RX 570 Woo!

[HankB]

I didn't upgrade my desktop for years because it didn't seem like there was anything that much faster than an I7-4770K. I think that's changed recently but I'm not ready to spend the $$$ to upgrade MoBo, RAM and processor. Instead I've been upgrading disks (4x SSD in RAID0 on a H/W RAID card) and finally got around to looking at an upgrade to my old reliable GTX-460. I replaced it with an AMD RX-570.

I was not pleasantly surprised. I am blown away I ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark on the old card. It did not quite make 2 fps. (Yes, I'm not a gamer. ) The new card is running at 70-150 fps. I guess I waited too long to update.

On the subject of new storage, I bought an HP EX950 NVME SSD. That thing screams! At the moment I've put it in a riser card in my desktop so I can run some benchmarks on it and decide how I want to format it. I had no idea how small the NVME drives were until I held one in my hand. And it screams! And it doesn't thermal throttle. (Inside the laptop there are cooling pads so it should be good there.) I'll probably put the old NVME SSD in the riser card in my desktop. It's a Z87 system ans supposedly not able to boot from NVME, but it shows up in the boot menu. Hmmm... But the same benchmarks that show the HP drive as a screamer also show the Toshiba drive as a dog. (Write speeds on the order of a SATA SSD.) But I digress. This is about GPUs.

I'm happy to see that there is still significant progress being made with GPUs.

 

[EarthDog]

Cool!

Though, I cant say I'm surprised considering the card is 9+ years old and midrange back then. There is still significant performance bumps from 9+ year old cpus to today.

 

[HankB]

Cool!

Though, I cant say I'm surprised considering the card is 9+ years old and midrange back then. There is still significant performance bumps from 9+ year old cpus to today.

Yup. However I looked up my I7-4770K and Google tells me it was released in 2008 so it is actually an earlier model. I might have used the GTX-460 with an earlier processor (AMD Phenom II 820X IIRC) that was a lot slower.

I just looked up some CPUmark scores and see:
i7-4770K (2008 introduction) 10077 (2251 single core)
i7-9850h (2019 introduction) 14294 (2577 single core)
That's not enough to make me want to spend $$$ to upgrade. Most of the boost is in additional cores which won't benefit single threaded processes. AMD OTOH..
Ryzen 9 3900X (2019?) 31862 (2919 single core)
Not an order of magnitude better but I can see why AMD is getting the attention these days.

I feel like I'm getting a lot more bang for my buck with HDD -> SSD and GPU upgrades. Even though my processor is probably a decade old, I don't feel like it is out of balance with the rest of my components.

... need to update my .sig

 

[UltraTaco]

Aye Mate, gtx460 is a performer! I'm still on it. Cnt wait to get rid of it when need arises.

 

[EarthDog]

Yup. However I looked up my I7-4770K and Google tells me it was released in 2008 so it is actually an earlier model. I might have used the GTX-460 with an earlier processor (AMD Phenom II 820X IIRC) that was a lot slower.

I just looked up some CPUmark scores and see:
i7-4770K (2008 introduction) 10077 (2251 single core)
i7-9850h (2019 introduction) 14294 (2577 single core)
That's not enough to make me want to spend $$$ to upgrade. Most of the boost is in additional cores which won't benefit single threaded processes. AMD OTOH..
Ryzen 9 3900X (2019?) 31862 (2919 single core)
Not an order of magnitude better but I can see why AMD is getting the attention these days.

I feel like I'm getting a lot more bang for my buck with HDD -> SSD and GPU upgrades. Even though my processor is probably a decade old, I don't feel like it is out of balance with the rest of my components.

... need to update my .sig

????

Your current cpu was released in 2013 and is only 6 years old.

You've also compared it to a mobile part (in an effort to compare like c/t count, I see). Point is, however, even though the comps and dates are confused your point remains. Haswell is still a solid cpu for most users.

A 9 year old cpu would be 2600k.. which haswell and today's processors walk all over due to the 50% IPC increases and clocks on top of that. Haswell at 1080p can hold a few fps back, but nothing worth noting unless you are after every fps or high hz gaming.

There is no doubt if you need a snappy desktop etc an ssd to hdd is the way to go. Since you dont game, a gpu upgrade is useless for all intents and purposes. I would have saved that money for a cpu/mem/mobo upgrade considering that point. Haswell to Coffee Lake was only like 10% IPC difference IIRC, but clocks have increased slightly too, avilable instruction sets, etc.

 

[Mandrake4565]

Unless one is Gaming, which you say you're not. Doing "real work" rendering for a living or running programs that max out the processor etc. Most do not need the newest greatest processor. Heck I was gaming on my Fx 8350 up until about a year ago without an issue. My 16 yr old is a gamer and he still uses a 2600k @ 4.5 ghz with a GTX 780 and says he doesn't have any issues with it either. The 4770k is still a relevant processor.


Out of curiosity, what heaven benchmark did you run the GTX 460 on?

 

[UltraTaco]

Doesn't gtx get into 20s in heaven? I remember it being a bit choppy, but not as bad as 3fps.

 

[HankB]

????

Your current cpu was released in 2013 and is only 6 years old.

You've also compared it to a mobile part (in an effort to compare like c/t count, I see). Point is, however, even though the comps and dates are confused your point remains. Haswell is still a solid cpu for most users.
...

I can't recall when I bought it and couldn't find a record. When I looked for I7-4770K release date, I found 2008. (For example https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7.) Edit: Book of knowledge lists 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors. I can't find a date on Intel's page.

I'm not familiar with Intel's current lineup and a little searching found that processor. At 45W TDP I didn't think it was a mobile processor but I guess I was wrong. It was at the top of the list at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/[email protected]+2.60GHz&id=3478 but as I look back at that page it clearly states "Laptop CPUs, so it was not an apples to apples comparison.

Unless one is Gaming, which you say you're not. Doing "real work" rendering for a living or running programs that max out the processor etc. Most do not need the newest greatest processor. Heck I was gaming on my Fx 8350 up until about a year ago without an issue. My 16 yr old is a gamer and he still uses a 2600k @ 4.5 ghz with a GTX 780 and says he doesn't have any issues with it either. The 4770k is still a relevant processor.


Out of curiosity, what heaven benchmark did you run the GTX 460 on?

It's nice to watch youtube videos w/out tearing. This was Unigine Heaven 4.0.

I didn't think the GTX-460 was that bad. Perhaps there was a problem with the benchmark or how I ran it.

Doesn't gtx get into 20s in heaven? I remember it being a bit choppy, but not as bad as 3fps.

This is on Linux in case that matters. I was using the latest drivers that support this card. (319 IIRC.) Newer drivers no longer support Fermi. And I did not get 3 fps. I got 1.87 fps. I was using a 1920x1200 monitor and perhaps that makes a difference. There is a second monitor but the test runs on only one monitor.

 

[HankB]

I've dug into this a bit more and need to correct some mistakes in my original post and followups.

First, the performance of the GTX-460. It seems pretty clear to me that it was running on the open source nouveau drivers and not the proprietary drivers. That would account for the poor performance on the benchmark, tearing while watching videos and some other artifacts I was seeing. I didn't need a new video card as badly as I thought I did. I just need to properly configure the drivers I had already installed. That's a little embarrassing. Nevertheless, I still benefit from having a card that is still supported and probably uses less power.

Second, a better CPU comparison would be the I7-9700K. That compares as:
I7-9700K 17199 (single thread 2819)
I7-4770K 10077 (single thread 2251)
That presumes that the Passmark CPU Mark is a valid score for comparing processors. It's chief benefit is that it is easy to find. That doesn't mean it is representative of actual usage. That's a healthy performance boost but still falls short of Moore's law.
I did find the purchase date fir my I7-4770K and it was May 1, 2014. It seems to me that the 2008 release date I found at more than one web site is wrong or release date does not men what I think it means. (Abe Lincoln says that not everything I find on the Internet is correct. )

I'm not going to put the GTX-460 back into my desktop to confirm the driver/benchmark results. However I might be able to put it in one of my headless servers and hook up a spare monitor. I could also have a go at folding with it and the new AMD card now that cooler weather is upon us. That would be another way to compare performance aside from a graphical benchmark.

Thanks all for pointing out the questionable things in my earlier posts.

And my reaction to the new card remains "Woo!"

 

[EarthDog]

Wow hank! Good find on your driver issue!

As far as looking at information on Intel CPUs, I go to their ark website. When I type in just the name of the processor, say i7-4770k, one of the first links to return (for me) is the intel ark page. But this is where it shows intro year and has tdp listed.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-4770k-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz.html

 

[trents]

They make riser cards for laptops?

 

[HankB]

They make riser cards for laptops?

Not this one. I should have been more clear. It's an NVME to PCIE adapter card. (I'm not sure if that's properly called a riser card.) I've installed it temporarily in my desktop and I'm running some benchmarks on it so I can evaluate how best to format it for my laptop. (EXT4, vs ZFS, with and w/out encryption and various pool creation options.) Once the new SSD is swapped in to my laptop, I'll put the other SSD in my desktop using this. I would have preferred to use an external SSD housing but those that support USB-C cost a lot more than the $10 this adapter cost.

 

[ronss]

i know the amd rx 560 is a tad bit faster than the gtx 460, so the rx 570 should without a doubt be faster...congrats on new card