Dual Core Linux Performance: Two Penguins are Better than One
by Kristopher Kubicki on July 1, 2005 5:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Gaming Benchmark 1: Heavy Downloading
It's not uncommon for us to fire up BitTorrent and start downloading the next SUSE ISOs (only 8GB per release!). Killing time for the 20 to 30 hour download requires some serious gaming, and Doom3 always wants to be played. Although this is a very similar benchmark to Anand's Doom3 gaming benchmark, we are using a GeForce 6600GT while he uses a 6800 Ultra. The two are not comparable.
Doom3 is running at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF on the NVIDIA 1.0-7664 drivers. We first ran this test without the extra baggage from the multi tasking.
Now we re-ran the demo with the steps below:
- Open FireFox 1.0.4 and load all 5 web pages.
- Open XMMS and start playing a Nine Inch Nails CD ripped to Ogg
- Open Thunderbird for news
- Login to our news server and start downloading headers for our subscribed news groups
- Load up Doom3 and run timedemo "demo1" - record FPS
Very much like the DVD burning test on the previous page, the dual core systems had no difficulty crunching away at Doom3 while downloading our news headers in the background. The Pentium 4 660 is penalized as much as 16%! Our game play on the dual core machines was actually very solid as well when compared to the Athlon 64 3500+ and the Pentium 640. Constantly during writes to the disk the entire game would almost lock up. The Pentium D 820 did well but its low(er) clock speed assured that it could not out perform the Athlon 64s that do slightly better in this test than Pentiums to begin with.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
StealthyOne - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
where is the pentium EE? :-)JGunther - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
#4, it's 'cause Kris is writing the article. 'nuff said. ONCE AGAIN he's skewed the benchmarks by throwing the top of the line Intel dual core chip up against the entry level AMD chip. Nice job.Also, ditto on #7 and #12... way to criticize the AMD part for its price, Kris, without mentioning that the Pentium-D requires a mobo upgrade while the X2 does not.
semo - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
#6 that's what i'm thinking.plus, i thought that with dma enabled, the cpu would not have to do too much work to burn a dvd
atlr - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
I look forward to some database server/web server tests.appu - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Kris, great work! You might want to consideramaroK (http://amarok.kde.org) as an equivalent
of iTunes under Linux, or even gtkpod. XMMS is
better treated as an equivalent of Winamp 2.x.
Furen - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
I have one question: why was the compile job on the x2 system only run with -j1? Not trying to flame you or anything, just a wondering...bob661 - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Kristopher Kubick,"At $558 you pay through the nose for the additional performance of the Athlon 64 X2 4200+"
That's the price for the P-D 840 not the X2 4200.
SLIM - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
I think #7 has hit the nail on the head. One other large difference in the prices besides the memory is the extra $100+ spent on a 955x motherboard or a comparable nforce4 sli intel edition (not sure if these support dual core yet though). The price difference, as has been pointed out several time before, between the intel cpus and amd cpus is just about negated once you tack on the extra cost of the MB and memory.You could definitely choose a 945 MB and save about $100 but I have yet to see the pentium D benched on that platform, and I don't think there is an sli platform for intel that's available for under $225.
GoatHerderEd - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Ill stick with my K6-3 550 (=Furen - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
haha, what a cool article name and icon =)