Computer speeds

Lucifer posted this via
:

I have a desktop computer with an i5 quad core without hyperthreading
and with eight gigs RAM.
The desktop gives 5888 with geekbench 2.4.
I have a laptop with an i7 quad core with hyperthreading and with
four gigs RAM.
The laptop gives 7415 with geekbench 2.4.

Yet the laptop seems slower. It takes longer to start.
Is that only because it has less RAM? Would it be worth me upgrading
the RAM?

Your laptop probably has a HDD that only spins 5400 RPM. It probably also
automatically loads Bluetooth and WiFi networks.

That's like an old lady on a walker who races to get in front of you at the
grocery store, then blocks the aisle and goes really slow, but when you
find an opportunity to get past her without knocking her over she says
"What happened to being a gentleman?"

I don't even say "WTF, old lady?" because she's only got a few more years,
so I might as well let her have "the win" - in her mind.

And if it's a Dell laptop, that's a whole 'nuther host of proprietary poop
piles you must tippy-toe through.

Hope this helps.

--

I AM Bucky Breeder, (*(^;

Resolve conflicts the American way :

Rock - Paper - Scissors - Free Shipping from Amazon

.... and I approve this message!

On 9/1/19 7:56 AM, Bucky Breeder wrote:

[snip]

That's like an old lady on a walker who races to get in front of you at the
grocery store, then blocks the aisle and goes really slow,

Even worse, with a notebook (not computer). That's usually a sign of
"extreme couponing". While I don't mind the use of coupons, I often see
these people who don't decide what coupons to use until their groceries
have been checked, and have to search the notebook and dig through the
groceries several times while you wait, frequently arguing with the
checker severel times.

--
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me,
it is the parts that I do understand." [Mark Twain]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2019 08:55:06 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Lucifer wrote:

On Fri, 30 Aug 2019 22:50:27 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Lucifer wrote:

I have a desktop computer with an i5 quad core without hyperthreading
and with eight gigs RAM.
The desktop gives 5888 with geekbench 2.4.
I have a laptop with an i7 quad core with hyperthreading and with
four gigs RAM.
The laptop gives 7415 with geekbench 2.4.

Yet the laptop seems slower. It takes longer to start.
Is that only because it has less RAM? Would it be worth me upgrading
the RAM?

https://www.geekbench.com/

I see no mention of benchmarking the storage media (HDD, SSD). You
don't mention what type (HDD or SSD) of drive you desktop and laptop
computers use.

Speccy says the laptop uses
596GB Western Digital WDC WD6400BPVT-75HXZT1 (SATA)
and the desktop uses
931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EARS-00YSB1 ATA Device (SATA)

Could it be programs running in the background on the laptop?
I will run Startup Control.


In your desktop, the WD10EARS-00YSB1 is a 5400 RPM 1TB HDD, but it's a
"green" drive. It supports SATA-2 3 Gbps.

Note: I never use green HDDs in my builds. They contain firmware to
put them to sleep. In hosts where they were hosts, backup programs
sometimes failed because of the HDD going to sleep and not waking up
fast enough. The backup job gets busy compressing a huge file, the
green drive goes to sleep, then the backup program expects the drive
to be immediately available to copy the compressed file but the drive
doesn't react fast enough, so the backup fails. Swapped out the green
drive with a blue (5400 RPM) or black (7200 RPM) and the backup
failures went away. If you haven't encountered problems with the
green drive's lag to spin up, it's not an issue for you.

I have a WD Purple 2 TB. Would that be better than the green?

In your laptop, the WD6400BPVT-75HXZT1 is a 5400 RPM 640 GB HDD, and a
"blue" drive. It supports SATA-2 3.0 Gbps.

While your HDDs support SATA3 doesn't mean your desktop or laptop do.

I suspect the laptop drive is slower than the desktop drive.

When was the last time you ran a defrag on your HDDs? While Windows 10
runs a background defrag on Windows startup and also has one scheduled
(Task Scheduler - Task Scheduler Library - Microsoft - Windows -
Defrag), that doesn't mean the computer was powered up or out of
hibernation at the scheduled time, and boot-time defrag only works on a
reboot, not from a resume from hibernation.

I have not done a defrag on either.
The desktop has a fresh install of Windows 10.
The laptop was upgraded from Windows 7.

I agree with Paul that the benchmark probably takes into account the 4
extra HT cores in its performance testing. That the benchmark uses the
cores for deeper concurrent parallelism doesn't mean your programs do.
Go into the UEFI/BIOS and disable hyperthreading. Your laptop will be
back to a 4-core count, the same as for your desktop, and then re-run
the benchmark. While that will put the desktop and laptop on similar
foundation with the same core count, the laptop's CPU is still a mobile
version of the i7. To reduce heat and save on battery power, the mobile
version will tend to throttle itself.

I will try that.

Note: I've not ever used that benchmark program. You might want to
try something more well known, like Passmark. You might also want to
run HD Tune for a disk benchmark on both computers. Just because the
drives have similar specs doesn't mean the motherboards do, like one
might have better I/O performance, say, for the data bus. DO NOT RUN
the write test as that is destructive (wipes the HDD). Per their
version comparison at https://www.hdtune.com/download.html, the write
test is disabled in the freeware version.

Startup programs definitely have an impact on responsiveness. The more
processes that are running then the more context switches there are and
the CPU has less time per processes (disregarding priority). You could
use Task Manager's Startup tab to disable the startup programs (no 3rd
party tool needed) and retest both your computers. That's when you also
decide if you really need all those startup programs. I also go through
the services (services.msc) to check which ones I can stop and disable.
For example, AMD likes to install their hotkey poller service but it is
superfluous if you never want to use their hotkeys to effect changes to
your video settings. Lots of programs install services that the dev
thinks you just must have but are superfluous. They wrote it, so it
just must be highly critical ... yeah, right (roll eyes).

While unused system RAM is wasted RAM, you still want some reserved for
when you later load other programs. That you have less RAM in your
laptop than in your desktop doesn't mean it isn't enough. Go into Task
Manager, Performance tab, and check how much unused memory you have
after a reboot of Windows.

Thanks for the info.

In article , Lucifer
wrote:


I have a WD Purple 2 TB. Would that be better than the green?

purple is for surveillance video. it's not ideal for everyday use, and
there's nothing wrong with green.

In your laptop, the WD6400BPVT-75HXZT1 is a 5400 RPM 640 GB HDD, and a
"blue" drive. It supports SATA-2 3.0 Gbps.

While your HDDs support SATA3 doesn't mean your desktop or laptop do.

I suspect the laptop drive is slower than the desktop drive.

not necessarily and it is likely not the bottleneck so it doesn't
actually matter.

nospam wrote:
In article , Lucifer
wrote:

I have a WD Purple 2 TB. Would that be better than the green?

purple is for surveillance video. it's not ideal for everyday use, and
there's nothing wrong with green.


https://community.wd.com/t/wd-purple...p-use/17274/10

LB_WD WDStaff Jan '15

"The drive will only use the streaming ATA commands if it receives
them from the host.

Desktop computers should not natively issue these types of
commands so the drive should work like a normal hard drive.

Some differences are that since the drive is optimized for
contiguous data streams, the random read/write may not be
as fast as a regular desktop drive.

Also, the drive is designed for constant 24/7 operation so
it will not go into a power saving mode on its own.
"

The Green on the other hand, is likely to have aggressive power
saving, and either park the heads, or spin down when it's idle
for a short time.

This is why it's important to *read customer reviews*
for anything you buy of that nature, because there is
no telling how scummy a product you're going to get
these days.

The data sheet cannot be relied upon to tell the whole
truth about a product.

Just about every sin I've detected in hard drives, was detected
first in the customer reviews.

It's a lot like my webcam. On the side of the box it says

1600x1200 30FPS

when the actual spec and behavior is

1600x1200 @ 5 FPS
640x480 @ 30 FPS

and by cherry picking digits, you can make
a *whopper* of a dishonest deceitful spec.

So it is with hard drives. "The less the
customer knows, the more money we make."
This is why they don't list platter count any
more, whether the drive is 512e, 512n, 4Kn,
whether the drive uses shingled recording,
and so on. Honesty is bad for business.

Paul