New PC: biggest bang for the buck?

[Nocturnal]

Go i7 second gen if you can afford it. My i7-920 is 1.5 years old now and it's still quite fast. A quad core i5 is no slouch either and AMD makes some fast processors that are less money per MIPS. There are several way to look at CPU speed, here's one that looks at the Passmark:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

[sleshin]

Hi Georg,

Yes, i7-2xxx is probably the way to go. I read that the Sandy Bridge generation also give some nice performance boosts compared to the previous i7 generation. Only, you'll have to wait for another month or so until Intel as fixed the problem with the chips set.

About 2 weeks ago, Dell started to offer a new version of there XPS laptop, available for shipping after March 15, with a 2nd gen Intel Core i7-2820QM processor. Do you know if this has the "fixed" chip set.

Steve

[Nocturnal]

You should ask Dell to make sure but I doubt they'd sell broken hardware on purpose.

[georg.viehoever]

...
About 2 weeks ago, Dell started to offer a new version of there XPS laptop, available for shipping after March 15, with a 2nd gen Intel Core i7-2820QM processor. Do you know if this has the "fixed" chip set.
...

Unlikely. I have heard the first fixed systems are supposed to ship by end of March. You should ask Dell about it. If you/they dont plan to (ever) use the slow SATA ports that have problems, there is no reason not to buy such as system (the fast SATA ports dont have the problem).

Georg

[Nocturnal]

When you order a Dell laptop today it may not get built till 2-3 weeks from now. It's possible that they're delaying those i7s until the right parts come in.

[sleshin]

Thanks Sander and Georg. I certainly will ask Dell but being well informed before talking with them can't hurt.

Steve

[georg.viehoever]

Asus P8P67 Board with 8 GB RAM and i5-2500 3.3 GHz (Sandy Bridge generation, Quad Core, no HT), HD6850 graphics, Blue Ray burner, 2TB Harddisk with 7200 rpm.
Windows7-x64
PI 1.6.9.652 with latest patches

Results:
- new icon set: 8.595 sec
- old icons set:produces error when loading the icon set "*** Error: Deconvolution: Unknown parameter: linear", but still works. 25.05 seconds

Quite amazing speed for just 900 EUR (plus, one could easily save 100 EUR by using a smaller harddisk, a more modest graphics card, a less flashy casing, a plain DVD drive... . But try to tell this to your son   )

Georg

[Juan Conejero]

Intel Core i7 990X @ 3.47GHz
Intel DX58SO2 motherboard
24 GB of RAM @ 1066MHz
ATI FirePro V4800 graphics card
2 x WD7500AYYS hard disks working as a RAID 1 set
2 x Hitachi HDP725050GLA hard disks for swap file storage
Fedora 14 Linux x86_64
Gnome desktop latest version with X11 composition manager running.
PixInsight 1.7.0.675 (development version)

Benchmark_M74
Average of 6 runs: 9.58 s (minimum: 9.53 s, maximum: 9.63 s)

Benchmark_M74_parallel
Average of 6 runs: 4.67 s (minimum: 4.59 s, maximum: 4.73 s)

This is a self-made machine that replaces my old dual Xeon workstation.

Edited: These results are with the console open. The two 750 GB WD disks are working as a software RAID 1 set (mdadm).

[georg.viehoever]

...Benchmark_M74_parallel
Average of 6 runs: 4.67 s (minimum: 4.59 s, maximum: 4.73 s)
...

Wow, this is probably amongst the fasted single socket system you can buy today...  8)

[Carlos Milovic]

You changed KDE for Gnome? I didn't feel it right on Fedora... I think that gnome blends better with ubuntu

[georg.viehoever]

PI 1.6.9, latest patches
RHEL6-x64
2x Xeon X5550 quadcore @2.66 GHz, HT deactivated (unfortunately the only RHEL6 system I have access to)
24 GB RAM

Benchmark_M74_parallel: 11.57 secs
Benchmark_M74: 18.79 secs

Note that closing the console window for computation had a large effect (14.54 vs. 11.57 secs).

Georg

[twade]

To all,

After about eight years, I finally had to upgrade my machine.  It was testing my patience due to its slowness.  The old PC was a dual Xeon 2.66 GHz 32-bit processor.  Each processor is single core, but it has HT for a total of 2 threads (total for the system is 4 threads).  The new machine is a dual Xeon 5650 2.66 GHz processor with 6 cores each for a total of 24 threads.  The old system was Windows XP 32-bit; whereas, the new system is Windows 7 64-bit.  Finally, the old system had 4 GB of ram, and the new system has 24 GB.  All the benchmark tests were run with the console open.

Old dual processor Xeon 2.66 GHz:
   Benchmark_M74:             78.09 seconds
   Benchmark_M74_parallel:  35.54 seconds

New dual processor Xeon x5650 2.66 GHz:
   Benchmark_M74:             83.42
   Benchmark_M74_parallel:  12.13

I'm a little surprised at how slow the processors are when executing with non-parallel code.  I suppose the "poor" performance of the new chip (i.e. slower than the older chip) is due to the 64-bit overhead and larger memory pool???  It definitely goes to show that cpu speed is everything.

I did run a comparison on StarAlignment and Integration.  It took the old system 8203 seconds to align thirty-three 4096x4096 images (Kodak 16803 chip).  It took the new system 1184 seconds.  Integrating the images with noise evaluation and Winsorized sigma clipping.  The old system took 2132 seconds while the new system took 1041 seconds.

I'm very pleased with the improvement I'm seeing, but as stated earlier, cpu speed is everything if you want the fastest computations.  In the future, I may experiment with overclocking.

Wade

[georg.viehoever]

...
New dual processor Xeon x5650 2.66 GHz:
   Benchmark_M74:             83.42
 ...

I am a bit surprised about how slow it is for the non-parallel benchmark. After all, the 2x Xeon X5550 quadcore @2.66 GHz I tested in my previous mail does the same thing in 18.79 secs.   If you look at other measurements in this thread, even fairly old laptops are faster than this. Something is probably wrong with this number.

Georg

[twade]

Georg,

I am a bit surprised about how slow it is for the non-parallel benchmark.

I'm very surprised too.  Do you have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this unexpected result? Perhaps, it is the OS.  I have 7200 rpm SATA drives installed.  Are there any settings in PixInsight I need to change.  At present, they are set at their default.  The motherboard is an EVGA SR-2.

Thanks,

Wade

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Wade,

Congratulations on you new machine. With that dream of a motherboard and those Xeon processors this machine should beat everything else by far. I agree with Georg that something is wrong with those 83 seconds, and I think with the 12 seconds too. I think the operating system may be the problem here. We have seen performance problems with Windows 7 on several machines, although nothing so severe.

Definitely a 64-bit operating system cannot be the problem here; it is just the contrary. The same happens with RAM - the more the better.

Any chance you install a Linux distribution? You could just add a second hard drive and install Linux on it, then set up a dual boot system. I guess you may be surprised...