15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 1st comment:
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I got bored and earlier and ran CPUMARK 2.1 (a benchmarking program for CPU'S) on my laptop earlier and got to wondering, do most mudders fall in the, cruddy internet, cruddy PC group (read: I MUD because i can't do anything else), the cruddy PC, fast internet, good PC, crap for internet, or if most mudders have nice PC's with high end internet connections. I'd judge from the speedtest.net related thread that most of us do have good internet (at least 3-5 Mb/s)
15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Whoops forgot to post the link. Program can be downloaded here:

CPUMark 2.1

EDIT: My laptop scored a: 7496.7 (That's with no overclocking)
15 Oct, 2007, Zeno wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Strange. I got a score of 5766, and I have a dual core w/ 2GB RAM. So whatever you use must be damn powerful.

But yeah, I try to keep up to date. I often play the recent games, such as Half Life 2.
15 Oct, 2007, Guest wrote in the 4th comment:
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AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+

Test 1: 1050.4
Test 2: 1008.4
Test 3: 5042.0

Final score: 5260.5

These results don't seen all that impressive for what I know is a kick ass CPU. I also have 2GB of Ram on this box.
15 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 5th comment:
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I can't run that because it's Windows (not sure I would want to run it anyhow due to questions of trust) but FWIW, my PC has 2gb RAM and a dual-core 2.4GHz processor (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+). It kicks the tail off of my 3.0GHz laptop, incidentally, so don't let the GHz rating fool you. It's really a pretty good computer, and wasn't that far from top of the line a year ago. (I bought it after interning for a summer at a finance firm.) It has pretty good graphics cards (yes, cards: two of them in SLI) too, although they're showing age and probably couldn't play the brand new games at highest specs. (It can run Oblivion at almost max specs for most things, most of the time.)

For internet, I am literally on an Internet backbone so I get pretty much the fastest you can get. :wink:

I'm probably going to build a new computer come June or so once I get settled into my NYC apartment, if that data point is of interest to you. Either that or upgrade some of the components, but I think I'll get a new computer with a dual-processor dual-core motherboard instead…
15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 6th comment:
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Quote
Strange. I got a score of 5766, and I have a dual core w/ 2GB RAM. So whatever you use must be damn powerful.


2 GB RAM Intel Duo Core 2 2.0 GHz

To break it up more as Samson showed his:

Test 1: 1050.4
Test 2: 442.3
Test 3: 8403.4
15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 7th comment:
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And aye the GHz rating does NOT determine speed, all of us look to be using Dual-Cores, all of which are lower rated than the 3.0 GHz laptop and I doubt any of them underperform it.
15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 8th comment:
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As a sidenote, anyone ever overclocked a laptop? I'm planning to try it tomorrow.
15 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
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I haven't. (In fact, I haven't overclocked anything…) I'm not really sure I think the slight gain of overclocking is worth the risk of destroying your hardware more quickly.
15 Oct, 2007, Guest wrote in the 10th comment:
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This test seems to somehow be skewed heavily toward producing high integer scores on Intel CPUs. One of my roommates ran it and got a final score of 8250, with an integer operations test well over 10,000 while the other two tests were about in line with the results I got on mine. Yet, I've routinely outmatched his PC in other benchmarking tools.
15 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
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For better benchmarks, it's better to trust the folks at places like Tom's Hardware than some random dude who wrote a program because TH run much more extensive benchmarking, on a lot more than just three tests.
15 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 12th comment:
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Yeah, some part of those tests are indeed Intel biased, likely doesn't multithread, grandmother's desktop scored horrendously, it is a lot worser than the Duo 2 in my laptop, but shouldn't be this much of a difference:

AMD Sempron 64 3600+ @ 2.01 GHz

Test 1: 787.8
Test 2: 787.8
Test 3: 3601.4

Score: 3826.5
18 Oct, 2007, bexar wrote in the 13th comment:
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Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz and 4GB RAM

Test 1: 1260.5
Test 2: 525.2
Test 3: 8403.4

Final Score: 7647.1

Hmm not so impressive. :cry:
18 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 14th comment:
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Yeah….that's just off…..that machine should be an absolute beast, but then again if it was me I'd have it closer to 3 GHz through overclocking it…
18 Oct, 2007, Noplex wrote in the 15th comment:
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DavidHaley said:
I can't run that because it's Windows (not sure I would want to run it anyhow due to questions of trust) but FWIW, my PC has 2gb RAM and a dual-core 2.4GHz processor (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+). It kicks the tail off of my 3.0GHz laptop, incidentally, so don't let the GHz rating fool you. It's really a pretty good computer, and wasn't that far from top of the line a year ago.

There is a big difference between Desktop CPUs and Mobile CPUs. With the Intel Core 2 Duo, you'll see a huge margin of advantage simply because of the front side bus speed differences. The other factors, faster memory, hard-drives and higher on-die cache is another reason you can' t accurately rate a desktop and mobile processor side-by-side. But I get where you were heading with it, honestly, you probably won't need a new system for awhile. If you max out the memory (probably an 8GB upper limit) you'll have a nice lifespan out of that system.

Personally, I stick with Intel CPUs on the mobile end (power and battery life being better) and AMD on the Desktop end. Although, with Intel's newest offersing, AMD is going to need to pick up the pace. I know that my AMD64 3400 that is nearly three years old still marks really high on these tests (even though its a single die unit), because of the higher on-die cache.

From what I can tell, though, depending on the version of Windows you are running will also determine the score on these. Unfortunately Windows XP x64 doesn't have the best driver support, but you should essentially score better due to the 64-bit extensions. What also irritated me about Vista is that the x64 version apparently does not ship with all the appropriate processor architectures either.

I am planning to move my Desktop system to Ubuntu soon (even though Windows XP hasn't failed me, using OS X has moved me to enjoying running a *nix operating system). Plus, UT3, Quake, Doom and Steam (Half-Life 2, Portal, TF2, etc) will run fine on Linux.

But every time I walk into Walmart those ~$388 mini-desktop machines still glare at me. With a dual-core mobile AMD processor, gigabyte of memory and a 320GB hard-drive it would make a screaming Linux media/development server. I had to nearly hold myself back from buying one and putting it along side my laptop in the dorm room.
18 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 16th comment:
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Noplex said:
There is a big difference between Desktop CPUs and Mobile CPUs.

Yes, very true. Interesting that you mention the FSB because I think that's where my laptop gets its butt kicked. The individual components are pretty good: the processor isn't even a mobile processor. The graphics card was a 'mobile' version, I think, but it was generally ok. The hard drive was fast, and the system would be slow even without HD access.

An example: I had a USB sound card, and when it was plugged in to the laptop, the sound would occasionally stutter even on games that were years old. I know it wasn't the sound card's fault, because I tested it on other (desktop) systems. My theory is that the bus was being overloaded with the extra information passing along the bus to get to the USB sound card. Anyhow, I'm pretty irritated with this laptop, for that and other reasons… :smile:

I didn't know that HL2 ran on Linux. That makes me happy, since although I dual-boot, it's annoying to do so. (Then again, I haven't played a game in a loooong time due to being swamped in homework, so the point is somewhat moot these days…)

Noplex said:
With a dual-core mobile AMD processor, gigabyte of memory and a 320GB hard-drive it would make a screaming Linux media/development server.

I'm usually wary of those. The individual "big" components look good, but e.g. the motherboard might be crap. And if all you need is the processor, HDD and RAM, it might even be cheaper to build it yourself. (I built the desktop I have now and saved at least $1000.)
18 Oct, 2007, Guest wrote in the 17th comment:
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I build all of my PCs myself, I've never bought one off the shelf unit yet. I prefer to know exactly what's going in, so I can be sure it isn't being stuffed with crapware.
19 Oct, 2007, Noplex wrote in the 18th comment:
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DavidHaley said:
An example: I had a USB sound card, and when it was plugged in to the laptop, the sound would occasionally stutter even on games that were years old. I know it wasn't the sound card's fault, because I tested it on other (desktop) systems. My theory is that the bus was being overloaded with the extra information passing along the bus to get to the USB sound card.

I don't know enough about the hardware to answer that question, but personally I've never been too fond of USB sound cards. I would make sure that you have USB 2.0 enabled in the BIOS and be sure that the legacy device support is on as well. Usually those sound cards don't have enough to bottleneck the rest of the system, but depending on what else you are doing it might cause a problem. I have found, especially with sound cards, using the latest *stable* drivers tend to be the better route as well (Some of creative's beta drivers suck).

Also, check the website for your notebook and find out the chipset. Most of the times it could be an issue with the USB controller drivers of the northbridge chipset. I've solved many problems simply installing (or rolling back) the VIA drivers on some of my older machines.

DavidHaley said:
I didn't know that HL2 ran on Linux. That makes me happy, since although I dual-boot, it's annoying to do so. (Then again, I haven't played a game in a loooong time due to being swamped in homework, so the point is somewhat moot these days…)

Yeah, it does, you can use the latest version of WINE to do so. TF2, HL2, Ep:1, Ep:2, Portal and the older games all work well (within 3-5% difference, which is acceptable). I'm not sure about some of the other games sold on Steam (for example, the DOS games and some of the id collection). Even though Quake 3 and 4 run on Linux I know for sure that they don't push those out over Steam.

DavidHaley said:
I'm usually wary of those. The individual "big" components look good, but e.g. the motherboard might be crap. And if all you need is the processor, HDD and RAM, it might even be cheaper to build it yourself. (I built the desktop I have now and saved at least $1000.)

I just bought a PS3, so I am going to throw Linux on there and see how well I can use it for some minimal development. All I need is a SVN, GCC4, Python and a Java compiler. But for the price, $388, I could care less if the board is crap. As long as I can bump the RAM up to 2GB and add another hard-drive I am fine with it. Since the PS3 has pretty good performance I am going to test drive that setup out first. Worst comes to worst I will just use my trusty 500mhz P3 system.

Samson said:
I build all of my PCs myself, I've never bought one off the shelf unit yet. I prefer to know exactly what's going in, so I can be sure it isn't being stuffed with crapware.

The newer systems are surprisingly better (for the price that you are paying). Of course, because its cheap, you know they aren't using the best hardware inside. But even if you can pick up the components cheap and then swap out for a good motherboard its still worth the price in some cases.

I area that I am at (Newark, NJ - about 30 minutes by train from NYC) isn't the best to be keeping expensive things in. I was a little wary about buying a PS3 and leaving it here. But push came to shove and I needed a little gaming in my life.
20 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 19th comment:
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Noplex said:
I don't know enough about the hardware to answer that question, but personally I've never been too fond of USB sound cards. I would make sure that you have USB 2.0 enabled in the BIOS and be sure that the legacy device support is on as well. (…)

I got it because the laptop's sound card stinks, and I wanted to be able to use my 5.1 sound system. :smirk: It worked very well when I wasn't playing games or anything. I suspect that gfxcard+soundcard overloaded the BUS. But, I never proved it. I did quite extensively look into the USB settings, making sure that USB2 was on, etc., legacy device etc., checking out in Windows what it thought the bandwidth was, even checking voltages to make sure things were getting enough power. I played around with drivers a bit too but to no avail.

End result, my desktop has a 7.1 sound card that came on the motherboard, and my USB sound card is now a paperweight on my desk. Unfortunate use of $100 even though it did serve most of my purposes for just over a year. One of these days I'll resurrect it to use as a sound card for my server, to make it a media station or something. Probably when I move to NYC: not much point setting all that up when I'll be moving in ~6 months.

Noplex said:
Yeah, it does, you can use the latest version of WINE to do so.

Sounds great! I'll try that out next time I have enough time to play. :wink:

Noplex said:
I just bought a PS3, so I am going to throw Linux on there and see how well I can use it for some minimal development. All I need is a SVN, GCC4, Python and a Java compiler. But for the price, $388, I could care less if the board is crap. As long as I can bump the RAM up to 2GB and add another hard-drive I am fine with it. Since the PS3 has pretty good performance I am going to test drive that setup out first. Worst comes to worst I will just use my trusty 500mhz P3 system.

Good points. It depends on what you're trying to do with it I suppose. I have to admit the notion of buying a PS3 to put Linux on it is somewhat amusing to me but it does make sense given your description. :lol:
20 Oct, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 20th comment:
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There is a big difference between Desktop CPUs and Mobile CPUs.
Agreed, well most of the time anyway heh, my laptop absolutely puts most desktop processors to shame, but I'd say mine's the exception being a Duo Core 2, not the rule.
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