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Make this old machine new again (Dell SC420) - a budget minded-challenge

A

AtlantaBob

Golden Member
Hi all,

Quick summary -- will a new graphics card help an old server running Intel integrated graphics respond better in Ubuntu 10.04?

I've got a Dell SC420 server that I'm trying to make a little more useful for day-to-day work. It's running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) to do Emails, web-browsing, shell-scripting development, etc. Absolutely no games need to work (other than the GNOME Tetris clone.) I have real computers that I can use if I need to do difficult work.

The specs are as follows:

Celeron (Prescott) @ 2.53GHz
2 GB RAM
It is using Intel Integrated Graphics (E7221) to run a Acer 22" Monitor @ 1680 x 1050. *This chipset was originally designed to run graphics for a budget server.*

Although Ubuntu on this machine is surprisingly fast, opening 10 tabs from the Anandtech forums was maxing out the CPU until I installed NoScript. Now, the hangs and slowness seem to come from anything graphics related (e.g. scrolling a webpage, clicking on an already-opened tab.) I'm wondering if installing a (cheap!) graphics card would help speed the machine up.

Apparently there were some issues with how Dell restricted the graphics system to not allow some PCI-based graphics cards.( http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=15151 ) The only other option would be to use a PCI-X 1X graphics card (which is ridiculously expensive > $80 ) I was thinking about something like a Stealth S60 Radeon 7000 64MB PCI Graphics Card ( http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0229732 ) Any thoughts if that would help things at all?

Thanks in advance.
 
If you're using compiz, try switching back to metacity and see if that is more responsive.

I would say that the Celery Preshott is the root of your problem though.
 
mfenn,

Thanks. I *think* I'm running metacity (the settings in gnome-appearance-properties are set to "none").

I'm just surprised that I can max out the CPU by rapidly scrolling a webpage up and down with the mouse scroll-wheel. Would I be correct in thinking that in Ubuntu all of that rendering would be pushed off to a GPU if one was present?
 
AtlantaBob said:
mfenn,

Thanks. I *think* I'm running metacity (the settings in gnome-appearance-properties are set to "none").

I'm just surprised that I can max out the CPU by rapidly scrolling a webpage up and down with the mouse scroll-wheel. Would I be correct in thinking that in Ubuntu all of that rendering would be pushed off to a GPU if one was present?
Click to expand...

If you do a "ps ax | grep metacity" and see the metacity process there, then you are running it. If you have the appearance settings set to "none" I believe you are correct that that indicates that you're running metacity. (Ubuntu customizes the gnome-appearance-properties control panel quite a bit and I am not intimately familiar with how.)

Anywho, metacity is completely software-rendered, so a GPU wouldn't help you at all there. I suppose you could drop in a supported GPU and switch to compiz (which is GPU-acclerated), but I honestly don't know how much that would help you overall.
 
mfenn,

Thanks again for all your help today.

Although I thought that setting gnome-appearance-properties to none would automatically run metacity, ps ax | grep compiz shows that a significant amount of computer time was still being used. I ended up running metacity --replace & to fix that, and it seems to work (no more "compiz" listed as a running process). Anyhow, it doesn't really seem to change the fact that rapidly scrolling a webpage can still max out the CPU.

Maybe I'll try finding a cheap PCI graphics card and see how that does (I've got a friend who's a computer tech -- perhaps he has one lying around somewhere).
 
Yeah, no problem. 🙂 Warning, brain dump follows:

Have you tried a different browser? Also, does rapidly scrolling a terminal or nautilus window cause the same issue? It could be related to the way the browser (I'm assuming Firefox) redraws the page. Also, have you tried disabling "smooth scrolling" in the browser?
 
Ah, thanks for the suggestions. I'm guessing that the CPU usage is simply proportional to the amount of data that the CPU is being asked to manipulate (logic follows):

When I do the scrolling in gonme's terminal (windowed environment), I can only get up to about 33% CPU utilization, no matter how fast I try to move it.

When I do the scrolling in gedit I can only get up to about 40% utilization (using a 4 MB test file here).

When I do the scrolling in Nautilus (List view with some date details enabled in /bin) I can hit 100% pretty easily.

And yes, "smooth scrolling" is disabled -- I enabled it just to see what would happen, and the resulting lag meant that the screen kept moving up and down for a good 10 seconds after I quit moving the scroll wheel!

I'll go ahead and install another browser, and will let anyone who's interested know if the results are substantially different from what I've got here. Thanks again.
 
For what it's worth, scrolling in Chrome (on the exact same page) only gets up to 70% CPU utilization with Flashblock enabled. So apparently Chrome is a little more efficient in how it deals with scrolling issues on integrated graphics than Firefox when running under Ubuntu.
 
AtlantaBob said:
For what it's worth, scrolling in Chrome (on the exact same page) only gets up to 70% CPU utilization with Flashblock enabled. So apparently Chrome is a little more efficient in how it deals with scrolling issues on integrated graphics than Firefox when running under Ubuntu.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup:

I guess the Chrome code just hits the CPU a little less.
 
I own two Dell SC420s with Celeron 2.53 GHz CPU. One has been my SBS 2003 server for five years now. The other is used by my mother for typical home PC use (browsing, email, etc.).

For technical details, you might look at the ServerEdge.net board, which has a Dell SC420 section:
http://serveredge.net/showthread.php?t=1954

The video card issue with the SC420 was that Dell didn't want it to be another 400SC, where zillions of enthusiasts bought "bare-bones" servers and put AGP cards in their (unsupported) AGP slots. Dell added a non-standard PCI-E x16 slot to the SC420 that wouldn't take an x16 card without modification.

I've only run XP and Server 2003 on these, but I've never noted any video slowdown as long as video drivers were installed. The video is dog-slow if Microsoft's standard VGA drivers are used.

I just remoted into my SBS 2003 server, which is running Server 2003, Exchange Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint Server and opened up ten I.E. windows on Forums.Anandtech.com. I couldn't detect any scrolling slowdown at all and the CPU utilization didn't move from the average of maybe 40% that the Server was using at the time. I'm not sure why the (non-browsing) CPU utilization was that high at the time, since my recollection is that average CPU usage is more like 10% on my server. But there's a lot of housekeeping that's done each day with SBS 2003.

I'm only running 1024x768 resolution on the screen and remotely, so maybe your higher video resolution is an issue. But, at 1024x768 anyway, I've never sensed any video slowdown at all with the standard video chipset.

Anyway, you can look at the ServerEdge forums for infomation on video card modifications. And there are certainly some PCI video cards that are tons faster than the built-in video. The only problem is that the really good ones (NVidia 6200 or higher) are all in the $50+ range unless you can find a deal.
 
Last edited:
While RebateMonger is talking about Windows performance, he reminded me of something important. You're not running the vesa graphics driver are you? That could cause scrolling to really suck. I dunno if that GPU (using the term loosely 😛) is supported by the intel driver though...
 
Thanks guys,

RebateMonger, thanks for the link to that site. I remember that there used to be an old site (poweredgeforums, I think) that had tons of useful information and was then bought by Dell to redirect to their site.

mfenn,

I *think* that I'm using the Intel drivers here -- here's a portion of the output from /var/log/Xorg.0.log
The remaining lines (such as those listing monitor modes) all seem to reference intel(0), so I'm assuming that is the driver it is using. If I'm missing something though, please let me know!

Again, thanks, all.

(==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0
(==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 1
(==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 2
(==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
(II) LoadModule: "intel"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
(II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.9.1
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0
(II) LoadModule: "vesa"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so
(II) Module vesa: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.3.0
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0
(==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0
(==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 1
(==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 2
(==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
(II) LoadModule: "intel"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
(II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.9.1
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0
(II) LoadModule: "vesa"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so
(II) Module vesa: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.3.0
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0
 
Yeah, it sounds like it's using the intel driver then. Maybe the driver has some terrible fallback mode for that specific graphics chip? *shrug*

It sounds like you're stuck with the perfect storm of a poorly-supported IGP and a weak CPU. If Chrome is working out for you, I'd stick with that.
 
mfenn,

Thanks again for all of your help -- I definitely appreciate it. Thanks to everyone else as well for the input.

It's definitely not an unbearable situation -- just annoying. I think I'll stay with the old setup unless I can get a great deal on a PCI video card.
 
AtlantaBob said:
RebateMonger, thanks for the link to that site. I remember that there used to be an old site (poweredgeforums, I think) that had tons of useful information and was then bought by Dell to redirect to their site.
Click to expand...
ServerEdge Forums are what used to be the old Altonen (spelling?) Forums, which were briefly named "PowerEdge Forums".
 
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