Special: Speed and performance is key

Last time we kicked off this series by having a look at the guts of my new desktop, today we’re going to extend on that by looking into how it performs in general. We’ll be going through the installation process, some global benchmarks, have a look at stability and sum things up. The hardware selection General performance [...]

Last time we kicked off this series by having a look at the guts of my new desktop, today we’re going to extend on that by looking into how it performs in general. We’ll be going through the installation process, some global benchmarks, have a look at stability and sum things up.

• The hardware selection
• General performance (reading now)
• Benchmarking games (future entry)
• Application handling (future entry)
• Conclusion (future entry)

Starting up for the very first time

Blanc, noppes, nada. No matter which term you can come up for no result, that’s what it looked like at first. Anything wrong? Probably not otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, well it ended up simply being a wrongly connected power cable by which as a result the PSU refused to allow the system to boot.

After that minor issue was corrected things started up nicely, the motherboard was directly at a revision which was capable to run the quad core processor so no problems with that. The RAM, hdd and DVD-RW drive also didn’t give any problems being recognized at all, it booted up like a charm.

Time to install the Vista disc, get that thing installed. It took a bit of time before it read in the disc, something which it didn’t do on my laptop after checking it there but asides from that it worked splendidly. The Vista installation was finished within no time at all, I believe it took about 20~25 minutes in total till it finished.

The booting process

The boot process goes extremely fast, it took about 6 seconds between turning on the system and till the moment I had my desktop visible. Unfortunately this quickly changed as I hooked up my WD myBooks. During the boot process it reads those discs directly as hard disks as well, this means though that they have to be booted up individually and loaded in which takes up quite some time.

I’m still looking into how to fix this issue since I do not need to boot from them, therefore I also do not prefer to wait for them while booting. So far they’re the only thing truly slowing down stuff while booting up.

Vista in all its glory

You don’t have to look around long on the net to see people flaming, vista would be slow, performance would be terrible and it definitely wouldn’t be stable. So far… it’s all in the contrary, it runs without any issues at all, physical memory usage is just a minor percentage when idling and enough free during for example gaming or using photoshop.

Also when it comes to stability, things aren’t causing any issues. Uptime for several days works without any slow down, no BSOD’s or other crashes have occurred and multi-tasking goes absolutely superior thanks to their vista styled tabbing.

3DMark 06

The most well known gamers benchmark out there simply couldn’t be left out, it’s a great indicator for how your system currently ranks and what sort of performance you might expect during gaming.

As I was putting together this choice of hardware I set a goal for myself to have a system which would break the mark of 10.000, although up front it’s hard to truly foresee what you’ll score you can check many benchmarks of others online to see which hardware performs well.

I made it! With a 3DMark 06 score of 10.748 based on the average of 3 runs I passed my goal royally, and that compared to a pathetic 520 which my laptop reached after going through a lot of pain and fps’ of 0~5.

PCMark Vantage

Asides from being able to test your gaming performance Futuremark also has a similar utility which has a go at your overall system performance for general application usage.

With a score of just over 5000 it reported that my system has an above average rating, still quite a bit from the number 1 though which scored over a massive figure of 15000, but heck, can’t beat them all right?

Seeing as to how the Vantage version of PCMark is Vista only I couldn’t compare this benchmark to my laptop, but I’m sure that in case it did work it wouldn’t score any higher than a score of around 200. Simply based upon my experiences on how it handled the more modern applications like the latest photoshop or even word 2007.

Is that a cool breeze I feel?

When I used to buy a system in the past I never used to look at temperatures that much, but as the couple of years more and more I had my systems overheating and as a result crashing I decided to take a different approach this time and keep temperatures in mind.

So far the temperatures are definitely low, and that for a fan based system. If you compare the internal drive for example to the external myBook you can see how it’s pretty much twice as cool! To my surprise I must say how cool the CPU actually is, with an ambient temperature of around 18-20 degrees it lies just above it and even when stressed it barely goes up.

With these sort of temperatures I’m confident that overheating isn’t going to be an issue any time soon, during the summer as the ambient temperature will go up it’ll be interesting to see what sort of an effect it’s going to have but I doubt it’ll be major. Even with my old desktop which had a stock cooler the difference used to be no more than about 4 degrees, although in that case it was an increase from 71 to 75, ouch!

Conclusion

The overall performance so far is simply amazing, it’s fast, cool, stable; definitely worth every penny. Finally I’m capable of playing games without any issues again, Vista runs like a charm, applications start up in no time at all and Windows isn’t constantly halted because an application hasn’t finished loading yet.

Next time we’ll be taking a closer look at the gaming performance, cover a wide set of benchmarks and get a better impression on how well it functions.