array.For goodness sake don't get an i-shit processor unless you have a specific task you wish it to perform for which it has been officially benchmarked. I was furious when I came back from my Christmas holiday to find that my work computer that has an i7 processor was suddenly slower after the IT people had been in. But after a week I realised what the problem was the BIOS had been reset to default settings and my special customisations had been reverted. This created a marked slowdown in the overall feel of the computer's speed and caused opening programs to take longer. When I realised it I went back into the BIOS and did my special customisations once again.I disable the hyper- threading capability as this is the biggest load of bullocks in CPUs today. Once upon a time when Intel launched its emergency edition cough cough I mean extreme edition processor it may have had some use and somewhat increased the speed of the processor but these days with increased RAM speeds it is actually a bottleneck in itself as your processor is being forced to swap between two tasks when it probably has enough data and instructions to carry on with what it was already doing. Then I disable two out of the four real cores that I have (the eight cores declared on the spec sheet take into account the software hack that hyper- threading is) because while I have one of the best 3-D CAD modelling software around the stupid dumb program is still only capable of using one processing core at a time so having four cores trying to use memory bandwidth on menial tasks is a total waste of my time because I want all of the performance in the software I am using at that moment and with a 3-D mouse at my fingertips I do notice the lag.My own machine at home which granted is newer than my work one which is also a for physical core processor on which I have disabled two ran the 3-D CAD software much faster even with all four cores enabled.At the end of the day it's down to what you want to do with the machine. My last computer lasted me seven years and there was not a lot wrong with it when I sold most of the components on eBay as a kit for over £100 and noted that many other people were doing the same. Modern advancements in computing have not really meant a lot for us common mortals. The biggest jump seems to have been in the amount of cores in a processor but this is of little help to us because most programs are still single core programs so unless you are playing specific games or doing hard-core video processing your i7 processor is a total and utter waste of time and money.Sorry for the rant but I'm getting fed up with companies like Intel telling us we need things that we don't and actually selling us a poorer product in the process.

author: Refrigerator
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 10:04:23 pm
content: I'm using an ACER TravelMate 4100 notebook pc and it struggles with internet, Honestly i expected more from a 1.6GHz CPU.Kinda makes me want to get something better, although the screen is pretty big and high-res too bad the hardware can't handle it.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 10:12:40 pm
content: Quote from: Refrigerator on January 24, 2016, 10:04:23 pmWe use Acer desktops and laptops at work (among other brands) and they are honestly the biggest piles of steaming crap I've ever had to use. To round them up in two words: unstable and slow. They even look and feel cheap and nasty. Despite the intel processors, it all comes down to the quality of the mainboard (which is built down to a price and isn't designed to last). Notwithstanding all of that, there is the most annoying blue LED on the front chassis which is supposed to indicate network activity. It's uttely useless as it flashes in ~500ms on/off cycles (rather than a proper activity LED). So basically it just flashes non-stop even when the machine is idle due to broadcast traffic etc... All it does is distract the user.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 10:43:00 pm
content: Quote from: Papal_Stick on January 24, 2016, 08:19:12 pmOw, well, install Windows Vista then ;-) .

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 10:50:02 pm
content: How? Simply browse to a "modern" website, which uses multiple gigabytes to display a few lines of text.http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

author: rollatorwieltje
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:09:14 pm
content: When you don't play games the C2D line is still very acceptable. Still using one, a 2.6GHz in a 2010 Macbook pro. Only thing I did was replace the harddrive with a good SSD, then you realize how much of a bottleneck a harddisk really is. Also get the maximum amount of ram your system will take, it's dirt cheap anyway. Modern browsers like to use stupid amounts of it.My desktop is a bit more powerful, i5 2500k with a GTX980 graphics card. The processor is 5 years old, but still has no problems at all with the latest games. The GTX980 I bought recently because the old HD6970 card pretty much died. I looked at upgrading the whole machine but it was simply not worth it based on benchmarks, and that's coming from somebody who buys a GTX980...Quote from: helius on January 24, 2016, 10:50:02 pmI once looked at the intranet website of the company I work for. It downloaded about 6MB and used about 50 connections to eventually render about 400kB worth of static data... Especially annoying when you have to use it over a limited connection like on a mobile network. These bloated AJAX garbage sites need to die out quickly. Also looking at you, EEVBlog frontpage... Didn't measure anything, but it takes several seconds to load, even on my desktop with 120MBit internet.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:32:36 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 24, 2016, 09:48:17 pmWow, slowing down your entire computer because you don't want to use application specific core affinity:http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/37272/set-a-programs-affinity-in-windows-7-for-better-performance/Those of us who do high performance computing will now have a giggle, since NUMA made its way down to desktop workstations this sort of application based control has been routine.Core is just a marketing designation, the i series have been mainstream for more than 5 years, there is not reason to avoid them as they span all budgets and performance. Looking closely at benchmarking and synthetic performance there are often specific examples of excellent or poor performance but thats not confined to any manufacturer, less so any specific branding.

author: DimitriP
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:38:21 pm
content: There are fast CPUs, fast motherboards, fast video cards and fast hard drives.Most people end up getting one or two out of the four and eventually the machine starts crawling just like the old machine.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:41:32 pm
content: Quote from: rollatorwieltje on January 24, 2016, 11:09:14 pmA lot of this is driven by marketing and advertising, they have locked into an idea that a website should have a maximum load time on a current computer and average internet connection and they fill this endlessly with more and more stuff (background as video seem to be the flavour of the month right now). You even see stylesheets being used to hide content until the page completely loads and some script releases the content to you (typically after you have dismissed ads or signed in) but still appears in search bots.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:42:08 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 24, 2016, 09:48:17 pmDon't buy one of a wide variety of differing CPUs, including the best desktop and mobile CPUs (excluding Xeon abuse.. oh, right, same technology) on the market? Ohkaaaaay...QuoteHyperthreading is extremely valuable in many workloads. If it doesn't work and makes things worse, blame the software, not the hardware.QuoteThey do not specify 8 cores.. and wilfully disabling half your processing power is a very.. interesting choice.QuoteMeanwhile, those of us in IT are fed up with people spewing bad advice based on an utter lack of understanding.

author: DimitriP
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:46:10 pm
content: QuoteNot to open a can of worms or rain in your parade but if it takes "several seconds" there is something wrong and it might have nothing to do with eevblog or you but everything else in between.It loads fine over here (southern California)Do a:tracertwww.eevblog.comTracing route towww.eevblog.com[104.31.75.133]over a maximum of 30 hops:1 <1 ms * *2 8 ms 14 ms 8 ms3 18 ms 15 ms 9 ms4 11 ms 15 ms 12 ms5 15 ms 23 ms 15 ms6 20 ms 17 ms 16 ms7 13 ms 13 ms 16 ms8 17 ms 14 ms 15 ms9 11 ms 12 ms 15 ms cloudflare-ic-301668-las-bb1.c.telia.net [62.115.32.214]10 13 ms 12 ms 11 ms 104.31.75.133Trace complete.Do a tracertwww.eevblog.comI'm 10 hops away, no

author: DimitriP
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2016, 11:50:48 pm
content: QuoteYeah...about that....Hardware exists for the convenience of the software, just like IT exists for the convenience of the users.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:05:07 am
content: Quote from: helius on January 24, 2016, 10:50:02 pmThanks for the link! He's a very funny and intelligent writer. On a topic that is a bugbear of mine too, so it was great fun to read.Ha ha, his source code is neat, and small. No css or js at all. Though I notice he still uses the superfluous </li>. But not </p> thankfully. It's also amusing to see his line: "<!-- What the hell are you looking at? Get out of my source. --->"From a guy promoting open source accessible html coding... heh. He could be more welcoming.On PCs being 'obsolete' or not - hang onto all those older machines. The way Intel and MS are dragging the platform, you may be glad you did. Here's one hint:http://investmentwatchblog.com/all-new-cpus-will-require-windows-10/ALL New CPUs Will Require Windows 10I haven't looked into this yet, but a friend is. He tells me the intention is to close the secure boot opt-out loopholes. So systems won't allow replacing the factory installed OS (MS) with anything else. Ha ha... well we'll see...Meanwhile, I'm keeping all my old PCs. (Please god, can you just drop an asteroid on MS headquarters? Is that so hard?)More on the topic of glorious Microsoft master race:http://everist.org/archives/links/__Win_10_info.txt

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:06:17 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 24, 2016, 09:48:17 pmNot quite. Hyperthreading isn't like that. Hyperthreading will clobber the L1/L2/L3 caches simply because more processes are competing for the cache - and that can be a real problem. Nowadays "DRAM is the new Disk, and Cache is the new RAM".Hyperthreading does speed up some important computational loads, but it slows down others. Anybody that does HPC automatically turns hyperthreading off.QuoteCAD is often an HPC workload and large datasets stress the caches.Processor-memory bandwidth has been a principal bottleneck for quite a few years now.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:13:25 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 24, 2016, 11:42:08 pmHyperthreading also decreases performance in many workloads. Hence it is important to specify the workload and not to make overly general statements.Hyperthreading isbeneficialwhere each process only has a little work to be done before it stalls waiting for an external device. Two classic examples are webservers and databases.Hyperthreading isnegativeif each application can only be a single process (as with a lot of HPC and CAD, think Amdahl!) or where the cache speed/size is the determining factor (as with much CAD and HPC). If you know how to speed up HPC/CAD programs then you are going to be seriously rich; can we go into business together please

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:43:46 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 25, 2016, 12:13:25 amGive it a core and don't use hyperthreading on it. The OS is already quite capable of doing this - why doesn't it? Because the software doesn't ask, apparently. Forcing software behaviour by disabling hardware features is a cheap hack.Disabling hyperthreading (and two whole usable cores, if you're that daft) may speed up a single process.. at the expense of others and, unless there's something badly wrong, general responsiveness. There are better ways, and they all involve less ranting.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:58:50 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 12:43:46 amOf course that's not speeding up programs, rather it is not slowing them down. Much CAD and HPC is inherently single-threaded, except where it becomes "embarassingly parallel" such as in monte-carlo and simulated annealing algorithms. But those only operate at a very coarse granularity; effectively each instance is a separate appliction.QuoteIn many cases yes, but in many important workloads, no. You are making overly general/dogmatic statements, presumably due to a limited view of the computational world.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:01:37 am
content: I'm in the same position, I've an E8400 and I'd like to be able to justify something faster, but even replacing with an i7 would only double its speed.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:18:02 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 25, 2016, 12:58:50 amI am making statements in the context of interactive software on a desktop system, not nearly as generally as you assume.Are we to proceed further with the assumptions, thinly veiled insults, and pointless argument?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:38:07 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 01:18:02 amIf you go back and read what you have written, that is the first time you have made such a statement. Many of your responses have been to points where that context didn't apply.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:46:02 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 25, 2016, 01:38:07 amWhere did that context not apply? This entire discussion stems from an interactive tool on a desktop system, and that's the subject I have been addressing.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:46:45 am
content: Quote from: bitslice on January 25, 2016, 01:01:37 amUse somewhere a relatively new PC with SSD for a few weeks. Then go back to your old PC and get a feel that it sucks. Though this method works only for users who are fast enough themselves. Actually performance of i7 from a few last generations is significantly more than 2x.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 04:04:45 am
content: Quote from: wraper on January 25, 2016, 01:46:45 amThat's what I would have expected, but benchmarks suggest otherwise?http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4790K

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 05:18:48 am
content: Quote from: Papal_Stick on January 24, 2016, 08:19:12 pmPlay Portal, its a nice I puzzle game in first person view to get you into the style.Youll be playing crysis before you know it

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 05:39:43 am
content: Quote from: bitslice on January 25, 2016, 04:04:45 amIf you look at the actual benchmark scores rather than the review score that old i7 is indeed more than 2* faster the the C2D on it's worse performing benchmarks. I think maybe the price of a new i7 system vs a second hand C2D system at the time was part of the final review score.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 05:45:09 am
content: You can double its performance by doing the LGA775 to 771 hack and drop in a Xeon like I did on an old Optiplex 330 I had.A Xeon E5440 runs about $15 USD, the adapter sticker for the processor costs about $2.50CPU:http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-E5440-2-83-GHz-12MB-1333MHz-SLANS-LGA771-CPU-Server-Processor-/181999910903?hash=item2a600a3ff7:g:LYMAAOSwZ1lWeLkrAdapter Sticker:http://www.ebay.com/itm/LGA-771-775-adapter-Intel-CPU-Socket-Mod-Sticker-Upgrade-Core2-to-Xeon-Quad-/121556798385?hash=item1c4d598bb1:g:qM0AAOSwabhUWR4JYour current processor has a Passmark CPU rating of about 2100, the E5440 has a rating of about 4000. Look for a "SLANS" Xeon which is the C0 stepping. The E0 stepping Xeons aren't as readily accepted by LGA775 boards. 12MB of L2 cache!In the screenshot below you can see that it has the G31/G33 desktop chipset but with a Xeon running in it. 4 hardware cores, with no hyperthreading.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 07:00:20 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 12:43:46 amIn my case there is just one thread I am interested in: the one I'm working on. With "8" cores even outlook takes longer to load and it kills my CAD. I have 2 core available now and it works sweet because one core can do what I want and windows can use the other for all the not very demanding background stuff. As I said I know some stuff my be able to use hyperthreading but I'm yet to find out what other than some games I don't play and video encoding which the benchmarks are based on. Our cad software supplier actual.ly advised to use a 2 core machine, but my lot as dumb and spent money on 4x what they needed.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 07:11:11 am
content: Simon have you tried setting processor affinity for the task? I don't use Windows often but I'm pretty certain it's just an option in the task manager.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 07:17:39 am
content: Windows doesn't remember priority and affinity settings.You'd need ProcessLasso for that. (Great tool by the way)

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 07:39:04 am
content: Quote from: Mechanical Menace on January 25, 2016, 07:11:11 amYea so long winded and needs doing every time. plus it does nothing to help the startup speed of the PC. As others have said turning the cores off is freeing up cache, so my dedicated task is getting more cache as well and not being hindered by what explorer.exe wants to do in the background.The bottom line is if you don't use a program that will specifically use hyperthreading and multicores then don't get one. Lets face it, the average 4 core processor does not need hyperthreading as well. It's just a way for them to label it as 8 cores when it is 4. My AMD 4 core really is 4 core and not a hyped up 2 core, what is intels game ? My AMD processor is faster and has the same cores and uses less power, so what did intel do ? they just lied and came up with a silly technical reason to justify it.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:10:49 am
content: Quote from: bitslice on January 25, 2016, 04:04:45 amhttps://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=955&cmp%5B%5D=2275BTW, scroll down the CPUboss page from your link to the bottom to see actual benchmark results. I really don't understand how do they get the scores which are on the top.

author: ez24
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:15:53 am
content: QuoteA sledge hammer can be fun

author: pickle9000
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:20:50 am
content: Hamster habitat. Guaranteed to stop working in 20 pee's.

author: rollatorwieltje
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:37:59 am
content: Quote from: DimitriP on January 24, 2016, 11:46:10 pmHas nothing to do with latency, but with the obscene amount of requests and amount of data it downloads. See the attached trace from Firefox. It does 222 requests, downloads over 8MB and takes over 14 seconds to just display the front page. For what? Pretty much the whole front page is static.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:46:16 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 07:39:04 amAnd actually limit yourself to lower performance processors...QuoteIntel don't lie, and they don't sell them as having '8 cores'.So what AMD processor do you have?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:46:44 am
content: Quote from: rollatorwieltje on January 25, 2016, 08:37:59 amDon't forget the time it takes adverts to load - because there's a long-winded auction occurring to decide which company rents your attention. Adblockers are a good thing.

author: cyr
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:49:26 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 07:39:04 amAFAIK intel have always accurately stated the number of cores and threads (e.g. 4C / 8T for a desktop i7), meanwhile AMD is using shared resources between pairs of cores:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/

author: AlxDroidDev
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 11:01:22 am
content: There is very little I can add to the valuable input you already got.SSD is the biggest upgrade one can make to a computer. However, to take full benefit of SSD under Windows, you need at least Win7.Discrete video cards are often an upgrade too, even if you're not a gamer. Many programs can benefit from GPU acceleration, such as Google Chrome, Adobe Creative Suite, and a few others. I believe many CAD programs can use GPU for fast rendering.A little overclock also goes a long way, if your motherboard allows it. My computer is an i7, originally spec'd at 2.66GHz, but I've been running it at 3.65GHz for the past 5 years, without any instability whatsoever. And it is air-cooled.Besides hardware, some fine tunning to Windows and Chrome is quite effective too. Disabling unused services on Windows and adjusting some flags on Chrome are very rewarding.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 11:23:34 am
content: Install Flash, Java, Virus protection can make your computer obsolete in a minute. Stupid to see that web pages in 2000 loaded faster than they do now. Also, make sure to go to any news site.If you wawnt to see how an optimised (size and loading) webpage looks like, go to google.com and look at the source. That is an optimal website, sure it looks as hell.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:43:20 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 09:46:16 amI think it's a 4350 buldozer. If you buy a system with more cores you end up with a lower top speed, a single thread process can only use 1 core, so you sacrifice speed for lots of cores but then can only use 1 of them - pointless unless your using software that will take advantage of multiple cores and hyperthreading.intel advertise their i7 as being 8 logical cores, joe public does not know the difference between a core and a logical core, it's intentionally deceptive and playing on the fact that people think more is better. Then someone sells a PC on ebay and advertises it's speed as being "clock speed x cores" if you do that with an "i" processor you have just given a false figure that is at least double what it should be.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 12:57:28 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 12:43:20 pmSo your 'true quad core' has.. two decoders, not four, two FPUs, not four, two L1i caches, not four, two L2s, not four... and you accuse Intel of lying.QuoteNot universally true, and that's what turboboost is for.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:05:43 pm
content: yes the cores are in sets of two, they share the cache, so ? that means when you turn one of the two off in a pair your not turning the cache off too, the other core in the pair now has twice the cache. I know the FPU is shared, it is a bit dodgy but it's not as bad as time sharing a whole core and then claiming that it's actually two.I have the option of turning a whole pair off (CU - computation unit), or turning one half of each CU off so it then means the FPU is kept and dedicated to the one main core and the cache is doubled. One of the reasons i disabled two cores, reduce power even more and got better response.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:20:50 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 12:43:20 pmQuote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 01:05:43 pmNo they don't, they advertise them as 4 cores, 8 threads:http://ark.intel.com/products/88196/Intel-Core-i7-6700-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz4 cores is the headline figure. And Joe Public wouldn't go looking for number of threads.And you're sort of arguing that no one should be allowed to advertise a feature Joe Public can't understand.And also hyperthreading is much better than it was when introduced in (I believe) the Core 2 Duos. And while yes it still can't do everything as well as twice the real cores it seems to be only serious fringe cases where it won't drastically help, and then that's only for certain sections of the code. And you don't have to be specially write things to take advantage of hyperthreading in particular to get the advantages. And I haven't seen it reduce performance of single threaded workloads since about that era tbh.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 01:34:29 pm
content: The Prescott Pentium 4's were first with Hyper-threading. And it has effect.You can indeed create synthetic benchmarks that truly torture hyper-threading, but that would not be a real-life case.Hyperthreading is quite a nifty solution to create a better processor whilst being economic with the gates.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 05:50:36 pm
content: Well I have seen advertising based on logical cores maybe not from intel themselves no more than AMD or intel tell ebay sellers to advertise a 2.5 GHz quad as a 10GHz, with multicore technology and increased memory speeds I fail to see how hyperthreading works anymore. Yes the first hyperthreader was a pentium 4 release in a hurry when AMD went into 64bit and built in memory controllers. They called it the extreme edition and it went faster than AMD's processors at I think 3.2GHz a new record breaker. Many people called it the emergency edition.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:01:27 pm
content: As far as i know the Core2 processors did not use hyperthreading. So why have we gone back ? how much does that extra data/instruction pipeline cost ? hm thought so.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:03:53 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:01:27 pmBecause it actually works well in lots of workloads.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:15:57 pm
content: Which ones ? I can only speak for the one machine I use that has it and it's awful, it criple the whole machine.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:21:06 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:15:57 pmVideo encoding, regular multi-threaded desktop use, compression..If your machine becomes 'crippled' by hyperthreading.. something iswrong, and it's not hyperthreading.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:24:04 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 08:21:06 pmYou said lots of workloads. How many office computers are running video encoding ? We know that CAD does not use it. File compression is rarely used.I don't know what is wrong with my machine, it's a work one so I can only do so much but dissabling hyperthreading causes a marked improvement in performance. And as with my home machine turning 2 cores off leaving two on also improves responsiveness. This is all easily explained with more cache available and less processes trying to connect to the same memory.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:32:19 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:24:04 pmAnd you asked for some examples, you got them. I never said hyperthreaded i7s were a good choice for office computers.File compression is rarely used.. by you, in your workload. I use a lot of compression, do lots of video encoding. I also use a lot of CAD, and play games. HT works for some of these tasks, not so much for others. I leave it on because overall, it is beneficial.QuoteAnd I have never claimed that you're not seeing these results. But marking the entire concept of hyperthreading as worthless based on one experience is a knee-jerk reaction if I ever saw one, and provably wrong.

author: bitshape
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:36:38 pm
content: Quote from: Stonent on January 25, 2016, 05:45:09 amNope, in realityonly 6MB effective. The Core2Quad-Xeon is mirroring the 2 separate 6MB cache's, so at any given time every core has the same cache-data available.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:40:04 pm
content: Quote from: bitshape on January 25, 2016, 08:36:38 pmSource?

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:43:31 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 08:32:19 pmYes that is all true. Unfortunately i don't have the means to test large numbers of computers and processors. I have never known intel to not recomend i7's for certain tasks. No doubt our computers now waste a vast amount of electricity as a whole multicore processor spins into action so that one of those cores can do what the user wants. The one good thing with the i7 compared to my buldozer is that it seems to control the closk speeds seperately. My response was to just turn off the un-needed cores. No processor manufacturer can be said to be aiming to deliver the right product to the market. No ine seems to talk about the fact that the vast majority of software needs only 1 core.When Dave tested the big server motherboard he found I can't remember if he had to turn hyperthreading on or off to make it work better, I'll have to find it and watch it again.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:46:33 pm
content: Modern computers use a lot less power than older ones. Well, unless you stretch the term 'modern' to include the current range of AMD processors.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:48:01 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 08:46:33 pmnow, now, it's not like I'm a fanboy. I have swung from one to the other. To be honest AMD have generally given the better solution for me.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:48:44 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:43:31 pmIf the additional cores hurt you, why don't just purchase some cheaper CPU with fewer core count.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:50:25 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 25, 2016, 08:48:44 pmAt the time I wanted 4 cores, I run boinc, so I do make full use of my processor. But then I decided I wanted to save some power and turned two off particularly when I found it gave better performance (more cache) a lesser core processor would have less cache. If I ever start video encoding I can turn the two cores back on.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 08:52:49 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:48:01 pmTo be fair, I was a bit broad there, the APUs aren't at all bad. The FXes, however, were uninspiring when they arrived. Four years ago.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:12:58 pm
content: Dave had to turn hyperthreading off as well although it may be a case of old motherboard and new OS, but if hyperthreading is that touchy it's not a good allround solution.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:18:42 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 08:21:06 pmAmdahl's law applies with a vengence for some workloads, especially HPC and simple CAD (i.e. not "embarassingly parallel" code).Hyperthreading can and does reduce processor performance for some workloads. People mention losing 5%-10% of the performance on average, and the worst cases are, well, worse. Hyperthreadingiswrongfor those workloads.Hence HPC peoplealwaysturn hyperthreading off. If you know what's "wrong" with their software or systemsand can improve it, then you can make alargeamount of moneyveryfast. But I doubt that's the case, since a lot ofverysmart people have tried over the past half century.Overall the general rule of thumb is that hyperthreading helps some workloads and hinders others - for reasons that are easily understood and predicted when considering the obvious interactions processor, cache, RAM and data access patterns in large datasets.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:22:40 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 25, 2016, 09:18:42 pmFor the love of spaghetti, man,context.Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:15:57 pmQuote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:15:57 pmQuote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:15:57 pmCould you PLEASE realise I'm not disagreeing with you?

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:33:07 pm
content: ok but no need to quote the same post 3 times.I think over all hyperthreading is just a publicity thing. They used it when they thought their chips were down. then stopped when they came out with a new good line of processors. then sudenly went back to it. Some task may work better but only those specifically designed for it.Actually 3-D CAD could make much better use of multiple processes but the con artists that sell the software could not care less. The thing that slows 3-D CAD down the most is when you have a very large assembly like a well detailed engine that you are trying to rotate on the screen. It takes so long to do the slightest movements. The reason is you have one little processor core screaming it's nuts off trying to calculate the slightest movements of every single component. But it seems to have never occurred to anybody that being as the assembly is made up of multiple components which all have an absolute position with respect to the origin they can all be independently rotated at the same time and they would all end up in the same place and therefore multiple cores could be used but because this won't actually gain them any more money they cannot be bothered. I often argue about this with somebody at work who cannot see the point and keeps going on about the fact that each component has a relationship with another components and therefore they have to be moved in order. I maintain that these relationships are simply a way for us to interact with the software and once a component is assembled its absolute position in the assembly is known therefore an eight core processor should be able to work with eight components simultaneously and move the assembly around eight times faster or four times faster if we are talking about and i7 processor with very little modification to the existing software it would simply be wait for it.... hyper- threading the software.

author: kingofkya
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:47:03 pm
content: Just though i would point out an ebay search term thous looking to upgrade might want to look at."Dell Precision T1600 3.10GHz Intel Xeon"$200-300 for a pc with 16gb of ram (you can't buy the cpu for that)http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precision-T1600-Tower-3-10GHz-Intel-Xeon-Quad-Core-E3-1225-16GB-RAM-80GB-HD-/171944148571?hash=item2808ab7e5b:g:xNYAAOSwgQ9V3jIFAlso just to add what other have said some applications you really need single core performance over a multi core. For example at work we have a client that runs a hardoop cluster (i believe something involving image storage/processing). They get higher performance out of an E3-1270 v2 that a duel cpu Xeon E5-2600. Due to the higher clock speed, and faster ram access. Regesterd ECC ram and speed can be a detramit in some cases.Correct me if i am wrong but i believe intels e3 xeon series still has the fasted per core of any processes currently.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 09:49:46 pm
content: The other appalling lack of use of multiple cores is in the speech recognition software I'm using right now. Again it only uses one core whereas it is a classic example I think of where multiple cores could be used. I am speaking the software is recognising individual words I am saying and trying to match them to known samples. There was more than one sample that it will try and match each word I say to apart from the grammatical analysis it will also do to try and establish what the word is. Yet it does all of these multiple tasks in one processing thread instead of using all of the cores available in my processor to simultaneously evaluate a number of possible solutions and then decide on the best one having scored each possible solution.Essentially hardware manufacturers are running around producing genuinely better hardware and or more crap with buzzword names while software writers are totally ignoring this and just coming up with more buzzword functions in their software instead of actual functionality and performance. I know this is not helped these days by the ever increasing branches of the family tree that processes now seem to sit on.The other reason why I am using a four core processor with two cores turned off is because it also gives me more potential for overclocking. So my 4.35 GHz processor is now working at 4.7 GHz and I have every intention of trying to go a bit faster.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 10:49:16 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 09:22:40 pmIf your statements have a context, it is up to you to state either the context or the region in which you believe your statements are valid.It is patently ridiculous to expect your readers to correctly guess what you aren't saying.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2016, 10:50:30 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 25, 2016, 10:49:16 pmYou see the quotes? What's in them? Context.People seem to have forgotten how to use forums.

author: bitshape
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 12:06:19 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 25, 2016, 10:50:30 pmSource?

author: rollatorwieltje
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 02:36:05 pm
content: I just did some testing with Hyperthreading. Specs:Lenovo T530 laptopi7 3520m (dual core with HT)8GB ramCrucial 256GB SSD in the optical slot (both the compiler and the project are on this disk)MinGW 4.9I ran A C++ build using MinGW and make. I usually have HT enabled and use 3 threads, with 5 threads the machine becomes nearly unusable. In this case HT offers quite a reasonable performance benefit. Not sure why the third HT 3T run was noticeably shorter, it's a company laptop, I can't close everything (well... not going to risk making IT angry), so maybe some background task stopped or something.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 04:37:28 pm
content: Quote from: rollatorwieltje on January 26, 2016, 02:36:05 pmThat has characteristics I would expect could benefit from HT: multiple parallel processes, and processes stalled waiting for i/o. Yes I know that SSD is faster than rotating rust, but it is still much slower than cache and DRAM.Many CAD and HPC programs are unlike that: single process and the performance is limited by cache and the memory architecture. There HT often reduces performance

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 04:53:27 pm
content: What is HPC ? CAD is certainly limited to one core. Although I think the display of large models could be speeded up if they could be bothered to modify the code.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 04:55:34 pm
content: Quote from: rollatorwieltje on January 26, 2016, 02:36:05 pmI wonder when people will start figure out their laptop have msata slot before tossing the optical drive.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:00:47 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 26, 2016, 04:55:34 pmPerhaps he has an SSD in that slot and wanted or needed a removable one instead of a mostly useless coaster burner.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:07:11 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 26, 2016, 05:00:47 pmI've seen a "guide" on youtube where one PC "specialist" replaces the optical drive with ssd, then says, I also bought external DVD drive because my customer needs oneyet this laptop has msata. And this wasn't the only case when I stumbled on something like this. BTW in the optical bay, very often sata is of slower revision than main HDD port. And with SSD this certainly will cripple it's speed.EDIT: I actually saved one guy in the last moment from making this mistake.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:10:02 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 26, 2016, 05:07:11 pmPerhaps in cheap ones..

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:11:52 pm
content: I mostly stopped using CD/DVD drives about 5 or 6 years ago. At one time I used DVDs for back ups, until I decided redundant HDDs were probably more reliable and much easier to use, and nearly as cheap. I still have one though, for those occasional times I need to rip an old DVD or CD.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:15:04 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 26, 2016, 05:10:02 pmThere is no correlation with cheap or not, there is just no point of sata 3 in the optical bay. In cheap one, both ports could be slow.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:18:30 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 26, 2016, 05:15:04 pmExcept for that small, minor point of high end laptops having 'optical bays' which take optical drives.. and HDDs, and SSDs, and batteries...I'll be honest, I'm not sure if the second 6Gbps port on my chipset goes to the 'optical bay' or the docking port. Newer chipsets have four..There is definitely a price correlation, as manufacturers will quite intentionally cripple lower end devices, plus simply not go to the effort of thinking about what they're doing.E: 30 seconds in a datasheet, 'optical bay' port is 6Gbps.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:28:17 pm
content: If there is 2 sata 3 in the chipset, then second sata 3 most likely will be msata slot (if present) or M.2 slot.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:30:41 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 26, 2016, 05:28:17 pmAaaaand in the case above.. nope! T530 uses port 1 for the Ultrabay.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 05:41:18 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 25, 2016, 08:10:49 amAh, that looks a bit more realistic, thanks.I've seen similar scores on a different site, so I suspect that cpuboss is doing something retarded with its scoring mechanism.

author: rollatorwieltje
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 06:04:27 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 26, 2016, 04:55:34 pmI already had this SSD from a previous machine. Can't use it as primary as it's too small for the image our IT dept uses. Maybe not optimal, but It beats using the built in coffee grinder.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 06:11:49 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 26, 2016, 04:53:27 pmSorry; high performance computing. Number crunching on steroids, or dealing with very large datasets, and some graph reduction algorithms. Very difficult to parallelise the algorithms at a fine-grained level since inter-process(or) comms and sync would dominate the performance. Often possible to parallelise at a coarse-grained level in large server farms.Nowadays often related to the life sciences, e.g. protein folding or looking for patterns in DNA sequences, but also many physical tasks such as SETI or searching photos to find interesting features.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 06:21:31 pm
content: Quote from: Papal_Stick on January 24, 2016, 06:34:05 pmI could not help noting you flag, sorry, so according to this man your not even allowed to obsolete your computer! You need to downgrade to a type writer!QuoteIf you dont, well Sweden will yet again bombard you with teddy bears!http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/07/20127279351012537.html

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 06:25:12 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 26, 2016, 06:11:49 pmAh, like BOINC that I run, infact if you have a 4 core processor it runs 4 seperate core. Hyperthreading reaked havoc for BOINC on my work machine. I'm pretty sure tasks were taking over twice as long to complete at it tried to run two tasks on 1 core.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 06:45:34 pm
content: Quote from: MT on January 26, 2016, 06:21:31 pmAnd does it right. Iphones and other gadgets are great devices for spying. And I'm pretty sure NSA do know/or specially made zero day vulnerability for every such popular OS/gadget.Just remember about how many years USA shamelessly spied on Merkel's mobile phone.Or Stuxnethttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 07:09:29 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 26, 2016, 06:11:49 pmYou can't always parallelise everything, but the things you have mentioned can by running more instances of the program (or just launching another thread) with dataset split betweens threads/instances. If they couldn't the distributed computing efforts and even trying to solve them on modern supercomputers wouldn't help, you'd get no better results running on a single core desktop PC than on a massive cluster. There are a few inherently unparallelisable workloads, but they are much rarer than a specific part of a workload being unparallelisable. It's much more common for it just to be too hard for the person implementing the program to be able to do it effectively. Programmers are notoriously bad at dealing with concurrent processing though generally getting better, but if you're not already an expert the tools to do so can be a bugger to get your head around. And most application code for HTC or HPC systems are not written by programmers.And not too long ago games programmers couldn't work out how to get advantages using threads, then they worked out which of the inherently unthreadable operations could be put in their own if not split up themselves. Other areas are catching up, CAD packages will in the long run but they always drag their feet.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 26, 2016, 07:24:27 pm
content: Quote from: Mechanical Menace on January 26, 2016, 07:09:29 pmThose are the "embarrassingly parallel " problems suitable for coarse grained parallelim on cluster farms. The problem is that the individual coarse grains are the ones that we are discussing w.r.t. hyperthreading. Some have even been proven to be inherently unparallelisable.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 27, 2016, 11:29:06 pm
content: So much twittering about cores and hyperthreading, and not one peep about the elephant in the room. Or its giant stinking pile of elephant poop.https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdhttps://libreboot.org/faq/#intelTHIS is why you should keep old machines (and old/non-MS OSs.) Or rather it's one file that lists some of the problems. There are plenty of other such sources.'Modern' processor hardware simply cannot be considered secure and working solely in the interests of the owner.They are all insecure, and by insecure, I don't mean 'maybe there could be holes.' I mean deliberately wide-open back doored by design, involving government orders to allow them total covert access. Implemented under the guise of 'improving security', but it's all fake. By 'trusted and secure' they mean "we trust your computer to be secure against you, the owner, so we can be sure it will do what _we_ want."Oh, and of course, with that level of access there is also the ability to remotely permanently brick machines, and manipulate or wipe mass storage devices, if anyone with the keys chose to do so. Which they could do in broadcast mode, if there was ever any kind up widespread uppityness.The remote monitoring, control and forced updates features of Windows 10 are another outrageous example of this trend, and anyone who isn't paying attention to that topic (and is using Win10) deserves what they are definitely going to get.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 27, 2016, 11:47:33 pm
content: win10 connects to the server oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 03:02:05 am
content: Quote from: helius on January 27, 2016, 11:47:33 pmThat is just one of many thousands of reasons to avoid Windows 10.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 03:10:22 am
content: Quote from: rdl on January 28, 2016, 03:02:05 amYou can avoid win 10 but together with updates the same spying services were installed on the win 7 and 8.1 too. So either way you need to disable them for not being spied.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 03:26:17 am
content: Quote from: wraper on January 28, 2016, 03:10:22 amYeah, I've been checking updates carefully since the first time those sleazebags tried that trick.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 12:18:30 pm
content: Quote from: rdl on January 26, 2016, 05:11:52 pmI would have to say I still burn a disc about once a week or two either at home or at work. It's most likely to work absolutely everywhere regardless of operating system or file system. Then again, I deal with classified data which can't be e-mailed according to our Government Policies. "Safe Hand" delivery is where it's at for me.Though I don't think one should dismiss old technology. I keep critical data encrypted on CD-R/DVD-R with an "absolute last resort" backup actually printed out on paper for scanning using Paperback (it basically looks like pages of QR-codes).

author: macboy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 03:11:33 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:24:04 pmNonsense. I am not saying you don't see some kind of improvement, but it isn't due to those reasons. I can't fathom any real reason for the improvement, other than perhaps a small effect due to the processes getting juggled around between cores too much, resulting in too many L1 (+L2) core-specific cache flushes back to L2(or L3) shared cache. That can be combatted by setting processor affinity for specific programs. Your copmuter might simply be sick.Hyperthreading on the P4 was a significant improvement back then. It wasn't quite as good as two real cores, but it was so so much better than just one. Most tasks didn't necessarily run faster (especially back then when everything was single-threaded) but the overall responsiveness of the computer was improved. It was a night and day difference. The machine remained very responsive even with a task chewing up 100% CPU in the background; not something that happens with a single core/thread CPU. The "Core"/"Core2" architectures didn't use it because Core was based on P3 technology not P4, so it wasn't just a free carry-over from the P4 HT work.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 03:22:32 pm
content: Quote from: macboy on January 28, 2016, 03:11:33 pmThe P4 architecture was a step in the wrong direction, taken for the wrong reasons (marketing GHz). The excessively deep pipelining necessary for the GHz spec was fine for a limited number of synthetic benchmarks, but caused problems in real-world workloads.Intel aren't fools, even though they make the occasional misstep. Hence the Core architectures (re)started from the P3, not the P4.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 04:21:03 pm
content: Quote from: blueskull on January 28, 2016, 03:24:10 amThat's the one reason I have Windows 10, though luckily I don't find the need to boot into it as often now as 5 years ago. Even with that said I've turned off every possible bit of data sharing you can I think could be a security concern, even though I don't use the services anyway, and I whitelist outward data as I need. Got to admit so far it doesn't seem to be trying to call home with anything I've told it not to.TBH though I don't really count it as spying when it tells/asks you on install what info it wants to share and you have the option of opting in or out then or later. I'm sorry but a lot of this "MS/Google/Apple are spying on me" whining to me is like people who post things to the public interweb complaining about invasions of privacy when people notice what they chose to make publicly available.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 05:35:14 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 28, 2016, 03:22:32 pmYea then the i-shit range

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 05:37:00 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 28, 2016, 05:36:32 pm

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 05:39:03 pm
content: I can understand hyperthreading was an advantage on the P4 especially with such a long pipeline aimed at duping certain benchmarks, it probably meant that while one pipeline was being flushed the other would allow the processor to carry on working, Aka hyperthreading was a fix of a fix.With a real multicor processor I cannot see the point of hyperthreading other than marketing wank.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 05:40:40 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 05:39:03 pmAnd yet the performance gains in the right applications are real and staring you in the face.Oh well.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 05:42:08 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 28, 2016, 05:40:40 pmWhat like daves own video encoding experiment ? granted is was not of latest generation. Sure some niche applications most of which exist in benchmarks but I still don't buy it frankly.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:01:16 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 05:42:08 pmYou don't buy it because you are biased against it. I have no idea what encoder Dave was trying to use, and I'm not going to watch an hour of video to extract it.i5 750 and i7 860 are only slightly different in clock (5% or so), and they're otherwise identical except for HT. i7 920 is the same clock with triple channel memory, basically.. except it has HT. Hmm, they're both 20% faster than the i5.. can't be HT, though, HT slows everything down.Oh, oops, there's a 760 which is the same clock as the 860, but no HT.. Darn, that HT's 20% faster again.i5 3470 at 'max overclock' (3.8GHz with four cores loaded), 20% slower than an i7 3770K running at 3.7GHz with all four cores and 8 threads. Nuts, that HT's doing it again.MARKETING WANK!!!!Yes, this is just one example, and yes, you may consider it a 'niche benchmark', but.. x264 is used an awful, awful lot. By a lot of people. And HT works well for it. Works with x265, which is an utter dog at the best of times, too:Only 13% in that example, oh no. Must be marketing wank.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:06:08 pm
content: Ah, So a sinthetic benchmark shows a 20% (or was it 15%) increase and that sells it ? Like you said, which encoder was Dave using, what happens to all of the other programs ? So for 20% increase using a bench mark probably based on a video encoder very few will use while making it worse for other programs and hey presto, another shiny thing for people to buy. Sure it may help in some situations, by the way how much more cache does the hyperthreader have ?

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:13:59 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 06:06:08 pmA 'synthetic' benchmark which does real-world video encoding using real-world software? Using a video encoder very many people buying workstations for video purposes will use, those people being the target audience of high end CPUs like the i7?QuoteNONEin the first example. The i5 760 and i7 860 in those examples are EXACTLY THE SAME DEVICE. They just won't enable HT (or VT-d, or TXT, both of which are irrelevant) on the i5. And look, it comes out faster for this!The i7 3770K has 2MiB more L3 cache than the i5 3470. As does the i7 4770K over the i5 4690. I suppose that immediately makes the results invalid.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:20:44 pm
content: Well a 20% increase for a specific type of task does not make it that valuable to many users. Particularly if it hinders other tasks. If we ignore the fact that it was possibly introduced to overcome P4 design cockups and go with the official story of coping better with limited memory bandwidth, i take it all the processors examined do have the same memory speeds.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:24:00 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 06:20:44 pmAnd a 10% decrease for your specific type of task does not make it useless to everyone. Good grief.QuotePlease stop confusing the issue by bringing up the P4. It's not exactly the same technology, and it's not at all the same core.QuoteNo, they decided to test socket-compatible processors of the same clock speed and same design on totally different configurations so the numbers would be meaningless.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:30:55 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 28, 2016, 06:24:00 pmYes and no, I don't know how people choose processors but the i7 seems pretty pointless unless your video encoding.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 28, 2016, 06:41:54 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 06:30:55 pmReally? Couple more 760 vs 860 benchmarks, for good luck:Whoops, Photoshop is faster with HT.Whoops, 3DS Max renders faster with HT. The Phenom doing oh so well there has six cores and 20-30W more power consumption..Neck and neck single threaded..And the HT pulls aheaaaad. The extra real cores of the non-Bulldozer Phenom II were worthwhile there, though. About the only place it's paid off!Faster parity checking..Seeing as that one's only two threads, I'd love to know what the scheduler is getting up to.. Honestly, I/O bottlenecked in practice for significant amounts of data. But for on-the-fly compression, guess who wins again (with whatever codec that was.. LZMA2 at a guess).Again interesting, it seems to like HT even for poorly threaded tasks here. Perhaps the shared cache is beneficial for this?The classic pig of DAO pulls ahead with HT! Lots of scripted events to handle. AMD's 6-core space heater looking sad.Helped DoW2 (another favourite) out a little, but not enough to care about. Especially at 70fps to begin with.I won't inline them, WoW and SC2 gained a very little again:http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/amdfallcpurefresh2010_092110032441/24801.pnghttp://images.anandtech.com/graphs/amdfallcpurefresh2010_092110032441/24802.pngSo, in those series of benchmarks (that's basically everything from that test, which was focused on AMD CPUs no elss), HT pretty much held its own.

author: aargee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 01:28:32 am
content: I can't believe how derailed this thread has become (no, wait, yes I can ...)Let's rename it to "How do I make this thread obsolete?"But...I have just replaced my 2008 era Win 7 Q6600 box with a new H170 driven Skylark() i5 with 16G RAM, Win 10 and an M.2 SSD.The old one had become so bloated on Win 7 and all the rubbish I had subjected it to, took forever to boot, the last straw was the OS disk starting to error all over the place.I could have kept her going but the time had come and I wanted to building after quite a number of years. Honestly I couldn't justify the time and effort on the old box. The old Win 7 product key worked fine to install Win 10.Happy so far, boots very quickly, operation is so smooth in comparison. I'll deal with the privacy paranoia maybe later.

author: Synthetase
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 01:50:43 am
content: Quote from: Papal_Stick on January 24, 2016, 06:34:05 pmhttp://www.dansdata.com/sbs3.htm

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:06:01 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 28, 2016, 06:30:55 pmI check the offerings and buy the most expensive one right before the next one up has a huge price jump for little gain. ie, if a 3.2GHz is $10 more than 2.8GHz, but the 3.4GHz is then another $80 - I'll stop at the 3.2GHz. Because really, except for seriously compute intensive tasks, ANY processor speed is probably plenty fast. This would be for my main PC. If I am building something for a specific purpose that doesn't need a lot of power, I'll look at the low end of the line and find the best I can get for under a price limit. My current desktop even has a server CPU in it. Why? because it was cheaper than the equivalent clock speed I7, and has a lower TDP because it doesn't have integrated graphics - which is useless in this PC since I have a discrete GPU anyway. Next build will be once I get my hobby bench built, it will be lower power than this box, a mini-ITX size so I can bolt the box right on the back of the monitor. It only needs to be powerful enough to run some basic CAD like KiCad for EE and my model railroad CAD program, and control software for instruments like my Siglent scope and also model railroad programming software, and Arduino development. Probably some mid range I3 is what I will use. It will be plenty fast and I won't be gaming on that machine.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 11:57:03 am
content: Basically the niche applications (meaning you intend to do it and often) of the i7 are so limited that if it was sold only into the aplications where it was suited there would not be enough market for fit to be viable. The IT company that serves my employer are useless as are so many others, if my employer says: build me 3 powerful computers for 3D-CAD, well the IT company don't acually know anything about CAD and will just put in the biggest "most powerful" processors they can find. They even put in a £1000 graphics card that never gets used, except by Boinc.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 01:38:05 pm
content: Quote from: blueskull on January 29, 2016, 07:49:29 amSo the software you'd plan to use is written to take advantage of the i7 ? or this is another case of just buy the most expensive product because it much be better.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:17:22 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 01:38:05 pmThey are the fastest desktop focussed option. No matter what software you're running on them. Even/especially in single threaded applications. Even without the software being specially written to take advantage of newer extensions it might gain performance from using. Like everything high end though, whether it be an FX-9590, whatever the latest greatest AMD GPU is, Titan X, fancier M.2 drives etc, if the speed doesn't matter to you then there's no need.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:21:19 pm
content: Well the most efficient processor is a fast dual core, no one needs more than 2 cores unless the software specifically takes advantage of them. The more cores you have the slower the processor runs as expect the thermal perfomance maxes out.As we have established hyperthreading can make a lot of stuff slower not faster. So you only pick one if your software will use it's features. And yes a collegue has told me of i5's being faster than i7's, but I can't think why that would be

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:25:44 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 02:21:19 pmWe've so far established it makes one unnamed application and your questionable machines slower. And many tasks faster. Yes, there will be tasks it slows down, but so far you've not even NAMED ONE, other than broadly stating all CAD runs slower (which I doubt, and I doubt even more you've tested all CAD software).

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:32:07 pm
content: The other thing about this is that Intel has figured this out quite well. Of course you'll probably consider that just more marketing poo, but the whole boost clock design is there to take advantage of both types of applications while remaining within a given thermal and power window. Application doesn't use all those cores? They get shut down and the remaining ones that are used run faster. App is aware of and can use the multiple cores, they all fire up, at a slightly lower speed. 4 things at once at 25% lower speed than one thing at a time is still WAY faster.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:45:15 pm
content: Apart from the whole feel of my machine the 3-D CAD software I use is solid edge this is markedly slower and in fact it will only use 1/8 of a four core processor in hyper- threading mode. It has never overclocked itself to compensate for one core doing more work than the other three. Although I have noted that this would be a definite advantage over my AMD processor if it worked on my particular machine. And as I have already said BOINC was driven mad by hyper- threading and many tasks never completed on time and took excessively long. Never mind the fact that to make full use of the processor it had to run eight tasks at once. What would be much more efficient is if the cores would switch out of hyper- threading when the software cannot take advantage so that only one pipeline is used and four tasks can fully use one core rather than one core be split into two. Processor speed is 3.4 GHz but with hyper- threading enabled it is effectively 1.7 GHz this is why the machine appears slow because it is slow because one core is swapping between doing two tasks this is not fast this is slower. It seems that to take full advantage of the processor I probably need the right combination of hardware and software and this is really going to happen. As I said earlier the niche applications for the I7 are so niche that it did not make commercial sense to produce it in the first place unless of course lots of people bought it regardless.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 02:53:46 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 02:45:15 pmThen either turbo is turned off or you've never looked. Or it's cooking itself.QuoteThat is a task for the scheduler, not the processor. HT doesn't split cores in two, anyway..QuoteThat isNOThow HT works! It does not magically cut the speed of a thread in half and slow the entire computer down. I've said before and I will say it again: HT does not suddenly make a computer slow. None of my i7s are slow at any task. None of them have issues with responsiveness on the desktop. None of them crawl through daily processes.QuoteThe 'so niche' applications like Photoshop? 3DS? Video encoding? None of these are niche. You just don't use them.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:16:30 pm
content: I'm talking about the average office full of computers they mostly don't to all of these tasks. Again I work in an office full of computers full of I7 processes and we all use solid edge and we are all facing lower performance not that most people know any different where I work or care. I could take a look at might BIOS settings I'm hoping they replace the damn machine soon.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:42:03 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on January 29, 2016, 02:25:44 pmAbsence of evidence is not evidence of absence.If you talk to the relevant subset of users, you will find the results are commonplace. Other subsets will, correctly, have differing results on different workloads.You have been told what causes problems. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:46:01 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 29, 2016, 03:42:03 pmI've never claimed HT is perfect. I have admitted and agreed that it causes problems in certain workloads. But you apparently haven't bothered to read any of that.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:48:25 pm
content: My experience is that by certain tasks we mean everything the computer does except for specific workloads like video encoding and certain sections of photo shop that probably require mere seconds to process a photo. Of course I've only tried this on one processor.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:49:38 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 03:16:30 pmWell if you are buying I7 systems for an office full of word processors and spreadsheet drivers who might also do email, there are other issues....A Celeron is plenty for basic office workers these days, even those are dual core.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 03:50:27 pm
content: Tell that to the IT companies ripping customers off. We never needed the £1000 graphic cards but we got them because people think that 3-D CAD requires powerful graphics cards

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:13:58 pm
content: Considering I learned 3D CAD on an 8MHz 8088 system with an EGA card.... ok, it was hot-rodded with a NEC V20 and has an 8087 math coprocessor.As one of those IT company people - all I can say is that we don't do that silly sort of thing and recommend systems based on the intended task, not just what is the most expensive.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:20:42 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on January 29, 2016, 04:13:58 pmWhen I'm sure 3-D CAD has moved on somewhat unfortunately it's still strictly a single threaded process. These days it would seem that everybody is going into IT because on the face of it it is so easy. Of course nobody actually knows what processor is better for what software unless they have an interest in how the process at work and most IT people are only interested in setting up Windows. The understanding of how processes work and how programs use them can be quite intricate and really it would be up to the software writers themselves to dictate what the best type of processor is but of course Siemens who produced solid age will never admit that their coding is shit and that it is not capable of running on multiple processes despite the fact that this makes it hard to manipulate very large models like complete vehicles.The people who supply us the software recommends a core 2 Duo and that it be as fast as possible because as I have found myself the program will only use one core and to have other cores distracted by menial background tasks just eats up at the RAM accessibility and for the 3-D CAD software to work with ease and for it to be responsive it needs a lot of RAM bandwidth.Similarly might speech recognition software would be tons faster if it was using multiple cores so that it could compare a word to more than one potential match at the same time but of course nuance will never admit that the software cannot use multiple processor cores. In fact a salesperson told me that they thought it did use multiple cores but this is actually bullocks.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:51:04 pm
content: I recently was in a conversation with a software engineer of the type of websites and other server based applications. I, as embedded firmware guy asked for a method of setting up some software architecture.I mentioned the word "word", as in the width of cpu. He didn't knew.He is a spoiled little brat where all the hard parts were already finished in the form of libraries.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 06:56:25 pm
content: Quote from: Jeroen3 on January 29, 2016, 04:51:04 pmMy point exactly. IT people and many software engineers are working at such a high level they don't actually understand crap all about how things work at the low-level and the system architecture which is involved.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 09:56:17 pm
content: You really are a one brush kinda pot.Really not sure if mixing idioms works.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 06:17:34 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 11:57:03 amWhat is your problem? Siemens only certify some Intel integrated graphics, and the professional workstation product lines from AMD and NVIDIA, rather than risking a compatibility issue your supplier has delivered something as recommended? Solid Edge will use the GPU resources but that may not be the bottleneck depending on your specific projects.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 08:28:36 am
content: Quote from: Someone on January 30, 2016, 06:17:34 amSolid edge only uses the GPU for rendering, we don't do rendering, just modelling, solid edge flew on my machine with a £22 graphics card. Solid edge is certainly not picky on graphics cards. But the IT supplier assumed we needed a super dupa card, and of course we paid for it.

author: Syntax_Error
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 03:18:54 am
content: Quote from: Jeroen3 on January 29, 2016, 04:51:04 pmWhile I'm sure my comment will draw your (ample) ire, I can't help but muse on the irony of your irritation at his ignorance whilst asking him for help/advice in an area of your own ignorance.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 04:22:39 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 30, 2016, 08:28:36 amThe software provider and their people claim the GPU is used to drive the display of models, and some users claim that the GPU is the limiting factor when interacting with their models. Right now you're off in the world of Audio nuts, flying against the known published data but trusting your "feeling", feel free to actually come up with some benchmarking (the NX benchmark exercises parasolids easily enough) to show how GPUs dont affect viewing of 3D model and HT reduces performance.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:03:22 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 29, 2016, 03:50:27 pmWell, some CAD can use all the 3D horsepower available. Consider thecompletemodels of the Airbus aircraft. Yes, I know that a lot is"selected out" in software, but checking clearances (inc visually ) when retracting the undercarriage isn't a trivial task.Whether or not it is reasonable for an external company to understand one or two specific packages' requirements is a good question. They may have decided it was cheaper to buy hardware than to investigate, get it wrong and be blamed.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:17:13 am
content: The GPU has been virtualized btw.http://www.nvidia.com/object/vmware-trygrid.htmlAs an alternative of renting virtual machines in the cloud, you can purchase a Grid system by Nvidia on your datacenter and virtualize your desktops and GPU usuage from a common pool.So there is no need for every desktop at the office having the latest Quadro cards for 3D modeling.Edit: same goes for the CPU cores, you can share from a common virtual pool and your desktop can be a very cheap device capable of displaying video and supporting peripherals.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:38:02 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 31, 2016, 09:03:22 amI think mostly as in our case the users of the hardware and the people who acquire them are so separated and so ignorant of each other's plight that nobody would be the wiser. We fact did not ask for the computer that would be best for the job. Had the IT manager asked us who speak now and then with the people who provide and support software we would have been able to tell him what type of processor to ask for but he didn't ask so he thinks he got a great deal and most people are actually none the wiser in the office or don't actually give a rats arse.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:39:29 am
content: Quote from: miguelvp on January 31, 2016, 09:17:13 amI have in fact heard somebody from the company that sells solid edge to us (not seamers themselves) talk about clients who have servers full of graphics cards but these are being used specifically for rendering not for general CAD work. Click post

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:49:37 am
content: Quote from: Someone on January 31, 2016, 04:22:39 amNo actually I'm just the idiot that uses the software. The GPU has minimal use for general CAD work. Yes of course the GPU is used to display models as in the GPU is on the graphics card driving the monitors that are showing me the picture of my models. But the GPU does not seem to be doing any work when it comes to calculating how to manipulate the models in the program memory. Displaying the models is one thing but actually working on the 3-D data is another. If I load down all cores on my machine the graphics displaying grinds to a halt even when no program is trying to use the GPU. On the other hand if I leave all of my CPU cores free or leave at least one free so that solid edge has maximum use of one processor core and fully load down the GPU with a BOINC task this has no effect whatsoever on the software. All of those dozens of CUDA cores that we paid hundreds of pounds for are totally and utterly unused by solid edge. Yes if we were doing rendering then the GPU might get used but for the work we are doing it was a total and utter waste of money. And as I have already told you but you ignores and instead chose to call me something similar to an audio nuts I have run the same software on my own home computer with a graphics card that cost just £22 and the display was much faster and responsive than on my work machine and this was despite the fact that I had BOINC tasks running on all 4 cores (this was before I had turned 2 cores of on my machine). So a cheap crappy graphics card and a fully loaded AMD processor was faster at running solid edge than a core I 7 and I am the one that imagining things when I am the one that has done the tests. I rest my case. If you want to believe in your fantasy processes go right ahead. I am not a fan of any particular make or model all I am saying is that I have found that the AMD processors are better bang for buck and offer more performance for what I do and it would seem that the only arguments people have for and I 7 processor being any use whatsoever is for niche tasks or tasks that are carried out in such a short space of time nobody would miss the 20% increase in performance they are trumpeting.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 09:51:35 am
content: Quote from: Someone on January 30, 2016, 06:17:34 am£1000 is not nearly the most expensive PRO graphics card. Mid-range at best. Most of the CAD packages do not support usual/gaming graphics cards and will cripple their capabilities very significantly (often can be hacked) despite the GPU has the necessary horsepower and actually has the same graphics chip on it, just the different drivers. For example, there is a big difference with solidworks. And if you load some complicated model without a pro GPU (or hack and decent gaming GPU) it will be slow as hell.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 11:26:06 am
content: Quote from: Simon on January 31, 2016, 09:49:37 amIndeterminate "feelings" rather than comparable measurements, sounds just like the claims of audio nutters. The benchmark suites are out there and even Intel leave HT enabled on for their example NX benchmarks when trying to show their superior performance.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 11:29:42 am
content: Quote from: Someone on January 31, 2016, 11:26:06 amWell I'm sorry that I was so lax in not writing solid edge test routines into someone elses benchmark!, and I'm hardly in a position to write my own benchmarks.I beleive that i7 processors will run slower due to more cores ? that is an immediate disadvantage, because based on my experience and that of the software vendor the faster the CPU the better the performance, as per any single threaded application. And if it takes exotic combinations of hardware and software to make full use of the i7 apparently overclocking 1 core then that is an immediate fail.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 05:46:30 pm
content: Where I work, they have an old Core 2 machine with a GTX570 in it. The software that runs on it (part of a touchscreen testing robot, with some advanced machine vision) does use the GPU, though obviously not an entire 570 worth of it. My guess is that they had a 9800 or something when they first got the machine, which later broke down so they got a 570 as it was the best card they could get under the budget they had to get the machine back online.That said, there might be good reasons to buy a good GPU even if a cheaper one will do performance wise. The cheaper stuff is in an especially price competitive market and there will inevitably be cut corners.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 05:51:34 pm
content: Yes but when your spending £1000 on a card that could be replaced by one that cost £50. I have used my home and work graphics card to run Boinc tasks non stop when the machine is on and never had a card have a problem, the £22 one worked fine as well. They are so powerful these days.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 11:20:47 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on January 31, 2016, 05:51:34 pmRunning BOINC (does your employer know you do this at work?) loads the GPU with a low priority task, so it shouldn't impact other applications requesting resources. Benchmark or GTFO.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 11:40:27 pm
content: Siemens NX vs video card variations:https://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Lenovo/E32_E3-1280v3_Nvidia_K600/resultHTML.htmlhttps://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Lenovo/E32_E3-1280v3_Nvidia_K2000/resultHTML.htmlK2000 almost doubles K600 performance.https://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_FireProW2100/resultHTML.htmlhttps://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_QuadroK620/resultHTML.htmlhttps://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_QuadroK2200/resultHTML.htmlhttps://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_QuadroK4200/resultHTML.htmlhttps://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_QuadroK5200/resultHTML.htmlPerformance increases with video card, high end cards 3 times faster than the low end professional cards.HT is enabled on all these tests, uploaded by the computer makers to advertise their performance, so we can conclude HT is a net gain in performance for CAD applications otherwise they would have disabled it.NiHaoMike also points to the other "features" of a professional card, warranty, service contracts, etc. Businesses are concerned about the cost of ownership/operating and return on investment, often leading to less than perfect solutions in some aspects or for some users but overall saving money. If you can't even benchmark the machines to show which is the best choice how could you expect someone else in the company to do the same when making decisions?

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2016, 11:53:47 pm
content: And finally a benchmark with HT turned off:https://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/PrecisionTower5810_QuadroK6000/resultHTML.htmlCompared with a processor with twice as many cores, and HT turned on:https://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp12/Dell/Precision5810_QuadroK6000/resultHTML.htmlBoth have the same peak (turbo) clock speed for a single core, same architecture, etc so its all even there. But 4/4 cores/threads was fractionally slower than 8/16.Benchmarks show NX (parasolid) CAD was faster with HT and more cores (some other benchmarks against other tasks were slightly slower).

author: ez24
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 05:53:53 am
content: Can someone tell me what this post has become?

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 06:46:18 am
content: Quote from: ez24 on February 01, 2016, 05:53:53 amA heated discussion about the effectiveness of the i7 processor and wether or not having one automatically makes your PC obsolete as the OP wanted

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 07:07:25 am
content: Quote from: Simon on February 01, 2016, 06:46:18 amOr maybe the race to 1000 posts by ez24, you've been pretty active todayDon't blame you for wanting to get into ordering that DMM and being so close. Myself I'll wait for his secret one, whatever that is.Btw, I'm still using a Core 2 Duo E8400 @3GHz with 6GB of memory at home, works fine for me even in Windows 10.

author: ez24
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 07:11:33 am
content: Quote from: Simon on February 01, 2016, 06:46:18 amAccording to Intel the OP has (or had I hope) aIntel® Core™2 Duo Processor E8400(6M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)So how did it get that the OP has a I7 ?Last year I got rid of my last Duo and now I have I5 and I7. I still believe a sledge hammer has value.Soooo How do I get rid of my I7 quads ? My 64 bit models are a total failure.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 07:31:55 am
content: Quote from: ez24 on February 01, 2016, 07:11:33 amActually i recomended that he not get one, I didn't think that he had one.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 12:08:40 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on January 31, 2016, 11:53:47 pmCare is always required with benchmarks , of course. It is vital to get benchmark and architecture that matches your requirements.Those are Xeon chips, not core; Xeon is a server chip whereas core is a desktop chip. There is a lot of overlap, but significant internal differences can be very important in close benchmarks.The differing corecount makes extrapolations outside the specific machines and benchmarks meaningless.The benchmarks are probably heavily graphics based, which would be a very different workload to computationally limited CAD. Comparisons would be unhelpful and misleading.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 01, 2016, 07:39:31 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on January 31, 2016, 11:20:47 pmhow is that relevant ? as it happens yes, I have told them that the processor does more work for medical research than on the software we use due to their poor choice of processor.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 04:42:20 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on February 01, 2016, 12:08:40 pmWow, a bunch of FUD all in one post, we're not looking for small changes here but rather large ones, its easy enough to say that those two examples of 4/4 and 8/8 cores/threads were in fact equal for NX and no speed advantage could really be seen either way. What has not been shown anywhere is an improvement in performance for CAD by using less cores or disabling HT (solidworks did show a slight increase in performance on the 4/4). I have workloads that could run faster with HT disabled but they're such a small part of the day to day tasks that leaving HT on is a net gain overall, as it is for almost all people.Those Xeon processors are using the same microcode and cores as i7 parts, they even have the same amount of cache. Can you find any benchmarks to show how the Xeons perform better or worse than equivalent i7 parts? Every benchmark I've ever seen put them with identical performance, the Xeons offer a limited choice in platform and RAM compared to the i7 parts and there are some outlier parts for specific applications but they are essentially two different brandings of the same device.There are some CAD workloads that are CPU bound, but they are not typical. Benchmarks here were illustrative of the ridiculous claim from Simon that the GPU is inconsequential to CAD workQuote from: Simon on January 31, 2016, 09:49:37 amand that HT:Quote from: Simon on January 25, 2016, 08:24:04 pmYet without any figures to back that up. Adding more cores and turning on HT improved the NX benchmarks slightly, while solidworks slightly reduced its performance, so to claim that reducing core count and disabling HT creates "marked improvement" needs to be backed up with some examples rather than vague suggestions.Comparisons to benchmarks from the same CAD family are entirely relevant until some more specific examples can be produced, the suppliers have created benchmarks they see fit the majority of workflows, and usually recommend that end users seeking extreme performance conduct their own benchmarking for their specific tasks, but Simon is happy to bury his head in the sand and justbelieve.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 04:52:42 am
content: But...I have Xeon processors on my desktop at work.Just got mine upgraded to one of the latest Lenovo ThinkStation, not sure how many total cores but my previous one had a total of 16 so maybe 32 now? I should checkEdit, I meant threads, my older one had 8 cores and 16 threads, I think they are dual Xeons, but I have to look just got the new one last week.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 07:09:56 am
content: Oh so now it's GPU's we dissagree about. So why did my machine with a cheap £22 graphice card out perform a Quadro 4000 ? for my typical use. GPU's do not play a significant role in using solid edge for modelling. It may be used for rendering which I and many others don't do and as I said before i know people do have networked servers full of GPU's for rendering, rendering, not general modelling and drawings. Have you ever used solid edge ?

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 07:32:25 am
content: Quadros are all about overlays and line or point rendering. Consumer graphics cards outperform them (for games)

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 07:40:34 am
content: Quote from: miguelvp on February 02, 2016, 07:32:25 amYes but I am talking about literally the chepeast card i could get, we are comparing a card that cost £22 to one that cost 100's. yes maybe the quadro would do great at rendering, but I don't do rendering, no one in the cmpany does rendering, we are mechanical engineers and we don't need to present models with painted surfaces with all the shadows and scenery behind. The best you get from us is basic colours and a single clour background.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 08:02:58 am
content: Quote from: Simon on February 02, 2016, 07:40:34 amAnd that's where the Quadro excels on doing those basic drafting tasks, they do suck as gaming cards but they are way faster at rendering drafting dotted lines.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 08:21:22 am
content: Quote from: Simon on February 02, 2016, 07:40:34 amThe viewports in CAD (even in most softwares "2D" modes) are rendered from the GPU, a lot of the UI is done using overlays with GPU compositing. Here again with benchmarking:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/specviewperf-12-workstation-graphics-benchmark,3778-15.htmlNo contest. This isn't about the high quality photo realistic rendering (which you usually do with specialist software on the CPU) but real world CAD work.

author: hayatepilot
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 03:46:06 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on February 02, 2016, 07:09:56 amIt depends heavily on the size of the assembly you are trying to display.I use Solid Edge at work on a i7-870 with a GTX 460.If I try to rotate the BIG assemblies (>2000 Parts), the framerate drops to 1-3fps. Unusable. I have to hide the parts I'm not working on to get a reasonable speed.Wish I had a high end worstation with a quadro and all the bells and whistles.Need to convince my boss... O0Greetings

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 03:47:31 pm
content: Quote from: hayatepilot on February 02, 2016, 03:46:06 pmIf you turn HT off, I'm sure it'll shoot up to 30fps!

author: hayatepilot
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 03:58:36 pm
content: Sad thing is... It's already turned off.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 06:26:19 pm
content: I don't know about solid works, i guess single thread as well.

author: ez24
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2016, 08:17:08 pm
content: I think you guys scared the OP away with whatever this discussion is about. I keep waiting to see if he took a sledge to his computer. (not the first time a new OP has been scared away)If there is any logic to this maybe a new thread can be started on whatever this is so I could follow??