benchmark update

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This week I helped a friend pick out a new laptop. I picked out a few, but eventually she decided on the Acer Aspire 5536:

Specifications:

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 QL-64 2.1 Ghz
GPU: Radeon Mobility HD 3200
RAM: 3GB
HDD: 250GB
Screen: 15.6"
Price: Around 350

All-in-all, a very nice price for what is a very nice laptop. I also got to benchmark it.

The QL-64 was a never before seen chip on hwbot, so a quick request to support got it added. Needless to say, this resulted in a swathe of gold for me... :)

CPU-Z: 2118.53 Mhz
PiFast: 73.26 sec @ 2100 Mhz
1M SuperPi: 45.96 sec @ 2100 Mhz
32M SuperPi: 40 min 44.08 sec @ 2100 Mhz
32M wPrime: 39.35 sec @ 2100 Mhz
1024M wPrime: 21 min 1.12 sec @ 2100 Mhz

I wasn't able to benchmark using PC05 - for some reason it wouldn't install. Also didn't bother with the GPU due to time, and that card is hotly contested with better CPUs.

However, I still have a mountain of graphics cards and processors to bench. Lets see how far I get.

a haul in the mail

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Today I went to my college post box to receive an awesome haul:

Celeron 1.7Ghz (Costa Rica)
Celeron 1.7Ghz (Malay)
Celeron 1.8Ghz (Malay)
Celeron 2.2Ghz (Costa Rica)
Celeron D 2.66Ghz (Malay)
Pentium 4 1.6Ghz (Costa Rica)
Pentium 4 1.5Ghz (Costa Rica) x 2

All for around £1.50 each.

Some pure socket 478 benching ahead at some point.

benchmark update

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I took a bit of a detour this past couple of weeks. I'm doing a big round up of all the latest Catalyst driver releases for ATI cards on all the 3D benchmarks. There are some significantly surprising results! I'm less than halfway through as the testing is quite rigourous, and the results will be put up in the members section of BenchTecUK forums. Not a member? Join the team at HWbot, put up 3 scoring results (which isn't that hard) and start posting on the forum.

I've actually been quite generous to myself recently, and picked up some more equipment:

ATi 2400 Pro
nVidia 7800GS
5 Socket A processors, from Duron 700 to Athlon 1400
Socket A motherboard and cooler w/VGA port (1.5V and 3.3V)
Various Socket 478 processors from ebay

I took apart my old P4 mobo from its case so I could mess around with it. I took the cooler off, and the P4 proc came off with it! Looks like they'd used 3g of thermal material to seat the proc, and it'd set. I had to douse the area with TIM to help dissolve the thermal material, then use two screwdrivers to seperate the proc from the cooler. But I reseated it the way I wanted, hopefully I can push that beyond 3.6Ghz now.

I bought the Socket A procs and gfx cards from the BenchTec forums. I didn't have a socket A motherboard, but the procs were cheap, so I picked up a mobo/proc/cooler combo off ebay for under 20 notes. Got the mobo combo in the mail yesterday, only to find they'd used EVEN MORE thermal material on the proc... it hadn't even set properly. So I cleaned that up, and I'll test it soon after my Catalyst round up.

As far is BOINC is concerned, I'm atm only running 2 ATI cards on Milkyway - it'll be four when I've finished the Catalyst roundup. Aqua isn't giving out as much work, or credit, as before - but I got enough WUs to push me over 1m this week. GPUGrid climbed over 750k and is onto 1m fairly soon. SETI is being very awkward, and is having trouble getting to 250k. I may swap my nVidia card on GPUGrid over to Seti when GPUGrid reaches 1m - maybe get SETI to 1m. We'll see what happens.

At the minute, Dutchie is laying without power supply or graphics cards. I'll sort that soon.

On a bright note, I'm being commissioned to design a couple of websites. No doubt you can guess where that cash is going.

Also as a side project, as I've been learning CUDA and dabbling in OpenMP, I've been thinking of writing a benchmark program. The guys at BenchTec are being supportive - it probably wont be used at hwbot, but might use it in some form of competition at BenchTec. I'll post it here too :)

Take care, I'm back to benching.

mk-36 laptop benching

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I was lucky enough to get hold of a friends laptop these past couple of days, to replace a hard drive. Needless to say, benchmarks were forthcoming!

The system is best described as:

Acer Aspire 5051
AMD Turion 64 MK-36 - 2Ghz stock
1GB RAM
Radeon Mobility 1100

For both the CPU and GPU, there were less than 20 results for each benchmark, so I was guaranteed some points.

(Actually, as I'm writing this, I forgot to do some stock benchmarks for the CPU. Damn - that's for tomorrow then.)

Overclocking the CPU involved some SetFSB - managed 2213Mhz stable, and 2100Mhz for benching.

So, 2D results:

CPU-Z: 2213Mhz
PiFast: 57.97s @ 2100Mhz
SuperPi 1m: 41.11s @ 2100Mhz
SuperPi 32m: 35m 39.88s @ 2100Mhz
wPrime 32m: 1m 19.06s @ 2175Mhz
wPrime 1024m: 43m 50.33s @ 2100Mhz
PC Mark05: nothing, couldn't get it to work

Overclocking the GPU was a hard task. Hard enough that all I tried didn't work. So these are all stock scores, on an overclocked (2100Mhz) CPU:

Aquamark 3: 14207
3D Mark 01: 6008
3D Mark 03: 1523
3D Mark 05: 685
3D Mark 06: 186

So that's a nice haul of a bronze cup and 3 medals.

In other news, I ordered a 4850X2 today. So that means I can post some scores in the 4850X2 category, and the 4850X2 in CF (I'll team it with a 4850) categories. Also, the added bonus of crunching = win.

I've noticed I didn't put my 2x 4850 in CF scores up on the bot. And I can't find copies of them anywhere. So I'll do them again. It's a damn shame the UK is SOOO HOT AND HUMID at the minute. The results might be mediocre... at best.

benchmark'd

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So, I'm getting into the groove with this benchmarking thing. I have an optimised set up for 2D and 3D benchmarks, and over the week have benched the following:

CPUs:

Core i7 920 D0

GPUs: (w/ Core i7 920 D0 @ 4.1Ghz)

X550 256mb
X800 XL
X1900 XT
4670
2x4670 in CF
4850
2x4850 in CF
GTX 280

And thus the following results were garnered:

2D Stock:


2D Overclocked:


2D Combined:


3D Overall:


3D OC vs. OC, Stock vs. Stock:


In all graphs, the higher score is better :)

Calculation of 2D scores:
a) Take the highest time for test X out of my hardware
b) Divide each CPU time by highest time = score
c) Add all scores together for all tests

Calculation of 3D scores:
a) Take the best score for test X out of my hardware
b) Divide each test score by highest score, make a %
c) Add all % for all tests, max 500 points.

Interesting observations:

- The Core i7 blasts an overclocked Core 2 Duo E6400 out of the water.
- One 4670 isn't that good at gaming, however 2x4670 at stock beats a 4850 at stock.
- The GTX 280 is better at older benchmarks. However, 2x4850 at stock beats the GTX280 overclocked for a cheaper price.

benchmark update

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Just a small update, given I haven't written anything. HELLFIRE is still set up as a test rig; I'm currently chugging through all my previous graphics cards. Most are setting personal bests :) Also got some modified graphics to post.

And it looks like:

2x 4670 in CF > 1x 4850
2x 4850 in CF > 1x GTX280

Also, how come I get some monster memory overclocks?? =P More details soon.

benchmarks in graphical form

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Having played around with Excel (because I don't have Origin), I now have some graphs to show you the results of my various benchmarking.

First of all, the 2D Benchmarks:

The graph for this can be found over at http://borandi.googlepages.com/benchmarking:



BLUE = Singlethreaded Apps: PiFast, 1m SuperPi, 32m SuperPi
RED = Multithreaded Apps: wPrime 32m, wPrime 1024m
* = Not all benchmarks complete

I've decided to leave PCMark05 out of this, as it depends too much on the processor and hard drive used.

The slowest time is set as the max time, and all the scores are scaled to it. So if chip A takes 120 seconds, and chip B takes 30 seconds, chip B is rated 30/120 = 0.25

So for these benchmarks, LOWER IS BETTER.

The 3D Benchmarks:

The graph for this can be found over at http://borandi.googlepages.com/benchmarking2:



* = not all benchmarks completed yet

In these benchmarks, every score is normalised to the best score. So if GPU A gets 12000 points on a benchmark, and GPU B gets 6000 points, GPU B gets 12000/6000 = 0.5 points.

In these benchmarks, HIGHER IS BETTER.

benchmark update

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Apart from drinking the past few days, I'm finally getting around to putting the PSUs in the right PCs. Finished playing around with Dutchie, I just have to put it all it it's case now. I'm also playing around with the PCs at stock speeds, and getting some benchmarks for comparison.

Also managed to get admin access on my works Q6600, so was able to do a full suite of benchmarks for it:

CPU: Q6600 (2.4Ghz) @ 3.019Ghz
RAM: 2GB of something
Mobo: Foxconn something

CPU-Z: 3019.2Mhz
PiFast: 31.13s @ 3006Mhz
SuperPi 1m: 17.81s @ 3006Mhz
SuperPi 32m: 17m 39.920s @ 3006Mhz
wPrime 32m: 14.83s @ 3019Mhz
wPrime 1024m: 7m 45.63s @ 3019Mhz

Obviously none of them are placed - the Q6600 is a popular ship and I'm dealing with some crappy company that built this work machine. Pah.

benchmark update

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Now I have some Dutchie results :) Now the X2-5050e chip is 2.6Ghz on stock, however the motherboard I bought for it is useless for overclocking the CPU. It's awesome for tweaking the RAM timings, just naff for the CPU. For a start, I'm limited to 1.25 volts on Vcore. Also, with the RAM, I couldn't select DDR2-1066; only DDR2-800. As a result, I was only able to push the FSB from 200x13 (2600NMhz) to 225x13 (2925Mhz) a 12.5% overclock. Anything much above that and it'd refuse to boot properly. I'm not entirely sure why. It was having trouble at 225, until I boosted the RAM voltage from 1.8 to 2.05. This RAM is rated to 2.1V, but it didn't have the option. So is Dutchie RAM limited??

Nevertheless, I did some benchmarks. These are all at various speeds, as stability was a distinct issue.

CPU: X2-5050e (2.6Ghz) @ ~2.925Ghz
RAM: 2GB DDR2-1066Mhz (@ 833Mhz) 5-4-4-12 1T
HDD: WD Raptor
Mobo: AsRock ALiveXFire-eSata2
GFX: 2x4850 in CF

CPU-Z: 2947.2Mhz
PiFast: 45.08s @ 2936Mhz
SuperPi 1m: 31.03s @ 2937Mhz
SuperPi 32m: 28m 29.610s @ 2859Mhz
wPrime 32m: 29.24s @ 2962Mhz
wPrime 1024m: 15m 35.620s @ 2946Mhz
PCMark 05: 6180 @ 2859Mhz

I want to do wPrime 1024m and CPU-Z again, given I did run the wPrime 32m at 2962Mhz. I'll graph it all up and add some on later :) However, given the rarety of this processor on HWBot, 6 gold cups and 1 silver cup :)

benchmark update

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With this new RAM and 52.1% overclock, it was time to redo all the 2D tests for HWbot.

HALBERD:

CPU: E6400 (2.13Ghz) @ 3.24Ghz
GFX: GTX280 (605/1107) @ 740/1300
RAM: 4GB DDR2 OCZ Gold (1066Mhz) @ 810Mhz 5-5-6-15
HDD: WD Raptor 150GB
Mobo: MSI Platinum PowerUp!
Drivers: Forceware 182.50

CPUz: 3247Mhz
PiFast: 30.03s
SuperPi 1m: 17.829s
SuperPi 32m: 16m 18.125s
wPrime 32m: 25.468s
wPrime 1024m: 13m 43.25s
PCMark 05(w/GTX280 @ 740/1300): 9160

When it comes time to bench the 2x4850 setup, I will probably redo the PCMark05. Even though the E6400 is a popular chip, I managed to get into the HWBot points for the PCMark05 score.

I've also joined the BenchTecUK forums (the team I joined on HWBot), and they have a few legal tweaks I can use to get these benchmarks higher. When it comes round to producing graphs, I'll put the updated scores on them :)

xfx gtx280

In this post I'll be showing you the XFX GTX280 graphics card, and my annoying installation of it =P Here it is, bundled with HALBERD in the Thermaltake Armour:


The box is big, though not as large as my Asus HD4850 boxes. Inside, the card is well protected, with its antistatic bag, and tons of foam padding:


This is a great display by XFX - knowing that Joe Postman may just have to violently brake, with your new graphics card in the back of the van. The graphic work on the card is a big display of green and black and has that 'I'm a powerful graphics card' feel.


The fan on the card is a novel design to me. I've never seen a fan like this before - but given the size of the card, some serious cooling would need to be in order:


From the following picture, we see the GTX280 requires 1x6pin and 1x8pin power supply:

The back of the graphics card is also incased with this green and black metallic monster casing, however we see some ventilation fins and a red PCB showing through:

The SLI connectors are protected by a rubber seal, which easily comes off allowing you to fit 4 in Quad-SLI if you have the appropriate motherboard and power supplies:

Just to demonstrate the sheer size of this card, here it is alongside a regular consumer graphics card, the HD4670. The GTX280 is 10.5 inches (26.64 cm) long, and I'm sure weighs the best part of 2lbs (0.8kg).

Installation into my case arose some problems. One, this card is huge, and takes over a little section of my SATA ports, thus I had to take out two SATA cables. Second, my case uses a novel screwless system for sticking the cards in:

This purple/green combination is great for single slot cards, and the 4850s, because the 4850s have a little notch between slot1 and slot2. However, the GTX280 has essentially a solid bit of metal, and I had to remove the screwless design to even fit it in:

As you can see, this card is longer than the standard ATX motherboard! Thus be forwarned if you have a small case. This card is heavy and bulky, but looks awesome:

You may think, especially with the 4670 size comparison, why a card should need such a powerful heatsink and cooler? Well now we come to the overclocking.

The standard speed of this card was 605Mhz core, 1107 Mhz memory, 1300Mhz on the shaders. Without too much hassle, I was able to push this using RivaTuner to 740Mhz/1300Mhz/1596Mhz, and now runs at 70°C on full pelt.

So how about the benchmarks?

The system used for this bench was essentially the now souped up HALBERD:

CPU: E6400 (2.13Ghz) @ 3.24Ghz
GFX: GTX280 (605/1107) @ 740/1300
RAM: 4GB DDR2 OCZ Gold (1066Mhz) @ 810Mhz 5-5-6-15
HDD: WD Raptor 150GB
Mobo: MSI Platinum PowerUp!
Drivers: Forceware 182.50

Aquamark 3d: 170979
3D Mark 01: 56390
3D Mark 03: 57485
3D Mark 05: 19729
3D Mark 06: 14593

What are benchmarks without a comparison? Well, most people at HWbot use an E8600 (3.33Ghz) chip to do their benchmarks, which I'd love to have. And the GTX280 is a relatively popular card. Thus I don't really feature highly on the tables. Yet, I'll compare my other graphics card setups to this, make some pretty graphs.

Overall though, it looks nice and feels solid, and overclocks well. However, for £340, and the fact that a pair of HD4850s in Crossfire would/should work better, you can't really justify the cost.

benchmark update

So this time, the Radeon X800XL takes a spin in HALBERD. Stock, the X800XL runs at 400/490 - my card was old, so only a 405/522 overclock was possible using ATiTool. I was hoping for more.

The system:

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6400 (2.13Ghz) @ 2.448 Ghz
GFX: ATi Radeon X800XL (400/490) @ 405/522
WD Raptor, 2GB Ram @ 5-5-5-13 382.5*2

Results:

83286 on Aquamark (22nd)
26976 on 3D Mark 01 (49th)
12845 on 3D Mark 03 (30th)
5956 on 3D Mark 05 (35th)
2064 on 3D Mark 06 (24th)

Next is my old X1900XT - one of the hottest cards ever made (the fan never went full til 100 degrees C). I replaced it mainly as it was conking out at stock speeds :S I'll remove some dust, and see what that does.

benchmark update

Spent this evening benchmarking my brothers old ATi X550 256mb in my E6400 (2.13Ghz) @ 2.408Ghz. I was able to boost the FSB on the E6400 by 5 after the 3D Mark 05 test, but it made no difference to the previous tests.

The X550 overclocked quite well on air - from 450/277 to 480/342, using ATi Tool auto-tune settings.

The system:

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6400 (2.13Ghz) @ 2.448 Ghz
GFX: ATi X550 256mb (450/277) @ 480/432
WD Raptor, 2GB Ram @ 5-5-5-13 382.5*2

Results:

35108 on Aquamark (6th)
16470 on 3D Mark 01 (17th)
4527 on 3D Mark 03 (8th)
2330 on 3D Mark 05 (7th)
641 on 3D Mark 06 (5th )

Tomorrow, I intend to work on the X800XL I have. Initial findings show it doesn't overclock well.

Check out my HWBot.org profile.

benchmark update

I had some time on a couple of computers in the lab - the a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz Prescott (which I thought sold millions, but looks like not that version), and a Cedar Mill core - aka Pentium 4 631, which did sell loads.

The Cedar Mill core did nothing spectacular:

78.06 s on PiFast
46.72 s on 1M SuperPi

There's a good reason for this. The Cedar Mill chips were awesome overclockers - one person even got it up to 8Ghz! So I wont get anything for those submissions.

The 3.4Ghz Prescott netted me these results:

38.82 s on 1M SuperPi - 6th best on hwbot.org for this chip
65.06 s on PiFast - Numero Uno on hwbot.org for this chip

There is a reason I only did SuperPi and PiFast - on these machines, I don't have admin rights, so CPU-Z doesn't function properly. This means I can't submit a CPU-Z and wPrime doesn't work (cos it uses CPU-Z), or do any graphical benchmarks. I tried SuperPi 32m on the Prescott, but it kept failing. Didn't have time to run it on the Cedar Mill, but it probably wouldn't get anywhere in the tables!

the benchmarking

I'm currently benchmarking all my systems and submitting results to hwbot.org - look at my profile.

I have the following graphics cards to play with:

2 x 4850
2 x 4670 (one almost new, one never used, trying to sell, £50 each)
1 x 1900XT
1 x 800XL
1 x 550SE

Radeon 9800
Whatever is in Dell 1
Some Rage thing I found on my shelf. Looks old.

The programs I use to benchmark:

PiFast
SuperPi Mod 1.5 XS (1m and 32m tests)
wPrime95 (32m and 1024m tests)
CPU-Z
3D Mark 01
3D Mark 03
3D Mark 05
3D Mark 06
PC Mark 05
Aquamark

So in order to get best out of each GFX card, I need to put into my best CPU system at it's best overclocked speed. So all the PCI-E cards will go into HALBERD, and I've yet to see which of the AGP systems (Dell 1 and P4 old crock) is the best.