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Comparitive Benchmarks With and Without Aero Glass (Win 8.1)


NoelC

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Because I was asked by xpclient whether I had done any detailed benchmarks with and without Aero Glass, I decided to do some objective comparative testing.  I had done such tests before, but not with the most recent Aero Glass release.

Test system: 

Windows 8.1 Pro/MCE.
Dell Precision T5500 workstation with dual 6 core Xeon 3.47 GHz, 48 GB ECC RAM, ATI Radeon HD 7850.
The 6 x 8 GB RAM DIMMs are organized for optimal multichannel performance with this motherboard.
3 monitors, with the testing involving the displays being done by the test software primarily on the central 2650 x 1600 pixel Dell U3014.

Test setup:

Tests done to compare these three configurations:

  • Without Aero Glass for Win 8+ running and with default theme (i.e., flat, lifeless)
  • With Aero Glass version 1.4.5.520 (most stable for me) and Aero7 theme
  • With Aero Glass version 1.4.6.610 (slightly buggy for me) and Aero7 theme.

Test software:  Passmark PerformanceTest version 8.  All runs repeated twice with the better result shown.
Only the Clock32.exe application was running; the system was quiet beyond what I normally run in the background (generally fairly little).  
I specifically avoided doing any disk benchmarks as that puts a strain on my SSDs.
I made an effort to test consistently, though I did not go to special lengths to disable normally scheduled tasks, etc.

Summary and Conclusions:

There is always some variance from run to run because my CPUs automatically throttle up to "Turbo" speed (i.e., momentarily overclocking) per temperature measurements.  Also I use NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Addressing), which means that some memory locations are accessed more efficiently by each CPU package than others.  The system tries to allocate memory close to the CPU package that is running the code requesting the RAM, but it doesn't always create ideal alignment.

Overall the system doesn't feel like it runs any differently whatsoever with Aero Glass on vs. off.  It always gives essentially instantaneous desktop responsiveness.  This is backed up by the results - noting that there is almost no difference in the overall performance numbers.

Result differences fall within typical, expected variances I normally see between benchmark runs.  However, there were several that might indicate that there is a slight negative impact by Aero Glass - 3D Graphics entries "DirectX 10" and "Direct Compute" were a few percent higher without Aero Glass running.  If you game with your computer this could matter.  On a system like mine, which is a desktop workhorse and isn't used for gaming, the more important comparison is with the 2D benchmark results, which are virtually no different across all tests.

There was also an interesting jump in Memory "Database Operations" performance with the run where I tested Aero Glass 1.4.6.610, but I can't see how having Aero Glass in the system can really improve memory performance.  I believe it was just a lucky NUMA alignment of the memory locations used by the benchmark software for that run.  A second run with the same configuration (not shown here) delivered high 60s results close to the results from the other two configurations.  It's reasonable to ignore variations of up to about 5% from run to run.

Detailed Results:

Summary.png

CPU.png

2DGraphics.png

3DGraphics.png

Memory.png

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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I bought a PowerEdge T20 last year with the dual core Pentium G3220 (a Haswell chip).  I run Win 7 x64 Ultimate and it's actually quite quick.  In my case I bought three OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB drives and made a RAID 5 array from which everything boots and runs.  I also put in an old SATA 512 GB HDD I had laying around so that it would have internal backup beyond the redundancy of the RAID 5 array.

Even with the modest 2 core processor I got it's turned out to be a great little system - and for a great price.  I increased the RAM in mine to 8 GB with some inexpensive DIMMs from eBay, and that pushed the performance up a little more.  With the ECC RAM and RAID 5 it's been 100% reliable for over a year now.  The longest I've had it run between reboots (initiated by me) is a bit over 3 months.

I imagine with the E3-1225v3 it will be an absolutely great performer.  The Passmark site rates that processor at 7,025, which ain't too shabby for a 4 core chip.  You'll have 4 logical processors, since the E3-1225v3 does not have Hyperthreading.

What OS are you thinking of putting on it?  I can tell you Win 7 can work perfectly with it.  I also had a test installation of Win 10 on it once.

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
Correction: I thought the E3-1225 had Hyperthreading. It does not.
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Thanks N, I think at the moment my OpenSUSE machine whom running work for homepages (the old way, Gimp and Bluefish and so furt). It has starting acting wierd but it's aboute 10 years now or so, but later on its lightly to run as a win7rigg.

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It's an underappreciated little system.  As you see tested above, excluding the cheap monitor I have less than $500 total in the system.

By the way, the RAID is all via the motherboard SATA III ports and Intel RST drivers.

-Noel

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It's utterly quiet.

I don't use a video card for it (being a server, I'm not using it much interactively, though the Intel GPU isn't too slow), so the PSU is quite sufficient.

-Noel

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yeah, less than 36 h. I'm going to run linux on it, but just to see that everything work I did a quick test with a w10-disk and shame to say I didn't see any dramatic change of w10s behavior. I have lived in the belives that my machines was old and slow, but it's the OS that is poor....

Soon I put linux on it and all be good!

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