Zacate - Did I just not do my homework?

[sangyup81]

AMD said that the Zactate should be 90% of K8.

K8 2.0 GHz = Athlon 64 3200+
K8 1.8 GHz = Athlon 64 3000+
K8 1.6 GHz = Athlon 64 2800+

E-350 runs at 1.6 GHz. If we disable one core, it should be at least 90% of the K8 that just beats a P4 2.8 GHz

 

[toyota]

AMD said that the Zactate should be 90% of K8.

K8 2.0 GHz = Athlon 64 3200+
K8 1.8 GHz = Athlon 64 3000+
K8 1.6 GHz = Athlon 64 2800+

E-350 runs at 1.6 GHz. If we disable one core, it should be at least 90% of the K8 that just beats a P4 2.8 GHz

well that is not true. one core of the E-350 is about equal to a P4 at just 2.1 or so.

 

[VirtualLarry]

AMD said that the Zactate should be 90% of K8.

K8 2.0 GHz = Athlon 64 3200+
K8 1.8 GHz = Athlon 64 3000+
K8 1.6 GHz = Athlon 64 2800+

E-350 runs at 1.6 GHz. If we disable one core, it should be at least 90% of the K8 that just beats a P4 2.8 GHz

I'd say perhaps 75% of K8, not 90%. At least from what I've seen with my Zacate rig.

 

[Xpage]

Check the temps on the PC to make sure there in no thermal throttling. My Zactate rig for HTPC works well, installing windows 7 on it and updating it took a long long time but it won't be the fastest rig on the planet, it's sipping on power. The HSF had a . size drop of thermal paste on it. I reapplied thermal compound and temps dropped 10-15C. Sitting at 62C in normal netflix TV watching. This is with it running at ~1700mhz CPU and 700mhz GPU.

I'm thinking of replacing the 320GB WD HDD with something more responsive but I'll probably replace the rig with trinity when it gets released and go with a Momentus XT 2 as that is due out in a month or two.

 

[veri745]

I'd say perhaps 75% of K8, not 90%. At least from what I've seen with my Zacate rig.

I think 90% is more than generous to K8. A 1.6GHz K8 loses to the E-350 in almost every bench: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/115?vs=328

 

[Idontcare]

I like these posts that basically say to "unleash" the power of a $100 zacate cpu (with mobo) you need to buy more than $50 worth of ram and a $200 SSD.

At that point why bother hobbling your system with a zacate in the first place?

To the OP - yes your expectations were too high, you get what you pay for, a $200 system is going to perform like a $200 system. If you wanted more than $200 worth of performance then you need to budget out your components accordingly.

Someone above put is quite succinctly, there is a reason you don't see zacate fileservers taking over the market by storm.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked/3

There's some benchs of the E-350 against a single core Pentium 4 @ 3.6 GHz. The Pentium 4 easily beats the E-350 except on a few heavy multi-threaded bench where they are equal.

A 3 GHz Pentium 4 has 83% of the clock speed of the 3.6GHz. Even if you scale the benchmarks to 80% of the performance to replicate a 3 GHz Pentium 4, the P4 still beats the E-350 in all the benchmarks where the P4 3.6GHz won.

I dunno about you but that certainly looks like room for argument.

P.S. waiting for Passmark CPU bench as a reply cause we all know how accurate that is of real world performance

No, it doesn't. Your math is off. Do the calculations again at 3GHz and you'll see the E-350 wins overall.

 

[Accord99]

I think 90% is more than generous to K8. A 1.6GHz K8 loses to the E-350 in almost every bench: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/115?vs=328

The 2650e is single-core. Versus the dual-core 1.5GHz 3250e, 75% of K8 is reasonable estimate.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/328?vs=116

 

[itsmydamnation]

Dinos22 ( I think it was him,) of XS/OCAU/i4M etc did some really good clock for clock tests of an E-350 against K8 and K10. in int performance bobcat is right up there with K10 (funny when you think about the whole bulldozer zomg 2 ALU only thing) but where it really gets left behind is Floating point, in some cases we were talking 50% of k10, clock for clock.


edit: it was mAJORDhttp://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/member.php?44606-mAJORD

 

[frostedflakes]

I like these posts that basically say to "unleash" the power of a $100 zacate cpu (with mobo) you need to buy more than $50 worth of ram and a $200 SSD.

At that point why bother hobbling your system with a zacate in the first place?

To the OP - yes your expectations were too high, you get what you pay for, a $200 system is going to perform like a $200 system. If you wanted more than $200 worth of performance then you need to budget out your components accordingly.

Someone above put is quite succinctly, there is a reason you don't see zacate fileservers taking over the market by storm.

I don't think anyone is really saying that, hope people didn't get that impression from my post at least. My example was just illustrating how much of a bottleneck those 5400RPM notebook drives can be. A 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" HDD would probably make the system much more responsive, not like you'd need to go out and spend a ton of money on an SSD. Those 5400RPM notebook drives are just painfully slow to run an OS on. I mean sure the E-350 is no powerhouse either, but I'm pretty confident the drive is the main bottleneck in OP's system right now, not the CPU.

I'd also think Zacate should be more than adequate for file serving, you don't really need a ton of CPU power for that do you?

 

[86waterpumper]

I just don't understand why settle for a low cpu solution to begin with? My 2500k system idles at 35 watts...I mean how much lower does a zacate system idle at? Why not just go for a i3?

 

[frostedflakes]

Cost is a big part of it too, that ASRock E-350 board is like $100 on NewEgg. Hard to find an i3 and motherboard for that price.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

I just don't understand why settle for a low cpu solution to begin with? My 2500k system idles at 35 watts...I mean how much lower does a zacate system idle at? Why not just go for a i3?

Because both those systems would cost hundreds more and would be overkill for the intended use?

 

[toyota]

Cost is a big part of it too, that ASRock E-350 board is like $100 on NewEgg. Hard to find an i3 and motherboard for that price.

you can buy an i3 mobo for 50 bucks and i3 2100 for 125. so for 75 more bucks in total, you could have a massively more powerful system.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

you can buy an i3 mobo for 50-60 bucks.

But then the CPU is $125...

 

[toyota]

But then the CPU is $125...

I was editing...

 

[86waterpumper]

Well I would contest that it's not overkill if the system is not getting the job done, but yeah it's more expensive to some degree. Let's face it though, if someone is building a fileserver to begin with they are obviously not poor, it's not like it's a necessity to have it in the first place

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Well I would contest that it's not overkill if the system is not getting the job done, but yeah it's more expensive to some degree. Let's face it though, if someone is building a fileserver to begin with they are obviously not poor, it's not like it's a necessity to have it in the first place

As far as we can tell it's not getting the job done because the Hard Drive is too slow.

If you're looking for something cheap and good for the intended for the application as well I would look at the Pentium G620 instead of the i3 2100.

 

[pcgeek11]

I also tried upgrading my WHS V1 to WHS 2011 and found it was dog slow. I went back to WHS Version 1, that I was running on an Atom 510 on a gigabit lan.

No I didn't run WHS 2011 on the Atom it was on a E6700 and it was still a dog.

 

[iroc409]

I just don't understand why settle for a low cpu solution to begin with? My 2500k system idles at 35 watts...I mean how much lower does a zacate system idle at? Why not just go for a i3?

I think a base E-350 is supposed to idle at like 15 watts or so. My C-50 netbook claims 9W or something like that.

So, about half the power consumption of an i3, and less entry cost.

 

[fuzzymath10]

I am very curious about the E-350 boards and would almost build a small case for the sake of trying, but for many ppl, spending a bit more (e.g. on an i3 or Athlon II) might yield a system that will justify the upfront cost by lasting longer before needing replacement.

Netbook-level performance today will only appear worse over time, while an i3 will perform at a level two years from now that an E-350 does today. You can never count on the GPU to work with everything thrown at it, so having a good CPU to back it up never hurts.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

OP, the problem isn't Zacate, it isn't your 5400rpm drive, and it isn't WHS2011. It's using all three of them together.

Yes, you can run WHS2011 on Atom and Zacate. No, it is not at all pleasant, not even with 8GB+ RAM and an SSD. If you want to use WHS2011, you need a more capable CPU. If you want to stick with Zacate, you need a new file server OS. There are plenty of Linux derivatives that are easy to learn and cost nothing.

 

[jhu]

OP, the problem isn't Zacate, it isn't your 5400rpm drive, and it isn't WHS2011. It's using all three of them together.

Yes, you can run WHS2011 on Atom and Zacate. No, it is not at all pleasant, not even with 8GB+ RAM and an SSD. If you want to use WHS2011, you need a more capable CPU. If you want to stick with Zacate, you need a new file server OS. There are plenty of Linux derivatives that are easy to learn and cost nothing.

Agreed. Any free Linux or BSD distribution will be much faster and just as capable (unless you're using zfs).

 

[SunnyD]

After a few days of runtime, finalization of the software configurations, and letting things settle... here's what I've got.

#1 - Zacate itself is just fine for running WHS. After letting things settle and cache for a few days, the OS itself is running fairly peachy.

#2 - I'm going to laugh inside at anyone else that suggests getting a SSD for this machine. I want a file server, not a desktop gaming rig.

#3 - There does seem to be an issue with disk speed. Now before you all go saying "I told you so...", I'm still not discounting AMD's AHCI drivers for this. Something in general seems overall flaky, and I've not once had issues with WD Scorpio Blue's with speed (let's just say I know what to expect from them). I think overall speed may be better once I get a hardware controller for storage, but again, that doesn't "fix" the boot drive.

#4 - Watching server loads, etc, Zacate is more than capable for what I intend to throw at it. CPU usage more or less stays low. Occasionally it'll spike to 60-70%, but it's still fine for my purposes. There is no reason that the CPU itself shouldn't be considered powerful enough for a file server or WHS. If you want it as a general purpose server on the other hand, that's another story.

At this point I'm satisfied. If I had more time to play around and not push this thing into service, I'd play with various drive configurations, etc. But right now, it works. I'm satisfied.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I am surprised that you are now satisfied with its performance. I'm in the process of writing up a file server guide for the main site and after researching and experimenting, had decided to recommend neither Zacate nor Atom for WHS2011. I will be reconsidering that decision.

Would you mind describing what types of files you're storing on the server?