Choosing a CPU for an upgrade

R

rawthey

My 6 year old desktop system is getting due for some upgrading. It was built around a 64 bit dual core Athlon 4850e with 2GB DDR2 memory and was perfectly adequate for my needs at the time. Since then I've switched from UFS to ZFS and started to use VirtualBox, and applications have become more bloated - especially after moving from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.12.

Even after increasing the memory to 4GB it's showing the strain with many applications being sluggish to load and a serious hit in responsiveness while compiling ports or running zpool scrub.

I'm looking at going for either an AMD FX-6300 or an Intel Core i3-3240 with either 8 or 16 GB DDR3 memory.

My main use of the system in addition to normal web browsing, wordprocessing and email is web development which involves running Apache, PHP and MySQL for testing local copies of my websites plus, of course, periodic upgrading of ports which is usually a long slow process. I run MS Windows in VirtualBox guests for testing my websites with Internet Explorer and a small number of other Windows applications.

I have no requirement for gaming and unfortunately most of the online CPU reviews and benchmarks seem to be very heavily biased towards gaming so their recommendations are probably not very well matched to my needs.

After looking at comparisons at http://www.cpu-world.com it looks like both CPU's have similar overall performance, with the FX-6300 having about 30% better multi-threaded performance but 30% poorer single-threaded performance compared to the i3-3240. Output from top and systat on my system shows that both cores of my Athlon are equally utilised when the system is well loaded. This leads me to assume that multi-threaded performance will be more important than single-threaded and I would get more benefit from 6 threads on the AMD CPU than 4 threads on the Intel one. But that's only my guess, could anyone confirm if I'm thinking along the right lines or not.

I'd also be interested to know if anyone has any experience of CPU temperatures with AMD FX processors. One of the things I like about my current CPU is that it runs cool and quiet with a low TDP of 45 watts. The FX-6300 has a much higher TDP of 95 watts and I'm concerned that I could end up with rather a lot of fan noise to maintain an acceptable temperature.
 
In use, I suspect there will not be a lot of difference in how the machine runs. Intel is overpriced but fast and cool, AMD is underpowered and hot but cheap. After disappointment with AMD processors over the last decade or so, I've paid more for the Intel versions and not regretted it.
 
Since I've built a comparable FreeBSD desktop based on both mentioned processors for others, I'll chime in quick. In my opinion @wblock is correct that for day to day desktop usage it likely won't matter and the difference would be negligible. Based only on the 2 CPUs and workload you mentioned however, the AMD will give better performance overall especially if heavily multitasking in my experience. It will also heat up more under load, but it's really not nearly as bad as people sometimes make it out to be, especially with the quad core/dual module SKUs. However, if you do choose AMD, I would recommend purchasing a better cooling solution than what comes with the CPU. The stock fans are loud. Also, just to be clear, I'm not a fanboy of either company and the Intel i3 is certainly no slouch and a nice CPU also.
 
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Instead of the Core i3 I'd go with a Core i5 model that supports VT-d. The Core i3 only has VT-x. Look for specific models though, not all Core i5 models support VT-d.
 
You can not compare AMD's modules with Intel's core technology, entirely different ballgame, though on the surface the look the same. I was hellbent on buying the FX-6300 for my workstation six months ago, to use multiple Linux virtual machines and lots of compiling over a Slackware Linux host, however ended up buying a Haswell i5-4440 because luckily I saw the FX-6300 in action on my graphic designer friend's desktop and did a lot of reading on the web.

Under constant high load and usage, it stays as cold as my ex-girlfriend's heart, with the stock CPU cooler and 2 80mm cabinet fans. The inbuilt HD-4600 graphics card is good enough, actually pretty decent.

The only problem you may have is that Haswell graphics is still not supported on FreeBSD, I believe.

Regards.
 
CurlyTheStooge said:
You can not compare AMD's modules with Intel's core technology, entirely different ballgame, though on the surface the look the same. I was hellbent on buying the FX-6300 for my workstation six months ago, to use multiple Linux virtual machines and lots of compiling over a Slackware Linux host, however ended up buying a Haswell i5-4440 because luckily I saw the FX-6300 in action on my graphic designer friend's desktop and did a lot of reading on the web.
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Any specifics on what changed your mind? On paper, the FX-6300 is a lot of processor for the money.

The only problem you may have is that Haswell graphics is still not supported on FreeBSD, I believe.
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Correct. The vesa driver usually works, although not always at native resolution. Or add a cheap Radeon card.
 
wblock@ said:
Any specifics on what changed your mind? On paper, the FX-6300 is a lot of processor for the money.
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Not just on paper, its a good CPU for money in reality too, however I chose the i5 "over" because I was convinced that an i5 Haswell with socket H3 1150 is going to be slightly better investment. My reasons(and strictly mine) :-
  1. No need to buy a separate graphics card. His ATI HD graphics card went bonkers in the middle of a project and he had nothing to fallback on for the meantime.
  2. Trust me, my friend warned me about buying a good CPU cooler as this CPU gets quite hot under high load. He is a web & and graphics designer and always killing the CPU and GPU.
  3. I'm not a gamer and single core performance still matters to me.

wblock@ said:
Correct. The vesa driver usually works, although not always at native resolution. Or add a cheap Radeon card.
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Yup, I'm in the process of getting a used Radeon card from that friend for a cheap price, after that I may try installing FreeBSD on my Haswell too. :)

Regards.
 
CurlyTheStooge said:
You can not compare AMD's modules with Intel's core technology, entirely different ballgame, though on the surface the look the same. I was hellbent on buying the FX-6300 for my workstation six months ago, to use multiple Linux virtual machines and lots of compiling over a Slackware Linux host, however ended up buying a Haswell i5-4440 because luckily I saw the FX-6300 in action on my graphic designer friend's desktop and did a lot of reading on the web.
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While I don't have any references at the moment, but it was my understanding virtualization was one of the few areas AMD still competes with Intel head on.
 
protocelt said:
While I don't have any references at the moment, but it was my understanding virtualization was one of the few areas AMD still competes with Intel head on.
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And I didn't and won't deny that. I was merely stating that 'why' I was looking out for decently powerful CPU.

Regards.
 
CurlyTheStooge said:
protocelt said:
While I don't have any references at the moment, but it was my understanding virtualization was one of the few areas AMD still competes with Intel head on.
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And I didn't and won't deny that. I was merely stating that 'why' I was looking out for decently powerful CPU.

Regards.
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No worries. Just throwing that out there. :) If the OP has a flexible budget, an Intel i5 would be on par with the FX-6300 and run cooler.
 
Many thanks to everyone for the comments.

I've been happy with AMD for all my previous PC's but after reading the comments about heat and noise with the FX-6300 I'm inclined to favour the Intel route now.

I'd originally considered socket 1155 to avoid problems with graphics support not being available yet for Haswell but on further consideration I expect that if I choose Intel I might as well go for Haswell as a better long term solution and fall back to the Vesa driver or a cheap PCI card as a short term fix until graphics support is available. All the socket 1155 motherboards in the price range I've been looking at have 4 x SATA II sockets and only 2 x SATA III but the socket 1150 boards are the other way round with 4 x SATA III and 2 x SATA II. Shortage of SATA III is no problem at the moment but over the number of years I expect to keep the motherboard and CPU it could become a bit of a limitation.

Intel offer a bewildering array of CPU's but I think the i3-4150 would be a close Haswell approximation to my initial thought but after reading the comments about i5 processors I'm tempted to go for an i5-4460 if I can convince myself that the extra £50 is justified. The 3.7GHz i3-4360 might be a compromise midway between those two.

To add further confusion I've been thinking about the most sluggish aspects of my present setup. Much of this is slow starting of applications when the disk activity light is very active. So I was wondering if moving the base system and ports onto a SSD might be worth considering. A 64GB SSD and an i3-4150 would come out about the same cost as an i5-4460 but how would the benefit of the SSD compare with the lower performance of the i3 compared to the i5. If the SSD route is worthwhile then I could start using that with my existing system and perhaps even get a bit more life out of it before going for the major CPU, motherboard and memory upgrade.
 
I just bought an SSD, and it's a night-and-day difference for practically everything. I imagine just switching to an SSD will fix many of your problems, since things like updating ports uses quite a bit of IO.

I have a Phenom II that I bought about 5 years, and I was surprised about how much heat it puts out. It runs at 125w (45nm process) and it's fine in an open room, but when put in a closet it idles around 60C. I imagine the FX-6300 will run a bit cooler than that, but it'll still more than the Intel (they seem to be around 84w).

If you're really concerned about heat, you could look into AMD's lower power offerings, like AMD trinity: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer ... -5500.html
It's got a decent clock rate and a decent graphics card for pretty cheap (and virtualization support). I don't know enough about the differences between this and the others mentioned, but I was able to find boards with 4+ SATA III.

Another option is to look at Ivy-bridge chips. There are a few that run ~55w, you'll have graphics support OOTB on FreeBSD 10+, and they're cheaper than the haswells.
 
Here's the thing with SSDs: forget about the rated speeds. Those are mostly unimportant. What SSDs fix is contention and seek times. Hard drives go fast occasionally, but SSDs are fast all the time. Yes, one of those can make a bigger difference than a new processor.

Don't make the mistake of getting an SSD that is too small. That ends up just costing more as you buy another, larger one. There is an SSD price war right now, with 128G drives being relatively cheap, and 240/250G drives being much cheaper than even a few months ago.
 
wblock@ said:
Here's the thing with SSDs: forget about the rated speeds. Those are mostly unimportant. What SSDs fix is contention and seek times. Hard drives go fast occasionally, but SSDs are fast all the time. Yes, one of those can make a bigger difference than a new processor.
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This certainly looks worth serious consideration. I'm using sysutils/beadm to manage multiple ZFS boot environments so I alteady have base and ports under sys/ROOT and the rest of my data under sys/DATA so moving sys/ROOT into a new pool on a SSD would be quite straightforward. I expect directories in /var with transient data like log, mail, run and tmp will be best kept off the SSD but they could easily be moved to sys/DATA/var.

I suppose I'd need to upgrade from 9.1-RELEASE to 9.3 or 10.0 to get TRIM support in ZFS.
Don't make the mistake of getting an SSD that is too small. That ends up just costing more as you buy another, larger one. There is an SSD price war right now, with 128G drives being relatively cheap, and 240/250G drives being much cheaper than even a few months ago.
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I see what you mean - Amazon has Kingston V300 at £35 for 60GB or £46 for 120GB. Certainly worth the small extra for double the capacity.
 
I upgraded from a 5400RPM SATA 2.5" 320GB hard drive to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD 128GB. On the old drive I was getting about 10MB/sec on average (the drive was encrypted with geli). On the new SSD I am getting up to 400MB/sec and thats with geli encryption! (AES-NI on the CPU helps though). Moving to an SSD is well worth the cost.

Heres an interesting comparision: When I used to upgrade my FreeBSD server from source to a new version, it would take about 8 - 10 hours to do on the old server with SATA disks. The same thing on my new server with SSD disks takes 30min :)

Keeping ports up to date with an SSD drive is like magic too. The other day I had to update half of all my ports. About a 100 in total needed updating. It took less than 30min to do the entire update! Generally keeping the ports up to date takes less than 10min (depends how frequently I do the updates).

A ZFS scrub takes 53 seconds on the mirrored SSD drives that has about 16GB of data on it (about 300MB/sec). The 1TB SATA drive I use as another ZFS pool takes 46min to scrub 103GB of data (about 37MB/sec).

If you can, get an SSD!

Edit: In my opinion it's worth spending the extra to get the pro version of the SSD. It has better IOPS and lasts longer (can endure more read/writes). To me the pro makes sense for a server.
 
The Kingston V300 price has been dropping a lot lately. Kingston originally released it with faster flash memory. Current versions are much slower, and people feel that was deceptive. It will vary by locale, but currently Newegg has a 128G Sandisk SSDHP for 10% more than the V300, and the Plextor M5S for about 25% more. If I were buying right now, I would probably get one of those instead, likely the Plextor. Or for another $25, get one of the 256G drives...
 
Thanks for the remarks about Kingston which I will bear in mind. It looks like I can get something better for very little extra cost from Sandisk, Crucial or Plextor. Looking at the range of prices in the UK I should be able to get an "enterprise" grade Sandisk X110 or even an X210 for about the same price as the SSDHP.
 
I eventually decided to go the SSD route to improve performance and hopefully delay the need for a major motherboard + CPU + memory upgrade.

I purchased a couple of 128GB SanDisk X210 drives to configure as a ZFS mirror for system software. These have been in use for a few weeks now so I thought it appropriate to provide some feedback of my experience.

The ultimate aim was to use the drives as a mirror but I initially set them up as independent drives so that I could experiment booting into either 9.3-RELEASE or 10.0-RELEASE. After installing the OS on one of the SSD's I experienced an immediate improvement in responsiveness. After logging in to KDE4 through KDM most applications were much quicker to start, for example firefox now starts up in half the time, although initial startup of KDE4 showed hardly any improvement. Yes, I know KDE is bloated and a leaner desktop environment like XFCE would improve things but I've been using KDE for years and don't wamt to go through the time consuming learning curve of getting used to a different system until I really have to.

Previously I used to suffer serious performance hits when big jobs like upgrading ports were running or when the monthly ZFS scrub brought the system to a near standstill. Having the OS on the SSD has dramatically improved this, I can now happily work while several hundred ports are being rebuilt in the background and see hardly any slowdown. ZFS scrub now has hardly any effect on performance, the SSD gets scrubbed so quickly that any impact it might have is very brief and the 2 hour scrub of the HDD no longer interferes with access to OS files so has very little impact on responsiveness.

I had thought that moving things like ~/.kde4 and ~/.mozilla from the HDD to the SSD might have improved application start up times but it made no significant difference so I moved them back to the HDD to reduce wear on the SSD,

I had numerous problems with KDE applications randomly crashing with 10.0-RELEASE so decided to stick with 9.3 for now. I suspect this was down to something wrong with my setup rather than a specific issue with 10.0 but decided to take the easy option of sticking with the 9.3 system which worked OK.

I had expected that attaching the second drive into the pool to create a mirror would have produced a further improvement in performance by effectively doubling the potential read speed (which was certainly the case when I attached the second drive to the HDD pool some time ago) but there was no noticeable change. I expect even a single SSD is capable of saturating the maximum disk throughput that the rest of my hardware can manage.

So overall I regard this as a success. I can certainly delay the need for a major hardware upgrade for some time. From a purely performance point of view one SSD would have sufficed but the extra safety offered by the mirrored pool makes it worth the extra cost from my point of view.
 
Thanks for updating and good decision. :beer
I can hear crackling sounds not very frequently coming out from my Thinkpad's hard disk section. I won't be replacing it with a new hard disk when the time comes, but a small SSD. In here, the SSDs are way too costly for a poor guy like me.

Regards.
 
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