Single thread performance question

[perdomot]

Are you using Firefox? I've looked in FF and cannot find where to enable hardware acceleration.

Using Chromium as FF's cpu usage is much higher. Discovered this when I noticed my cpu temps were higher when watching 4K video.

 

[perdomot]

Sounds more like a downgrade/sidegrade than an upgrade to me. If you didn't have a system already you could make a case for getting a pentium. Honestly I don't think you would notice much real world difference though.

I would have agreed with you if not for my experience with the Pentium and the benchmarks showing higher single thread performance.

 

[killster1]

I would have agreed with you if not for my experience with the Pentium and the benchmarks showing higher single thread performance.

you have a single stick of ddr4 3000? You try upping your ram to 2x8gb? what does the Pentium have for memory? speed? number of sticks? timing? sounds like caching issue in windows 10 or ram speeds. Your cpu should not be the problem even if the Pentium is faster single core, just open task manager and play around see how often cpu is used heavily. I feel like something else is holding it back, the 1500x looks better than g4560 in every aspect (other than power) .

i am kinda stumped as your setup should be better, crystaldiskmark for fun?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Since we're discussing Linux and Coffee Lake in this thread... I'll ask this here.

Does Coffee Lake have any performance or power-management issues / bugs with Linux (kernel) right now?

Was thinking of selling off my Ryzen ATX rigs, and going with a DeskMini H310 rig, with a Coffee Lake (maybe i5-8400, maybe a couple of steps higher), 16GB DDR4, and a 512GB M.2 PCI-E SSD I happen to still have BNIB. Would save space / heat, although with Winter coming up fairly soon, the heat will be welcome.

 

[IntelUser2000]

OP: You could be right, but you need to consider other things first. 20% difference isn't that big from a responsiveness perspective.

Are you using a cheap, older SSD versus a better one for your friend's system? The cheap DRAM-less SSDs can become really slow in just a week of very light usage. As beginner99 also said, even good SSDs slow down over time. For responsiveness it can definitely make a noticeable difference.

 

[beginner99]

I used Linux Mint for both systems and my install was less than a month old and I keep the system lean with little added software so I doubt that was the cause. Both of our ssd are brand new and mine is an nvme drive while his is the standard sata so again, mine should at least feel faster but doesn't.

i would run an ssd benchmark on both system and compare. Slow loading files usually hint at an IO issue and not CPU performance. Also i previously missed the part you only have 1 RAm stick so single.channel. If your friend has dual-channel that could explain the perceived slowness.

As for sata vs nvme this isn't surprising. you won't feel a difference doing just consumer stuff like web browsing, file browsing and such. It would matter if you are running database loads or other heavy IO. Most ssds are rather "slow" at consumer workloads with Quedepth = 1.

See the recent Toshiba ssd review.

4k with QD = 1:

If you want optimum client performance, get an optane drive. (But i doubt in real-life you would actually notice much of a difference). point is ssds at this load are much slower than their advertised speed and it doesn't matter if it's sata or nvme.

Further down on that review is a chart on which you can see performance with increasing Queue Depth. Notice again, flash ssds only reach their high speeds with high QD, which you will never really have on a desktop.

EDIT:

And 1 month can be plenty to reach steady state. it doesn't matter if you keep your system clean. For example web browser will cache stuff, do quiet some writes to the drive. Each write will internally in the drive go to a different block so that you will reach steady-state rather quickly.

EDIT2:
How big is your friends ssd? how much free space do you have?

512Gb drives are usually faster than 256 because they have all channels populated. Also a filled up drive will get a lot slower and if you are 90% full, it will have a large impact on speed.