Benchmarking

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Guest

What does everyone here use to benchmark different workstations? I am
having issues with some Dell Precision 690s and NX3 file load times and video
performance.. One of the machines runs great and the other has very slow
load times. One machine opens a drawing in 30 seconds and get 60fps the other
opens in 2mins 45 secs and gets 30 fps. So I would like to benchmark both
machines and compare.

Both machines are identical except for video cards. I have swapped video
cards and nothing changed.

Is there anything free that does an exceptional job of benchmarking?
 
I suspect the benchmarking will be user environment specific. Different
apps will respond to better hardware in different areas. Depends
entirely on the constraints. In your instance the video card is not the
limiting factor. If I had to make a guess, in your case the "slow" PC
has had drive read errors and is running the drive in PIO instead of
DMA. Look in the Device manager at the primary IDE channel properties,
advanced setting. IF PIO, remove and reinstall it so it goes back to DMA.
 
Both are running in DMA mode.

Bob I said:
I suspect the benchmarking will be user environment specific. Different
apps will respond to better hardware in different areas. Depends
entirely on the constraints. In your instance the video card is not the
limiting factor. If I had to make a guess, in your case the "slow" PC
has had drive read errors and is running the drive in PIO instead of
DMA. Look in the Device manager at the primary IDE channel properties,
advanced setting. IF PIO, remove and reinstall it so it goes back to DMA.
Click to expand...
 
CPU speed on both, running the exactly the same? Open Task Manager and
review running processes.
 
I must revise this a bit after looking at the Dell purchase orders for all
these machines.

Fast Machine:
Dell Precision 690
Xeon 5160 3.0GHz
4GB 667MHz Ram
146GB Serial Attached SCSI 15K
2 NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4500 512Mb

Slow Machine:
Dell Precision 690
Xeon E5345 Quad Core 2.33GHz
4GB 667MHz Ram
300GB Serial Attached SCSI 10K
2 NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4600 768Mb

The slower PC has the QuadCore but has a slower HD. How much slow is a 10k
compare to a 15k performance wise.
 
On a sustained read, roughly 2/3's as fast. Also depends on where on the
platters the data resides. The quad core is probably not doing much for
you and the the clock speed of the slow box is only about 3/4 of the
fast box. Just a hunch though, I don't think the difference is all
hardware caused, I think you have something else going on with the slow
one.
 
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