Re: [gentoo-user] core i5

[Mark Knecht]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@×××××.at> wrote:
> Am 23.06.2010 03:43, schrieb Mark Knecht:
>> I'm writing you from an Intel Core i5-661 Clarksdale machine using the
>> built in graphics. I've been fairly impressed with the processor
>> itself, not very impressed with the stock cooling they supplied, and
>> in general find the graphics at least acceptable for my needs as a
>> desktop machine.
>
> That's one of my questions: I currently use a passive Nvidia GeForce
> 9600 GT here so to be able to play some games now and then (quite good
> performance compared to my former card but chosen for being quiet and
> cool while I work).
>
> I don't know if the builtin graphics will allow gaming on the same
> level, I should go for some benchmark results. But this is definitely
> not important ... just a nice to have feature maybe.

Depending on the MB you choose - I'm using an Intel DH55HC - you might
not even get access to the built-in graphics chip. It requires certain
chipsets and then certain connection on the MB and not all Core i5
MB's that accept the i5-661 have it. I'm sure you know that already
but maybe the info is helpful for others later.

The DH55HC has been a pretty good MB over the last 4-5 months that
I've been running the machine and the graphics are OK. They were not
so good 5 months ago but the driver has gotten noticeably better.

>
>> The i5-661 cores are actually the fastest cores I have, and I've also
>> got an i7-920 and an i7-980x. The i5-661 is only 2 cores/4 threads,
>> but the cores are clocked at a higher rate than the other machine and
>> on simple non-multi-threaded apps outperform the other machines.
>> However when I'm running something compute intensive I've had the
>> machine over heat using stock cooling so get a good CPU fan. (Yeah,
>> the i7-980x is pretty nice also as it has 12 threads to play with and
>> builds KDE from source in a little over an hour.)
>
> So you run "make -j13" or something?
>

Exactly. -j13. However there are things to learn about machine
configuration at this level. The disk systems start operating
differently when you have a lot of memory. I'm running 24GB of DRAM on
that machine and this effects the way the kernel looks at write back
to disk and what not. No problems, just new things to learn.

>> This machine has 3 old hard drives in it as well as 2 sound cards and
>> a 1394 card and along with the two LCD monitors it still draws only
>> about 150W so I'm pretty happy with the cost of running it day to day.
>>
>> I've not used it at all for Myth since I moved mostly to DirecTV but I
>> suspect it wouldn't do badly assuming there's no issues with the Intel
>> Graphics driver. I cannot help you there.
>
> I only run mythfrontend here sometimes, mostly in a window on one of the
> two monitors. I got used to compiz, even for daily work, but that
> shouldn't be much load for the intel graphics.
>

I've wanted to check out compiz but haven't had the time to learn. One
down side to running Gentoo is that you cannot do much of anything
like that without considerable study before hand...

> What I would like to speed up is updating various VMs, I have quite some
> linuxes in VMs, some of them gentoo-based, and running "emerge -avuDN
> world" on them could always need some speedup ;-)
>

For the price it's been a good purchase I think. I've run Windows XP
and Win 7 in vmware and the speed is pretty close to identical on the
apps I use. (Mostly TradeStation) I won't do live stock trading in Win
7 under Gentoo yet but maybe one of these days. It's been very stable
but for safety most of the time when I'm trading I just run Win 7
native.

> Thanks, Stefan

You are welcome!

Cheers,
Mark