Is Intel QX9650 worth it?

[levster]

I have a Supermicro c2sea with a Celeron 430 and a pair of Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards. Ever since I upgraded to unRAID 6, the system has become noticeably slower, with the latest parity check of 9 data drives taking approximately 33 hours!

 

I like the arrangement of the board, and have an e8400 processor, which is a dual core. I was wondering if anyone has experience with that and possible upgrading to the fastest CPU for that board, which I think is QX9650. That CPU can be had for about $100 to 115 on ebay. Any thoughts on getting the Quad Core Extreme over the e8400?

 

Any input would be great.

 

Thanks,

[JorgeB]

I believe you’ll see little difference, I never tested a quad core but did some tests on V6 with 12 disks and a dual 5700 @ 3.0Ghz is about 5% faster than a dual core Celeron E1200 @ 1.6Ghz during a parity check.

[levster]

I believe you’ll see little difference, I never tested a quad core but did some tests on V6 with 12 disks and a dual 5700 @ 3.0Ghz is about 5% faster than a dual core Celeron E1200 @ 1.6Ghz during a parity check.

 

Thanks. I'll try the E8400 and compare the parity check numbers to what they used to be in V5 and now in V6 with Celeron. Hopefully, someone with an Extreme CPU out there can chime in.

[JorgeB]

Forgot to add that interestingly enough on these latest tests I made, parity check on V6 was always slightly faster than V5, except with a single core Celeron D430, which is almost unusable on v6.

[levster]

... except with a single core Celeron D430, which is almost unusable on v6.

 

I can attest to this. Very slow.

[bkastner]

Any time you are looking at a CPU upgrade it's worth checking out:

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

 

This will allow you to see the passmark score of the prospective CPU vs your existing.

 

So, looking your scenario:

 

Celeron 430: 491

E8400: 2179

Q9650: 4268

 

So, your Celeron is very low end (no surprise), but the Q9650 is a good jump from the E8400 (basically double the performance).

[levster]

Any time you are looking at a CPU upgrade it's worth checking out:

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

 

This will allow you to see the passmark score of the prospective CPU vs your existing.

 

So, looking your scenario:

 

Celeron 430: 491

E8400: 2179

Q9650: 4268

 

So, your Celeron is very low end (no surprise), but the Q9650 is a good jump from the E8400 (basically double the performance).

 

I think that helps a lot. Spending $110 on an aged CPU is probably not worth it, when I can probably pick up a new motherboard / CPU with a "relatively" recent i5 or i7 and achieve much higher results at a relatively modest price difference.

[bkastner]

Any time you are looking at a CPU upgrade it's worth checking out:

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

 

This will allow you to see the passmark score of the prospective CPU vs your existing.

 

So, looking your scenario:

 

Celeron 430: 491

E8400: 2179

Q9650: 4268

 

So, your Celeron is very low end (no surprise), but the Q9650 is a good jump from the E8400 (basically double the performance).

 

I think that helps a lot. Spending $110 on an aged CPU is probably not worth it, when I can probably pick up a new motherboard / CPU with a "relatively" recent i5 or i7 and achieve much higher results at a relatively modest price difference.

 

For reference, cpubenchmark is always the first place I go when looking at a CPU. It helps you understand if an extra $20 investment in a CPU will give you a good bump in performance, or just isn't worth the money. It also helps when you have a fixed budget to figure out what CPU makes the most sense (especially when there are often different socket options at any given time).

 

You will also see a number of people on these forums mention passmark score. It's a pretty common reference for everyone.

 

Lastly, as a rule of thumb, if you are looking at Plex at all, you will want around 2000 passmark per concurrent stream you plan on running.

 

[garycase]

I'm not sure why, but it's clear that v6 does take a lot more CPU resources for parity checks.  I recently upgraded a C2SEA as well (with a Pentium E6300) and my parity check times are 31% longer than they were on v5, although I was able to notably improve that by disabling all page updates during parity checks (they're now only 6% longer).

 

As for your system -- it's not worth buying a QX9650, but it's certainly worth swapping in your E8400.    Jumping from  PassMark of 491 to 2179 is a 4.4X improvement in CPU "horsepower" ... that's very likely to completely eliminate the extra time your parity checks are taking.  [As a reference, my Pentium E6300 scores 1707 on PassMark => so if I could get within 6% with this, I'd certainly think an E8400 can match the v5 times.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ohlwiler]

I too have been considering a 775 processor upgrade. If you choose the ebay route, consider the Q9550. It seems to go for about $45 and is very close to the 9650 in performance.

[garycase]

The trusty old C2SEA is an excellent board, and is certainly worth upgrading to a newer CPU if you can do it for a reasonable cost ... free is good    (since you have an E8400) ... but anything under $50 is probably worthwhile.

 

Since I use mine purely as a NAS, with no other applications, I can live with the 6% increase in parity check speeds, and the somewhat reduced ability to stream  [i could easily stream 5 movies at a time with v5 ... haven't tested with v6 but I suspect that's a bit lower now -- probably 3 or 4 -- but since there are only 2 of us I don't think that's an issue  ]    Nevertheless, I may spring for an E8500 or E8600 ... these are available for under $20 on e-bay !!

 

 

[levster]

Thank you all for the input. I'll go with an E8400 for now unless I find a really good deal for a faster CPU.

 

Lev

[garycase]

Good choice => v6 will run much better on that than on your old Celeron.

 

[HellDiverUK]

E8400 is a good chip, still using a heap of E8400 machines at work.  Also consider the Q6600.  It runs very nicely too, and might be more compatible with older boards.

 

My "spare" workstation at work (the one I use for testing things out) is a Q6600 and it runs really quite well considering it's 7 years old.

[levster]

E8400 is a good chip, still using a heap of E8400 machines at work.  Also consider the Q6600.  It runs very nicely too, and might be more compatible with older boards.

 

My "spare" workstation at work (the one I use for testing things out) is a Q6600 and it runs really quite well considering it's 7 years old.

 

I sold my Q6600 about a year ago thinking that I'll never need that old CPU. Slightly regretting that now... 

[tdallen]

I'm quite happy with my upgrade from a Core 2 Duo E6400 (1200 Passmarks) to a Core 2 Quad Q9550 (4000+ Passmarks).  However, I was specifically looking for more horsepower for running Dockers and Plex.  I suspect that the E8400 is all you need to improve your basic NAS operations like a parity check.

[HellDiverUK]

The problem with the Core2 era machines is the motherboard/chipset can use as much power as a complete Haswell system.  The chipset can use up to 10W, the older style onboard NICs (Broadcom etc) can use 5W, and the VRMs are much less efficient.

[garycase]

Definitely true r.e. power consumption -- the Haswell systems are definitely much more efficient.  On the other hand, a "wasted" 20w or so is not a huge amount of power => about 175kwh/year at 24/7 operation.    Clearly it depends on your local power rates, but at the US average of $0.12/kwh that's about $21/year in energy costs.  You're not going to pay for an upgraded system with the savings      [but it IS nice to be "green" -- I've spent a LOT of $$ just to use less power in my systems (not just computers) ... but it's more about "feeling good" about the energy consumption than it is to actually save $$]

 

[tdallen]

Definitely true r.e. power consumption -- the Haswell systems are definitely much more efficient.  On the other hand, a "wasted" 20w or so is not a huge amount of power => about 175kwh/year at 24/7 operation.    Clearly it depends on your local power rates, but at the US average of $0.12/kwh that's about $21/year in energy costs.  You're not going to pay for an upgraded system with the savings      [but it IS nice to be "green" -- I've spent a LOT of $$ just to use less power in my systems (not just computers) ... but it's more about "feeling good" about the energy consumption than it is to actually save $$]

+1.  I tried to justify a modern Haswell build based on reduced power usage, but it literally would take decades to pay for itself even with extremely high New England power rates.  As we speak the draw on my UPS is 96 watts. This includes the system in my signature (at idle), a cable signal booster, cable modem, router, and 8 port switch.  Yeah, I could shave 20 or 30 watts off that, but it's less than a light bulb and as Gary points out it just doesn't save much money.  I'll have fun building a new system someday, but I think the carbon footprint for the manufacturing of a new system would probably exceed the energy savings .  I'll wait until something breaks and then have fun .

[HellDiverUK]

Fair point.  There's also the issues with RAM availability & compatibility, and the lack of native SATA ports.  Most S775 boards top out at 4 SATAs, and they're running off the old ICH10R if you're lucky.

[garycase]

Ports and RAM can both be issues => but in most of the cases we're really discussing, folks already HAVE the Socket 775 system, it supports as many drives as they want (perhaps with an add-in controller or two), they likely have the RAM they want ... and they're just looking for a bit more "horsepower" to run v6.

 

For those cases, a modest CPU "bump" is a reasonable upgrade.

 

[levster]

As a follow up, to those that may be interested, I have both an E8400 and a Q6600. I ran parity checks with both of these CPUs, one after the other, and here are the numbers:

 

E8400: Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes, 40 seconds. Average speed: 87.4 MB/sec

 

Q6600: Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes, 43 seconds. Average speed: 87.4 MB/sec

 

Will the quad core CPU fair better when using dockers and plug-ins?

[WeeboTech]

Will the quad core CPU fair better when using dockers and plug-ins?

I would say yes, and especially if you plan to use hash checksums on the files via bunker, bitrot or any of the newer tools.

Reading the data is usually at a constant speed, but having the extra horsepower to calculate one or more file hashes in parallel help.

 

The difference from a 2.2ghz dual core amd to a 2.4 ghz dual core hyperthreaded xeon was dramatic in my case.

 

In the past we would say no, but in today's day and age where we do more with the NAS and proactively monitor the health of our files, the extra cores help.

[ohlwiler]

I just picked up a Q9505 off ebay for $22. It replaced a E3400 celeron. 2.83 quad core vs. 2.6 dual core. Parity check uses two cores and I appear to be maxing out my processor (14 data disks at present), so a slight speed bump, but extra power for other uses and VT-d.

[garycase]

Unless you're replacing a very low-end CPU it's not likely that a new CPU will make much, if any, difference in parity check speeds.    It IS true that v6 uses more CPU "horsepower" for parity checks than previous versions -- but as long as you have "enough" CPU power, adding more won't make it any faster for a parity check.

 

What it WILL do is provide more capability to run Dockers, transcode media streams, run VM's, etc.

 

I suspect the forthcoming dual parity implementation will add a bit more demands on the CPU for a parity check, so this will likely raise the "floor" of CPU power that's needed to get max speed ... but again, I don't think this is the main reason to upgrade a CPU => it's the "other" non-NAS uses of the system where more power is really nice to have.