Performance
I’ve not yet exercised the system in my LAN party environment yet, but did burn it in by looping 3DMark for several hours after installing the Windows 7 RTM. Then I ran a few inspection tests, Windows Experience Index and 3DMark Vantage in standard (performance) mode.
Windows Experience Index
The Windows Experience Index is 5.9 (hobbled by the 7,200RPM hard drive, but the other scores were up around 7.5-7.9, which was about right for this system.
Finally, 3DMark Vantage reported a score of just over 10,000.
OK, tha's about normal.
Again, that’s about what I’d expected. The Radeon HD 4870 isn’t the fastest GPU around, but it was available, and should run fine in this environment.
I’ll report back in a postmortem after I’ve run the system for a month or so. For gaming, I value stability above raw performance, so if the system can’t hack 3GHz with the Core i5, I’ll no doubt upgrade the CPU cooler and start fooling around with voltages a bit. But the early indicators look good.
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12 comments
Paul
September 18, 2009 at 2:51 pm (UTC -7)
Interesting case! After the build, i bet it was pretty cramped in that little case. That may have something to do with the temps too. More than likely, if you swap out the HSF, I would think that you would get temps in the 35-40C range, depending on the cooler. I am going to be building one after the 1st of the year, so that I can play Aion in 1080p resolution.
Loyd Case
September 18, 2009 at 3:26 pm (UTC -7)
It turned out that one heat sink post was just a tiny bit rotated, so the CPU cooler wasn’t quite fully seated. If you go see that section, you’ll see I’m well under 50 degrees for all four cores — not bad for 3GHz using the standard low profile Intel cooler.
Tim Verry
September 18, 2009 at 8:18 pm (UTC -7)
Interesting, I look forward to the follow-up article. I may be going with an i5 750 or the i7 860 when I upgrade my computer. I’m very tempted to go the 1366 route; however, because the thought of hexacore (and 12 cores w/ hyperthreading
) would simply be awesome and I picture my video encoding going so much quicker! Then again, I would probably start encoding higher bit-rate videos (still more compressed than the HD source but o well, I don’t want to spend a week uploading HD video haha) just because I could so the time decrease may end up not happening, but still! 
For a gaming system; however, an overclocked i5 750 will pack a punch
.
Paul
September 19, 2009 at 10:18 pm (UTC -7)
Ah.. I would say that that would do it. That is pretty good for a stock cooler. making me think twice about getting an aftermarket HSF. Doing that would only drop temps further.
Jeff Z
September 20, 2009 at 5:43 pm (UTC -7)
Loyd-
Would you mind hooking up your Kill-a-Watt (or similar) to the system and post how many watts it runs at during idle? Heck, what about under different loads as well? This is always an important factor for me. I’m sure you have a Kill-a-Watt, right?
Thanks!
Jeff
Chris B.
September 21, 2009 at 12:23 pm (UTC -7)
Yeah, I’m really interested in a follow-up too. I’m about to embark on an upgrade as well. My old Core Duo e6600 just isn’t cutting it anymore.
What I’m really interested in is whether I should go x58 or P55. Considering most of the 58 motherboards are about double the P55′s, I’m not too worried about ‘future proofing’. By the time I’m ready to upgrade again, I’m sure there will be something better than both out.
I really just want good gaming performance without breaking the bank.
Loyd Case
September 21, 2009 at 12:31 pm (UTC -7)
Lynnfield is really the best bang for the buck currently, if you’re willing to live within the dual channel memory configurations.
As for power — I can hook up a Kill-a-Watt later (I’m out of the office most of this week), but all the other reviewers have noted that Lynnfield uses less power than either X58/Core i7 or higher end Core 2 Quads and X38/P35.
Mark
September 22, 2009 at 5:36 am (UTC -7)
Benchmark this!
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/22/sgi-releases-persona.html
YS
September 23, 2009 at 12:27 am (UTC -7)
Ugh, it’s hard to find a mATX case that doesn’t require a lot of effort to work on. I bought a Lian Li PC-V300, and while I like the looks and build quality, opening up the case is a pain. There are 6 tiny screws that are meant to sit flush with the side panel, and re-aligning them to fix the panel back perfectly is not easy.
Jeff Z
September 23, 2009 at 2:37 pm (UTC -7)
I’ll be looking forward to the Kill-A-Watt numbers. Thanks! It may be helpful to include the numbers on future reviews as well. What can I say, I’m addicted to the Kill-A-Watt.
Tim Verry
September 23, 2009 at 9:12 pm (UTC -7)
RE: Chris B.
Same here, my e6600 at 3.4ghz proc. is due for an upgrade aswell. The problem for me is the needed new RAM and new motherboard as well as the cpu. It is almost winter here, so I will be able to crank the cpu up a bit more (i can get 3.67ghz stable). Hopefully that will work well enough until i can save for an upgrade to lynnfield.
Jeff Z
October 1, 2009 at 10:28 am (UTC -7)
Loyd-
Get a chance to do those Kill-a-Watt numbers yet?
Thanks!
Jeff