Gigabyte GA-7PESH1 Review: A Dual Processor Motherboard through a Scientist’s Eyes
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2013 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- C602
As part of this review, we also ran our normal motherboard benchmarks.
WinRAR x64 3.93 - link
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible, and provides as a good test for when a system has variable threaded load. If a system has multiple speeds to invoke at different loading, the switching between those speeds will determine how well the system will do.
WinRAR is another example where enabling HyperThreading is actually hurting the throughput of the system. But even with all 32 threads in the system, the lack of memory speed hurts the benchmark.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
FastStone is relatively unaffected due to the single-threaded nature of the program.
Xilisoft Video Converter
With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices. By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs. For this test, we use a set of 33 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU. The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.
With XVC having many threads is what wins the day, and having HT enabled made the process very fast indeed. With HT on, we have 32 threads, meaning most of the videos were actually converted very quickly – the final 33rd video caused an extra delay at the end. This is yet another example of an algorithm that can be ported to GPUs, as XVC offers both an AMD and NVIDIA option for conversion.
x264 HD Benchmark
The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps. This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed. The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.
In contrast to XVC, which splits its threads across many files, the x264 HD benchmark splits threads across one file. As a result it seems that having HT off gives a subtle 13.7% boost in performance in the first pass and 11.0% boost in the second pass. The results of the first pass makes the second pass a lot more efficient across all the threads due to fewer memory accesses.
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dj christian - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link
No please!This article should be a one time only or once every 2 years at most.
nadana23 - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
From the looks of results some of the benchmarks are HIGHLY sensitive to effective bandwidth per thread (ie, GDDR5 feeding a GPU stream processor >> DDR3 feeding a Xeon HT core).However - it must be noted that 8x DIMMS is insufficient to achieve full memory bandwidth on Xeon E5 2S!
I'd suggest throwing a pure memory bandwidth test into the mix to make sure you're actually getting the rated number (51.2GB/s)...
http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/Intel-Xeon-Pro...
... as I strongly suspect your memory config is crippling results.
Dell's 12G config guidelines are as good a place as any to start on this :-
http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/c...
Simply removing one E5-2590 and moving to 1-Package, 8 DIMM config may (counter-intuitively) bench(market) faster... for you.
dapple - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
Great article, thanks! This is the sort of benchmark I've been wanting to see for quite some time now - simple, brute-force numerics where the code is visible and straightforward. Too many benchmarks are black boxes with processor- and compiler-specific tunes to make manufacturer "X" appear superior to "Y". That said, it would be most illustrative to perform a similar 'mark using vanilla gcc on both MS and *nix OS.daosis - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
It is long known issue, when windows does not start after changing hardware, especially GPU (not always so). There is as long known trick so. Just before last "power off" one should replace GPU's own driver with basic microsoft's one. In case of GPU it is "standart Vga adapter" (device manager - update driver - browse my computer - let me pick up). In fact one can replace all specific drivers on OS with similiar basic from MS and then to put this hard drive virtually to any system without any need for fresh install. Mind you, that after first boot it takes some time for OS to find and install specific drivers.jamesf991 - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
In the early '70s I was doing very similar simulations using a PDP 11/40 minicomputer. (I can send citations to my publications if anyone is interested.) At Texas Tech and later at Caltech, I simulated systems involving heterogeneous electron transfer kinetics, various chemical reactions in solution, coulostatics, galvanostatics, voltammetry, chronocoulometry, AC voltammetry, migration, double layer effects, solution hydrodynamics (laminar only), etc. Much of this was done on a PDP 11/40, originally with 8K words (= 16K bytes) of core memory. Later the machine was upgraded to 24 K words (!), we got a floating point board, and a hard disk drive (5 M words, IIRC). My research director probably paid in excess of $50K for the hardware. One cute project was to put a simulation "inside" a nonlinear regression routine to solve for electrode kinetic parameters such as k and alpha. Each iteration of the nonlinear solver required a new simulation -- hand-coding the innermost loops using floating point assembly instructions was a big speedup!I wonder how the old PDP would stack up against the 3770?
flynace - Monday, January 7, 2013 - link
Do you guys think that once Haswell moves the VRM on package that someone might do a 2 socket mATX board?Even if it means giving up 2 of the 4 PCIe slots and/or 2 DIMMs per socket it would be nice to have a high core count standard SFF board for those that need just that.
samsp99 - Monday, January 7, 2013 - link
I found this review interesting, but I don't think this board is really targeted at the HPC market. It seems like it would be good as part of a 2U / 12 + 2 drive system, similar to the Dell C2100. It would make a good virtual host, SQL, active web server etc. Having the 3 mSAS connectors would enable 4 drive each without the need for a SAS expander.Servers are designed for 99.999% uptime, remote management, and hands-off operation. To achieve that you need redundent power, UPS, Networking, storage etc. They also require high airflow, which is noisy and not something you want sitting under your desk. Based on that, it makes sense that the MB is intended for sale to system builders not your general build your own enthusiast.
HW manufactuerers are faced with a similar problem to airlines - consumers gravitate to the cheapest price, and so the only real money to be made is selling higher profit margin products to businesses. Servers are where intel etc makes their profits.
For the computational problems the author is trying to solve, to me it would seem to be better to consider:
a) At one point, I think google was using commodity hardware, with custom shelving etc. Assuming the algorithms can be paralleled on different hosts, you shouldn't need the reliability of traditional servers, so why not use a number of commodity systems together, choosing the components that have the best perf/$.
b) There are machines designed for HPC scenarios, such as HPC Systems E5816 that supports 8x Xeon E7-8000 (10 core) processors, or the E4002G8 - that will take 8 nVidia Tesla cards.
c) What about developing and testing the software on cheap worstations, and then when you are sure its ready, buying compute time from Amazon cloud services etc.
babysam - Monday, January 7, 2013 - link
It is quite delighting to look at your review on Anandtech (especially when I am using software and computer configurations of similar nature for my studies), as it is quite difficult for me to evaluate the performance gain of "real-life" software (i.e. science oriented in my case) on new hardware before buying.From what I have seen in your code segments provided (especially for the n-body simulation part) , there are large amount of floating-point divisions. Is there any possibility that the code is not only limited by the cache size(and thrashing), but by the limited throughput of the floating-point divider? (i.e. The performance degradations when HT is enabled may also be caused by the competition of the two running threads on the only floating-point divider in the core)
SanX - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - link
if you post zipped sources and exes for anyone to follow, learn, play, argue and eventually improve.I'd also preferred to see Fortran sources and benchmarks when possible.
Intel/AMD should start promote 2/4/8 socket monster mobos for enthusiasts and then general public since this is the beginning of the infinite in time era for multiprocessing.
Also where are games benchmarks like for example GTA4 which benefits a lot from multicores as well as from GPUs?
IanCutress - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
The n-body simulations are part of the C++ AMP example page, free for everyone to use. The rest of the code is part of a benchmark package I'm creating, hence I only give the loops in the code. Unfortunately I know no Fortran for benchmarks.Most mainstream users (i.e. gamers) still debate whether 4 or 6 cores are even necessary, so moving to 2P/4P/8P is a big leap in that regard. Enthusiasts can still get the large machines (a few folders use quad AMD setups) if they're willing to buy from ebay which may not always be wholly legal. You may see 2P/4P/8P becoming more mainstream when we start to hit process node limits.
Ian