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Surprising "benchmark" result. Can you explain?

Ben Cole

Ben Cole

Ben Cole

Soldato
Joined
24 Feb 2003
Posts
3,142
Location
Porthcawl and Southampton
Over many years I've run a kind of personal benchmark on every computer I've built.

It's a very complex spreadsheet of aircraft noise modelling done by the friend of a friend back in 1997.

For reference the first record was a Pentium 2 350MHz that took 8mins4secs to complete the calculations. (office 97, Windows NT)

Other points are a Duron 1.1GHz =70 secs ( Office 2000,XP Pro)


I haven't built a computer for years but just finished a budget build just for fun from parts from MM.

The previous record was my overclocked Athlon XP-M at 35 seconds ( Office 2k, XP Pro)

So I ran it on my new build, an E5200 at 3.0GHz which is the highest stable clock at standard voltages.

I know that the mitigating factors are a much heavier OS ( 7 H.P.) and Office (2010 Beta) and that a simple maths test will not showcase the improvements of a multi core processor BUT

I was gobsmacked when the test came in at 37seconds


Can anybody explain WTF!?!?!?!?!
 
Written in '97. I shouldn't really publish is because it doesn't belong to me. It was given in confidence.

It's just always provided a real world measure of performance increase.

I'll install an older version of Office and maybe Win XP to try out.
 
Well, an interesting perspective is the combination of CPU power fighting with the bloat of more modern equivalent software and operating systems. As I said I'll try with XP and Office 97/2000 but my original post still stands.

As I said above I'm still really surprised that in spite of the OS and new Office that the E5200 was so slow.
 
A little update.

Windows 7 but with Office 2003 dropped the time to 36 seconds. Still very disappointing.

However, I did an install of XP Pro (nlited) on a new partition to dual boot and put Office 2000 on that one.

Result........26 seconds. Now that's more like it!!!!!!
 
Indeed.

Another update......Win 7 with Office 2000=29seconds.

So the biggest factor in the slowdown is office.


On the flipside, I was pleased to see Super-pi being much quicker in Windows 7(64) than XP Pro(32).
 
No...what I was saying was that I've never owned W2K. (I skipped it)

'98 needed floppies to install...and that I will not be bothering with ;)
 
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