Tuesday 10 March 2015

Desktop Upgrade – Part 2

My new hardware came and it looks a bit like this:

Looking sexy

First things first - time to rag out my old kit and clean out seven years of accumulated dust.

Before: I wish my girlfriend was this dirty (that's not really my PC).

After: Loads cleaner than your mucky mother.

Brilliant, time to put it all together, that heat sink is an absolute beast and it was a bit of a sod to bolt to the motherboard. The Asrock Z97 Anniversary motherboard is only about 2/3 the size of my old Asus so there is a bit more room for messing about with the drives.

Assembled: The heatsink fits in the Cooler Master Centurion C5 case no problem if you remove the pipe attached to the case side.

After a fresh install of Linux Mint 17.1 with the Xfce desktop, we're ready to rock. The Linux 'sensors' command show that things are running pretty cool at stock speeds:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +26.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Testing

Before attempting any overclocking I wanted to make sure the new hardware was stable enough and cool enough with the out of the box configuration.

First I used Memtest86 to make sure that there were no faults with the memory, downloadable here:
http://www.memtest86.com/download.htm

Faultless

Memtest86 took about half an hour to run on 8GB RAM, and reported no errors after one pass. I couldn't really be bothered running it for more time - I was going to overclock it whatever the result.

Booting back into Linux, I installed Prime95 and ran the 'Small FTTs' torture test to bring the CPU up to full utilization. Prime95 is downloadable from here:
http://www.mersenne.org/download/

The 'sensors' command showed the temperature immediately go up to the low 40°C range, still pretty cool, and increase slow by about 1°C per hour:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +42.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +42.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +38.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+1 hour

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +39.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+2 hours

ccoretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +44.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +44.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +40.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

No errors or warning were reported during the tests:

[Worker #2 Mar 7 21:21] Torture Test completed 182 tests in 2 hours, 23 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
[Worker #2 Mar 7 21:21] Worker stopped.
[Worker #1 Mar 7 21:21] Torture Test completed 181 tests in 2 hours, 23 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
[Worker #1 Mar 7 21:21] Worker stopped.
[Main thread Mar 7 21:21] Execution halted.

Stock Benchmark

I benchmarked the new setup at stock speeds using the same tools and tests as used in part 1.

I ran GeekBench three times to make sure the results were consistent:

RunSingle-Core ScoreMulti-Core ScoreFull Results
1st28715180http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048335
2nd28695178http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048351
3rd28695178http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048367

I ran each of the GpuTest fullscreen benchmark scripts, as before:

ModulePointsFPS
Triangle39818663
Plot3D371861
FurMark3946
PixMark Volplosion1762

Compared to the benchmark from part 1, my new system is roughly twice as fast:

TestNumber of times faster
Single-Core Score2.2x
Multi-Core Score1.6x
Triangle2.0x
Plot3D1.7x
FurMark2.8x
PixMark Volplosion3.2x

Part 3

Desktop Upgrade – Part 3