Discussion CPU power over the last 15 or so years on my rigs, a quick review...

[Hulk]

For various reasons I had to start over with Windows with my main desktop rig this weekend. As usual it's a whole weekend affair... deactivating all of my software, reloading, setting it up... I've been rebuilding this PC for the last 20 years at this point I think only the case has survived from the original build.

Anyway one of the tests I've been doing for the last 17 or so years is with Magix Vegas Pro (used to be Sony, used to be Sound Forge). There was an old rendertest from 2010 I've been using as a benchmark rendering it out to the same format over the years.

2006 - Core2Duo E6400 O/C to 3.2GHz - 1025 seconds
2011 - 2500K O/C to 4.2GHz - 164 seconds
2014 - 4770K (stock) - 49 seconds
2021 - 12700K (running ~4.3GHz during this render) - 11.37 seconds

All of these results were performed with the GPU in the CPU and it should be noted that the render format is not GPU accelerated but the operations in the timeline that "assemble" the timeline are accelerated by the GPU. So the GPU does have some effect on the result. Compared to the E6400 the 12700K is 90 times faster. That's nearly two orders of magnitude. While the test script is old it is a good representation of Vegas performance as far as what the "seat of my pants tells me." Especially when it comes to playback as this project was a stuttering mess with the E6400 now it's pretty much realtime with a few spots where it drops to 24fps.

 

[Tech Junky]

Now, that takes a lot of patience over almost 2 decades. I switch gears much more often though as my last update was from 8700K -> 12700K and 9750H -> 12700H (laptop).

I skipped 10/11th gen options because there wasn't enough incentive from the tech front to make sense but, going from gen3 >> 5 as there isn't much in the immediate future coming when it comes to the bus speeds made sense. Skipping the next couple of gens also makes sense since the next big thing coming isn't until Arrow Lake where things go to chiplets,

Things have changed a lot since the days of ASCII on screen and 5.25 floppies running programs and needing a bunch of 3.5" floppies to install things.

 

[Hulk]

I'm still running Quickbooks 99, which installs from 12 floppy disks!

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Anyway one of the tests I've been doing for the last 17 or so years is with Magix Vegas Pro (used to be Sony, used to be Sound Forge). There was an old rendertest from 2010 I've been using as a benchmark rendering it out to the same format over the years.

While only an anecdote, I remember doing MP3 encoding on a Pentium 90MHz back in the late '90s. Just doing a single CD would easily take an afternoon. It was not like you could use it for anything else while encoding either.

For comparison, a few years ago I had reason to clean up and re-encode my old music library. Seeing a Ryzen 1700 rip through a few thousand tracks 16 at a time was pretty impressive.

That is what I call progress.

I'm still running Quickbooks 99, which installs from 12 floppy disks!

USB floppy drive? Or just emulation?

 

[Hulk]

While only an anecdote, I remember doing MP3 encoding on a Pentium 90MHz back in the late '90s. Just doing a single CD would easily take an afternoon. It was not like you could use it for anything else while encoding either.

For comparison, a few years ago I had reason to clean up and re-encode my old music library. Seeing a Ryzen 1700 rip through a few thousand tracks 16 at a time was pretty impressive.

That is what I call progress.



USB floppy drive? Or just emulation?

Years ago when I still had a floppy drive I transferred each of the 12 disks into folders numbered 1-12. Amazingly the program installs from those folders with no intervention from me.

It's always nice to see how far we've come in terms of actual day-to-day tasks when it comes to compute. So many "simple tasks today" like encoding to mp3 or playing back MPEG-2 video were herculean 25 years ago.

 

[In2Photos]

While only an anecdote, I remember doing MP3 encoding on a Pentium 90MHz back in the late '90s. Just doing a single CD would easily take an afternoon. It was not like you could use it for anything else while encoding either.

For comparison, a few years ago I had reason to clean up and re-encode my old music library. Seeing a Ryzen 1700 rip through a few thousand tracks 16 at a time was pretty impressive.

That is what I call progress.

I recently had to rip a few CDs with a $300 laptop and was amazed at how fast the process was.

 

[maddogmcgee]

I just finished installing Chrome Flex on some i5-650 cpu's, the hard drive ones were ok but the one I added an SSD to was incredibly fast for a 12 year old computer. Even in Windows 10 it was pretty good.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It's always nice to see how far we've come in terms of actual day-to-day tasks when it comes to compute. So many "simple tasks today" like encoding to mp3 or playing back MPEG-2 video were herculean 25 years ago.

Back when DVDs showed up, I remember you had to have a dedicated MPEG2 decoder card to just have a chance of playback. I think the minimum for software decoding is somewhere about a 300MHz Pentium 2. My 450MHz K6-2 could do it without dropping frames.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

10 years ago I was running a 125 Watt processor, while today I'm running one that uses about half as much electricity, but has nearly 3X the performance. Not bad.

 

[Tech Junky]

@GunsMadeAmericaFree

On the reverse side back in the day I had a P 133 MMX which draws 10W of power and now have a monster 12700K that draws considerably more but, also runs 50X faster with 20 cores vs 1 and doesn't have to run Windows 3.1 or 95.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

>Back when DVDs showed up, I remember you had to have a dedicated MPEG2 >decoder card to just have a chance of playback.

Later, Windows had the media player that could play DVD's out of the box. My understanding is that that is gone now.

 

[In2Photos]

10 years ago I was running a 125 Watt processor, while today I'm running one that uses about half as much electricity, but has nearly 3X the performance. Not bad.

I'm still running my 130w i7-920 24/7. Hoping to change that soon though.

 

[Tech Junky]

I'm still running my 130w i7-920 24/7. Hoping to change that soon though.

If it works then leave it alone as you can't be doing too much on it that requires more processing power. If you did you would have swapped it long ago.

It would be perfect for repurposing as a media / NAS / router combo though and the new box get to do whatever you have planned that needs a higher performance CPU in it.

 

[In2Photos]

If it works then leave it alone as you can't be doing too much on it that requires more processing power. If you did you would have swapped it long ago.

It would be perfect for repurposing as a media / NAS / router combo though and the new box get to do whatever you have planned that needs a higher performance CPU in it.

It has been my photo editing/gaming PC since it was built in 2009. I'm ready for better gaming performance, I don't do as much photo editing anymore. It does fine in games like Fortnite, Valorant, etc when playing with my kids, but there are some games coming out that we want to play and it won't run them. My unRAID server has an i5-2300 (upgraded from an Athlon 3000+) that used to be my daughter's gaming PC. I get a lot of time out of my PCs.

 

[Tech Junky]

@In2Photos Like I said... repurpose it and build a new box. Not knowing you already run a unraid though makes a difference though. Don't need 2 x NAS devices "normally" Drop the power draw by pulling the GPU and keep it as a standby storage device then or gut it and put in some low power parts to use it as a network device.

 

[In2Photos]

@In2Photos Like I said... repurpose it and build a new box. Not knowing you already run a unraid though makes a difference though. Don't need 2 x NAS devices "normally" Drop the power draw by pulling the GPU and keep it as a standby storage device then or gut it and put in some low power parts to use it as a network device.

I'll hang on to it, but doubt I will do anything with it. It's full ATX so there's no chance of a SFF build for HTPC or anything. I have one of those already too, although it doesn't get much use these days.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

>Back when DVDs showed up, I remember you had to have a dedicated MPEG2 >decoder card to just have a chance of playback.

Later, Windows had the media player that could play DVD's out of the box. My understanding is that that is gone now.

Correct. Microsoft didn't want to pay the licence fees.

No matter, since you can just use VLC, MediaPlayer Classic (xyz Edition) or anything else really. Send a nice thought to DVD-Jon when you do.

I'm still running my 130w i7-920 24/7. Hoping to change that soon though.

You might want to look into something newer. Nehalem has pretty poor idle power consumption.

As a bonus you get 14 years worth of platform upgrades. Plus you can use NVMe drives, and those are gold when manipulating large numbers of files. Both large and small.

 

[In2Photos]

You might want to look into something newer. Nehalem has pretty poor idle power consumption.

As a bonus you get 14 years worth of platform upgrades. Plus you can use NVMe drives, and those are gold when manipulating large numbers of files. Both large and small.

I'm planning on an AM5 system by Christmas. My PC folds 24/7 when I'm not gaming so it's never idle. But I'm really looking forward to a new build. My son's 5600x AM4 system runs circles around mine and I've been envious of his loading times for games!