Niall’s virtual diary archives – Monday 7th January 2013

Monday 7th January 2013: 12.26am.

Due to accidentally spending $5000 over the holiday period which was a bit more than intended, I thought it wise to scale back my new workstation intentions, so I pulled an old H67 chipset LGA1155 Sandy Bridge motherboard which was our former mediacentre back in Ireland and paired it with a new i7-3770K, and you can see the difference in synthetic benchmarks below. I also threw in, for good measure, results from the Celeron G530 which had been in there - this is the same CPU as is in my cloud node at home (total system power draw, including four hard drives, is just 28W).

I've normalised all the results to my old Q6700 workstation assembled in Autumn 2007. As you can see, the 3770K is around 2.5x to 3x faster on paper (AES encryption is bananas faster, some 13x times thanks to new AES encryption hardware assist in newer Intel processors).

Yet, as clock speeds have only improved by about 50% in the past five years, while I'll notice the new workstation is somewhat faster, I won't really feel the difference. Nor would I for probably another five years ;), so let's hope this upgrade maintains the distance till then.

I won't be replacing my old workstation with new until I get a LGA1155 mounting kit for my new uber CPU cooler, a Noctua NH-D14. Yes, it really is that massive, and yes it does have two 14cm fans. I'm not even sure it's going to fit into my Antec Solo super quiet case actually. Fun!