Q9300... it has seen better days.

[VirtualLarry]

I guess I'm agreeing with escrow4 about a comment he made in regard to Core2-era rigs, being pretty severely outdated.
( http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38141859&postcount=23 )

Even scrolling tabs of this forum, with NoScript (no ads), is not 100% smooth on my Q9300. (With a R7 260X 2GB GDDR5 card, connected via HDMI, 1080P, with audio playing.)

And browsing Newegg, even with NoScript, is pretty sluggish.

Some of that may have to do with the SSD, a Vertex2 50GB. (SATAII in a SATAII port.)

Even the A4-3300 FM1 rig that I built, with 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM, and a refurb Corsair Force LS 120GB (SATA6G in a SATAII port), with Win7 64-bit, seemed ... snappier?

Not sure why. Being a quad-core really doesn't help Firefox 45.0.1 64-bit at all, being pretty-much single-threaded.

I guess this rig would be acceptable, mostly, for Joe Sixpack, but after I've used my G4400 @ 4.455 with a PCI-E M.2 SSD, it's... a bit underwhelming.

I was toying with the idea of selling off the G4400 rigs, and trying to make some money, but ... I don't think so. They're too nice.

Maybe I can find someone locally to donate the Q9300 rigs to. Or, maybe I'll just put them away somewhere.

 

[cbn]

I use a stock speed E8500 and iGPU (GMA X4500) from Q45 express chipset and it browses this forum perfectly smooth.

Maybe use a faster dual core? Or could it be something else is wrong with the system?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just bumped up the FSB to 380 (2.85Ghz), vcore to 1.25v. Seems a little bit smoother. It wasn't hitting a CPU limit before though, I don't think, as CPU usage in Task Manager only got up to 18-21%, and didn't hit 25% or more.

I almost wonder if it was a memory issue with the video driver or something, and a reboot fixed it. (Wouldn't surprise me entirely, with AMD drivers.)

Edit: Now smooth-scrolling hits 14-15% CPU usage.

 

[therealnickdanger]

After eight years, the Q9300 had sure as hell feel slower than Skylake. I'm running a Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz here at work (not my choice) and scrolling up and down on this page is ~15-22% utilization in Chrome. 4GB RAM, 7200RPM HDD. Doesn't feel sluggish... feels normal.

 

[LTC8K6]

I use a 2009 vintage laptop with a T8300, onboard graphics, and a WD Black HDD and it doesn't show any signs of trouble dealing with heavy web browsing.

It stumbles with 1080P video and 720P video above 30fps, which is becoming irritating.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I think you must have other issues.

BTW, has anyone noticed the forum pages suddenly going blank for a few seconds? It is happening on my system occasionally, then eventually comes back and goes to the top of the page. Dont notice problems on anything except this forum.

 

[Qbah]

My Q9450 is butter smooth in Windows and browsing the net... that's a 2.66 C2Q. And I'm really pedantic about every single hiccup or slowdown... Games on the other hand, yes. I tried Ryse last week, it was painful even on Normal detail / ~720p resolution, once I got to the foresty area... Pretty much unplayable.

I think you have other issues with your rig.

 

[redzo]

I think you must have other issues.

BTW, has anyone noticed the forum pages suddenly going blank for a few seconds? It is happening on my system occasionally, then eventually comes back and goes to the top of the page. Dont notice problems on anything except this forum.

It is not just the forums.
Are you also on windows 10? In my case the entire content of the web page goes grey from time to time and it is browser independent. The symptom is a few weeks old as far as I can remember. I suspect that the video driver or the windows 10 window manager is at fault here. I'm currently on the integrated haswell gpu back home.

 

[waltchan]

Install Windows 10 with LGA775 setup may improve a little, but recommends AHCI and UEFI installation.

 

[Face2Face]

My Q9450 is butter smooth in Windows and browsing the net... that's a 2.66 C2Q. And I'm really pedantic about every single hiccup or slowdown... Games on the other hand, yes. I tried Ryse last week, it was painful even on Normal detail / ~720p resolution, once I got to the foresty area... Pretty much unplayable.

I think you have other issues with your rig.

I'm pretty sure I've seen you on the FO4 thread; if so, how does it do in FO4?

 

[Qbah]

I'm pretty sure I've seen you on the FO4 thread; if so, how does it do in FO4?

I'm playing a combination of high and ultra and with distance sliders around 3/4 towards max. 1080p. Medium weapons debris. Game runs better and looks much better than on my PS4. So it's perfectly usable in FO4. I'm usually around 35-40fps. It does go under 30 on rare occasion though... I actually was surprised Ryse ran so poorly... Crysis 3 did not have such issues and had grander vistas. I'm also sure my GTX670 having 4GB of VRAM helps with console ports too.

 

[escrow4]

My Q9450 is butter smooth in Windows and browsing the net... that's a 2.66 C2Q. And I'm really pedantic about every single hiccup or slowdown... Games on the other hand, yes. I tried Ryse last week, it was painful even on Normal detail / ~720p resolution, once I got to the foresty area... Pretty much unplayable.

I think you have other issues with your rig.

Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGP6Y0Pnhe4

At 720p/60p and 1080p/60p

Then try some flash or java heavy sites. The Core 2 won't be butter smooth.

My 5930K with poky GT 730 hits 10% or less with software decoding of the VP9 codec above.

 

[Erithan13]

Core 2 these days can be anything from perfectly viable to absolute junk depending on your usage requirements. I recently picked up an ex-office Core 2 machine for use in a workshop as a web browser/media player and even without a SSD it's perfectly fine for those uses. IIRC it's a E2100, 2ghz dual core, during web browsing with Spotify playing in the background there's practically no strain on the CPU. I'm sure if I opened a dozen flash-heavy tabs and tried to encode video at the same time it'd grind to a halt but as far that use goes it's quite happy to sit there and get on with it.

What I have noticed, and the same thing applies to our laptop with an AMD 1.4ghz dual core, is that the system is much more vulnerable than a modern machine to getting bogged down by runaway background processes. SVCHost is a particular offender and can easily overwhelm such old CPUs and cause stutter/lag with youtube or other programs running. Once those resource hogs are taken care of (including uninstalling bloatware etc) even the AMD lappy with hard drive is still adequate for light browsing and office work. I can certainly appreciate the difference when I return to an i7 with SSD but it really confirms the situation that CPUs have been 'good enough' for the average web surfer for ages.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGP6Y0Pnhe4

At 720p/60p and 1080p/60p

Then try some flash or java heavy sites. The Core 2 won't be butter smooth.

My 5930K with poky GT 730 hits 10% or less with software decoding of the VP9 codec above.

Hmm, tried that video, and other than one pause (thanks, Verizon...), it plays smooth on this Q9300 with R7 260X 2GB at 1080P60 (auto-detected).

Edit: Anywhere from 5% CPU to 29% CPU usage.

 

[SPBHM]

Hmm, tried that video, and other than one pause (thanks, Verizon...), it plays smooth on this Q9300 with R7 260X 2GB at 1080P60 (auto-detected).

Edit: Anywhere from 5% CPU to 29% CPU usage.

as low as 5% probably means you are using GPU decode.
try running on Chrome with VP9.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Btw, when I said scrolling in Firefox wasn't 100% smooth, I was specifically referring to the middle-mouse-button-click "smooth / autoscroll" feature in Firefox. I use it a lot to scroll.

You just middle-click in the middle of the page, then move the mouse up or down relative to the indicator that is left on-screen, and then it scrolls at a speed proportionate to the distance between the mouse and the on-screen indicator.

On the G4400 OCed, it's pretty-much perfectly smooth, regardless of what I've got running in the background (like BIONC, taking 100% CPU time, alibeit at a lower process priority), or mostly how many tabs I have open (I've had a hundred, and it still scrolled smoothly on the G4400). I've got a 7950 3GB in the G4400 rig though.

On the Q9300, it's mostly smooth, but has like a "beat frequency", in which it scrolls slightly quicker, so it's like smooth-smooth-smooth-jump-smooth-smooth-smooth-jump (repeat). It mostly doesn't matter how fast I scroll, the "beat frequency" is still there.

I wonder if it has to do with the HPET setting in the BIOS, and what kind of system timer hardware the OS is using. Maybe it's down to the timer stuff.

It's NOT that the CPU is maxed out in any way during smooth-scrolling.

 

[Qbah]

Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGP6Y0Pnhe4

At 720p/60p and 1080p/60p

Then try some flash or java heavy sites. The Core 2 won't be butter smooth.

My 5930K with poky GT 730 hits 10% or less with software decoding of the VP9 codec above.

The 1080p/60 video in Chrome gets me to ~85% on average. Scrolling gets me over 90% but not once did it hit 100%.

Stuff still scrolls smooth and the OS still is very responsive (no difference I can tell). I guess a dual core would have severe problems with that? As for flash or java heavy sites - got any examples?

 

[VirtualLarry]

What a difference a GPU (or an iGPU in an APU) makes!

I booted up the Celeron E3300 desktop that I refurbished, just to double-check it. It's in a G41 mobo, with a Syba / ASMedia SATA6G PCI-E 2.0 x1 card, and a 120GB Corsair Force LS SSD (refurb), and Win10 64-bit.

Anyway, I fired up Firefox, and browsed to this forum. Tried smooth-scrolling. CHOPPY! Far, far, more choppy than my Q9300 with the 260X GPU. But that's a G41 IGP for you, I guess.
Both Core2-era CPUs are clocked pretty-much the same (2.85-ish), and Firefox is primarily single-threaded, so the extra cores don't do much, except for media playback.

I checked Device Manager, and it's running a WDM 1.1 video driver, for the G41 IGP, in Win10.

Almost painful to use web browsing, compared to those A4-3300 / A4-3420 FM1 APUs that I've been playing with recently. (Both rigs had Win10 and SSDs.)

Edit: I tried that 1080P60 video of the ISS. It auto-detected at 720P60, but when I was watching it full-screen, it was probably playing 5-8FPS, and was taking 100% CPU time. On the youtube page, it played quite a bit smoother. Not 60FPS though. Maybe 20-30FPS. Still took 100% CPU.

 

[cbn]

What a difference a GPU (or an iGPU in an APU) makes!

I booted up the Celeron E3300 desktop that I refurbished, just to double-check it. It's in a G41 mobo, with a Syba / ASMedia SATA6G PCI-E 2.0 x1 card, and a 120GB Corsair Force LS SSD (refurb), and Win10 64-bit.

Anyway, I fired up Firefox, and browsed to this forum. Tried smooth-scrolling. CHOPPY! Far, far, more choppy than my Q9300 with the 260X GPU. But that's a G41 IGP for you, I guess.
Both Core2-era CPUs are clocked pretty-much the same (2.85-ish), and Firefox is primarily single-threaded, so the extra cores don't do much, except for media playback.

Right now I have MSI afterburner open on my Windows 7 E8500/GMA X4500 rig and when I scroll very rapidly on one of the 1280 x 1024 monitors browsing this forum CPU usage does increase on both cores....but one core more than the other. The faster the scrolling the higher the CPU usage. (peak CPU usage at the fastest level of scrolling was 55% for one core and 30% for the other core).

P.S. Opening web pages appears to stress both cores equally.

 

[waltchan]

What a difference a GPU (or an iGPU in an APU) makes!

I booted up the Celeron E3300 desktop that I refurbished, just to double-check it. It's in a G41 mobo, with a Syba / ASMedia SATA6G PCI-E 2.0 x1 card, and a 120GB Corsair Force LS SSD (refurb), and Win10 64-bit.

Anyway, I fired up Firefox, and browsed to this forum. Tried smooth-scrolling. CHOPPY! Far, far, more choppy than my Q9300 with the 260X GPU. But that's a G41 IGP for you, I guess.
Both Core2-era CPUs are clocked pretty-much the same (2.85-ish), and Firefox is primarily single-threaded, so the extra cores don't do much, except for media playback.

I checked Device Manager, and it's running a WDM 1.1 video driver, for the G41 IGP, in Win10.

Almost painful to use web browsing, compared to those A4-3300 / A4-3420 FM1 APUs that I've been playing with recently. (Both rigs had Win10 and SSDs.)

Edit: I tried that 1080P60 video of the ISS. It auto-detected at 720P60, but when I was watching it full-screen, it was probably playing 5-8FPS, and was taking 100% CPU time. On the youtube page, it played quite a bit smoother. Not 60FPS though. Maybe 20-30FPS. Still took 100% CPU.

You're comparing 2006 technology Core 2 vs. 2011 A4 FM1. Year does matter. I don't think it's a fair comparison. It may be the memory RAM speed, 800 vs. 1600, that slows web-browsing time. Why invest in LGA775s when FM1s are already depreciating near bottom.

Anyways, Celeron E3300 was based on Core 2 Duo E4600 first released in October 2007, both with 800 MHz DDR2 RAM speed. E4600's 100MHz lower speed makes it up with 2MB L2 cache instead. E3300 only has 1MB L2 cache.

 

[XavierMace]

Yeah but using AMD is like taking a time machine to the past so it seems pretty fair.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You're comparing 2006 technology Core 2 vs. 2011 A4 FM1. Year does matter. I don't think it's a fair comparison. It may be the memory RAM speed, 800 vs. 1600, that slows web-browsing time. Why invest in LGA775s when FM1s are already depreciating near bottom.

Anyways, Celeron E3300 was based on Core 2 Duo E4600 first released in October 2007, both with 800 MHz DDR2 RAM speed. E4600's 100MHz lower speed makes it up with 2MB L2 cache instead. E3300 only has 1MB L2 cache.

I was sort of obliquely referencing escrow4's post in another thread.

Absolutely hilarious, the AMD chip is barely faster than the E5200:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+E5200+@+2.50GHz

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A4-3300+APU

Sure that is only an indicator, but its HILARIOUS.

So, the E3300 is the same clock speed as the E5200, only less L2 cache. The FM1 CPU I was comparing with, was the A4-3420, overclocked 12%. The E3300 was overclocked 11%. So, the two are roughly similar in terms of CPU speed, so the comparison was really between the chipset IGP (the G41 chipset), and the APU iGPU.

 

[waltchan]

So, the E3300 is the same clock speed as the E5200, only less L2 cache. The FM1 CPU I was comparing with, was the A4-3420, overclocked 12%. The E3300 was overclocked 11%. So, the two are roughly similar in terms of CPU speed, so the comparison was really between the chipset IGP (the G41 chipset), and the APU iGPU.

And memory RAM speed, 800MHz vs 1600MHz.

 

[cbn]

So, the E3300 is the same clock speed as the E5200, only less L2 cache. The FM1 CPU I was comparing with, was the A4-3420, overclocked 12%. The E3300 was overclocked 11%. So, the two are roughly similar in terms of CPU speed, so the comparison was really between the chipset IGP (the G41 chipset), and the APU iGPU.

I think GPU can definitely matter but the AMD A4-4320 APU has a 20% faster CPU going by passmark:

E3300: 1396 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+E3300+@+2.50GHz

A4-3420: 1680 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A4-3420+APU&id=19

And at this slow level of CPU such a difference could be noticeable.....but I do believe you, of course, that the iGPU on the A4-3420 made a difference. (Example: In the past, I have noticed my old E6550* was faster at scrolling web pages when using a GT 630 compared to the GMA 3100 iGPU)

* E6550: 1503 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E6550+@+2.33GHz&id=941

 

[cbn]

Just for the fun of it (and based on our experience with CPU and GPU balance), for someone that owned that refurbished E3300 rig what would be the best upgrade for browsing?

$6 shipped E8400? (2180 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8400+@+3.00GHz)

$9 shipped E8500? (2314 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8500+@+3.16GHz)

$10 AR shipped Power Color HD5450? (Does give control panel in Windows 10)

A combination of those items? Or something else?

EDIT: LGA 771 mod is also an option allowing 5xxx quad core Xeon (eg, $13 shipped E5440 with 4022 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5440+@+2.83GHz) due to the G41 series chipset (but that is a bit of work and needs a $2 LGA 771 to LGA 775 adapter).