This morning I was rebooting both of my work computers and decided to run a benchmark test on them, since they were both clean and fresh. I decided to share this with my readers, just for fun. It's very interesting to see how the benchmarks come out on different computers.
I used PassMark's PerformanceTest 8.0 for the testing. It is free to evaluate and you can run your benchmark tests even if it has expired, just don't have access to some advanced options. I use their site cpubenchmark.com for CPU comparison so I figured their benchmark software would give me the best comparison with what I know.
I use two computers, "HP Pavilion" and "Snow" and I built both of them. One of them I built from scratch from a bare bone kit that I bought from TigerDirect. The other one was a "fixer-upper" from my 2008 HP Pavillion computer. It died in January 2012 and I ended up replacing everything in the case except the DVD drive and the front panel;)
HP Pavilion (I call it that even though it's only the case and the DVD drive that are left of it;) I use for day to day stuff. That includes work in MS Office, Adobe software - mostly Photoshop, Dreamveawer, Lightroom and less in the other tools offered via Adobe Creative Cloud. I also run email on it, many of the in-house programs to maintain my business etc. This machine is based on an Intel i5-2500K CPU on an ASUS P8P67-M Pro motherboard. It has 16GB of memory, Radeon HD 5400 Series video card and a 1TB Seagate SATA2 drive. On this machine I have a 26" Samsung T260 monitor and a 25" Hanns-G HH251 monitor.
Snow is a dedicated development machine and my work horse. Since the box is white I named it Snow;) I also use it as a host for virtual machines to do work in Clarion 6 and also for testing purposes. This machine is based on an Intel i7-3770K CPU on a P8Z77-V LX motherboard. It has 32GB of memory, 1TB Seagate SATA3 boot-up drive and 2TB Seagate SATA3 driver where I run my virtual machines. I'm contemplating adding a 240GB SSD drive to run the operating system and some of my programs on to add to the speed. I can easily run 3 virtual machines, each with Windows 7 Pro 32bit installed with 4GB of memory each and there is no slowdown at all. I have run 5 similar virtual machines on it and it performed without a hitch. The CPU has hyper-threading so software like VMWare effectively sees 8 cores. I can easily set each Virtual machine to use 2 cores and the CPU rarely goes above 20% usage! On this machine I just use the on-board graphic controller and don't have a dedicated video card. It's OK, but is not going to win any awards for speed;) I have two Samsung Syncmaster SA350 27" monitors on this system. One is hooked up directly via HDMI and the other one is hooked up to the DVI outlet via HDMI and a HDMI->DVI converter plug. This results in a very slight hue difference, barely noticeable but that's ok, since I use the other computer for photo work.
Click on the images to get a slightly more detailed information about the benchmark results.
I have 3 other computers in my office, a file server that I also rebuilt last year that is not anywhere close to powerful (uses i3) but it has something like 5TB of drives hooked up to it, mostly for backups but I also keep all my documents on this machine. I also keep my website code, apache web server, in-house software and version control files on that machine. A 6 year old laptop and a 10 year old development machine make up for the rest of the machines I have.
Hope this is interesting to some people:) I like messing with hardware and I enjoy building machines. If you are comfortable with it, it only takes between half an hour and an hour to put it together if everything fits. Re-using some components can take longer. For example in the HP box I had to rewire the front panel because the front panel plugs that HP uses don't match industry standards. So I had to carefully pull the wires out of the HP plug and plug each of them directly into the motherboard.
The HP was also a long and painful process. It had started to fail with hard disk errors so I backed up the drive and replaced it. Then the machine just died. Wouldn't turn on and it was just completely dead. So I replaced the motherboard and memory. Didn't help. So I replace the video card - which was a $300 NVIDIA card less than 6 months old, that was another painful and costly endeavor to try to reduce the flicker in the Clarion 8 IDE, which didn't help at all. Lo and behold, things started working again. Turned out that the drive seemed to be fine. It looks like it might have been a problem between the NVIDIA chips on the video card and the NVIDIA hard drive controller on the mother board. But I got a nice machine out of it:) I'm still using the original drive over a year later and it's working fine. I swore that NVIDIA chips would not be used in my computers again. Ever! 😉
Arnor Baldvinsson
