My personal G3220 impressions

[DrMrLordX]

Windows 8.1 64 bit. There is nothing running in the background, what I meant was for instance say I install a program that I just downloaded, while the installer is running the computer starts to slow down. Web browsing becomes more difficult and often times web pages will hang. Opening up programs while installing another makes the process take even longer.

I would strongly recommend using the performance tab in Task Manager to monitor CPU, RAM, and HDD usage during the aforementioned slowdown conditions. You may find it to be highly educational.

If you find that CPU utilization on either core stays below 100%, then you may be able to safely rule out your G3220 as a source of trouble. I would definitely look at the SATA drivers to make sure you have the right ones installed, and I'd recommend checking your HDD for errors, fragmentation, or warning signs that SMART might detect. It is possible that your drive is undergoing some sort of failure that hadn't yet emerged when you used it on your 9550.

 

[crashtech]

I've seen so many hard drives go south recently that I just figure a long scan with GSmartControl is mandatory before any repurposing of a drive.

 

[Lepton87]

Either way installing an SSD even if just for the system and the most used programs would benefit you greatly. My friend came to me with his PC to fix something it was FX6XXX, GTX970 and a 1TB HDD and it puzzled me how slow that computer felt. Amazingly slow.
All due to that HDD, it really does make a difference.

 

[JumBie]

I would strongly recommend using the performance tab in Task Manager to monitor CPU, RAM, and HDD usage during the aforementioned slowdown conditions. You may find it to be highly educational.

If you find that CPU utilization on either core stays below 100%, then you may be able to safely rule out your G3220 as a source of trouble. I would definitely look at the SATA drivers to make sure you have the right ones installed, and I'd recommend checking your HDD for errors, fragmentation, or warning signs that SMART might detect. It is possible that your drive is undergoing some sort of failure that hadn't yet emerged when you used it on your 9550.

When opening new web pages the cpu spikes to 30-40% while the HDD spikes to 70-100%

With the web browser open looking at youtube(just the main page) or anything for that matter the HDD spikes from 0-100% every 3-5 seconds.

EDIT: It stopped spiking... Okay screw this Ill just get an SSD and come back here to update!

 

[BSim500]

Why didn't the Phenom I system have the problem then?

Driver issues? Malware? Faulty? Iffy browser extension? Did you reinstall Windows when you changed motherboard? If so, is it set up the same (and if not it could be a clash of chipset drivers)? Is your Windows Power options set to "balanced" and not "power saver" (which would lock it in at its idle state). Some things you describe are normal (slower in some heavy games vs quads), but others "massive slowdowns when downloading", "web pages grind to a halt" aren't, even for dual cores (if that were "normal" then most 2-core 1.0-2.5GHz laptops wouldn't work even for simple tasks - clearly that's not the case...)

As a "reality check" to what modern Pentium's are capable of - If I disable 2 cores (in the BIOS) on my i5-3570, then lock it in at 1.6GHz mimicking a really slow mobile Pentium half the speed of a 3.0GHz Haswell G3220, even at 2x 1.6GHz cores, with a background MP3 in Winamp + playing a 1080p Youtube video in Firefox + HTPC software background recording from TV tuner card + reloading Anandtech's home-page is virtually instant. Average CPU usage for all 4 tasks combined is 26% / max is 45-50% (of 1.6GHz = 416-800MHz used per core). Here's a screenshot if you want proof.

When clocked at desktop 2x 3GHz cores, average CPU usage falls to 15%. With 4x 3GHz cores, it drops to below 8%. But in none of these is any CPU core remotely close to being a bottleneck even when doing 3-4 things at once, even when running at half the speed of your CPU. Even if you run a badly written game that loads 1x core 100% when minimized, the remaining core should still be enough for basic web browsing.

Likewise simply "having web browser tabs open" uses memory more than CPU (and you can speed up any system far more with adblock). Loading a web page with browser cache set to a 5,400rpm laptop drive gets massively HDD bottlenecked (lots of random <4k file read/writes which is "worst case" for HDD's - down to 0.5MB/s transfer rates when accessing dozens of tiny 4k size files (ie, typical web cache cookies, css/js files, etc) simultaneously on a 5,400rpm drive). Sometimes it can even be slower than disabling HDD web cache. Is your HDD LED constantly on when these browsing slowdowns occur? As mentioned, try taking a screenshot of CPU usage / using a CPU usage logger when browsing the web. Long install times / unresponsive web browser when installing large programs to HDD, are also due to a HDD bottleneck. Even high-end quad/octo cores run like treacle if they try to heavily access a 5,400rpm HDD which is being 100% loaded by another process. SSD's really are worth the hype & money on any machine down to and including netbooks.

When opening new web pages the cpu spikes to 30-40% while the HDD spikes to 70-100%

With the web browser open looking at youtube(just the main page) or anything for that matter the HDD spikes from 0-100% every 3-5 seconds.

Edit : Just noticed above. That is absolutely a HDD not CPU bottleneck.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Okay screw this Ill just get an SSD and come back here to update!

Good plan. Should improve your overall performance (web browsing, installing) nicely.

Wait till you see how fast Malwarebytes scans go on an SSD!

 

[escrow4]

I always scratch my head over this argument. It's like saying every car on the road should have a V-8 because a 4- or 6-cylinder is always a compromise.

For a general purpose PC, a Pentium is perfectly adequate... and the G3258 has proven the Pentium is capable of even more than browsing and YouTube.

Following the logic of the comment above, and I realize this makes me a hypocrite... I don't know why Intel even bothers with the Celeron except for low-power and maybe imbedded processors.

Not really an analogy. You don't build a PC every month for one, and unlike a car you'll be using a PC for more than getting A to B. If its a basic box that will last until it dies don't gimp it out the box with a poky dual core in 2014.

 

[Abwx]

The G3220 has literally over three times the ST performance as a 2.2GHz Phenom, .

This would mean that the pentium has "litteraly over" 2.2 x the IPC of said Phenom, i dont think that it s accurate at all , unless you use 3D Particle movement perhaps...

 

[crashtech]

................ not going to argue .........................

It's too difficult to find these CPUs in the same benchmark to be sure.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

nm - you answered my question.

MOAR SSD BENCHMARKS.

 

[SPBHM]

This would mean that the pentium has "litteraly over" 2.2 x the IPC of said Phenom, i dont think that it s accurate at all , unless you use 3D Particle movement perhaps...

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/23?vs=1265

 

[crashtech]

Yeah, but Cinebench is so unfair to AMD that the above benchmark is useless.

(Just saving Abwx some time. You are welcome, Abwx.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

This would mean that the pentium has "litteraly over" 2.2 x the IPC of said Phenom, i dont think that it s accurate at all , unless you use 3D Particle movement perhaps...

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=171&cmp[]=2267

 

[AtenRa]

Yeah, but Cinebench is so unfair to AMD that the above benchmark is useless.

(Just saving Abwx some time. You are welcome, Abwx.)

ahahahaha

 

[Abwx]

Yeah, but Cinebench is so unfair to AMD that the above benchmark is useless.

(Just saving Abwx some time. You are welcome, Abwx.)

That s still a good starting point, the ST IPC is 85% higher, we re far from the 120% required to get the more than 3x ST perf, on MT the 9650 has 16% better IPC, normalizing for the 3.0 pentium and 2.2 phenom we get 2.5x the ST perf but only 23% more MT perf, and that s using a FP bench where the pentium has 50% better IPC than a core 2 for exemple, in integer benches, wich are far more adequate in respect of the OP, you ll get much lower numbers, to the point that the phenom can have better perfs if 4 threads are fully used.

Overall the OP has greatly upgraded the ST perfs of his system but MT perfs wise he didnt get much if anything at all if he need a lot of throughput.

 

[crashtech]

I have corrected my post to reflect your take on the arithmetic. 2.5X the ST performance seems right to me.

 

[Abwx]

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/23?vs=1265

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1265?vs=106

Normalize the frequencies to 2.2 and 3.0 as in the OP.

I have corrected my post to reflect your take on the arithmetic. 2.5X the ST performance seems right to me.

In FP but with 7zip, wich is much more relevant, we can extract from the bench above that it has 1.77x the ST performance, at stock the phenom is 13% better for the total score, it s a case were there will be no upgrade, and most of the usages he pointed are integer instructions legacy apps were there will be no AVX, FMA or other FP instructions.

 

[DrMrLordX]

When opening new web pages the cpu spikes to 30-40% while the HDD spikes to 70-100%

With the web browser open looking at youtube(just the main page) or anything for that matter the HDD spikes from 0-100% every 3-5 seconds.

EDIT: It stopped spiking... Okay screw this Ill just get an SSD and come back here to update!

Then you have (probably) isolated the storage subsystem as being the culprit here, even if the problem is only periodic. It is possible that the drive is starting to fail, or that the default SATA controller drivers installed by Win8.1 are not well-suited to your chipset (which is really, really unlikely on an Intel chipset motherboard). Maybe it's just that the Biostar board has serious quality issues. Or maybe the standard driver is optimized for drives faster/newer than yours.

 

[lyssword]

This would mean that the pentium has "litteraly over" 2.2 x the IPC of said Phenom, i dont think that it s accurate at all , unless you use 3D Particle movement perhaps...

yes, literally 2.2x ipc, when you count something like 3dgaming or anything else (like memory bandwidth blah blah). Then when you start talking about 4.6 g3258, the phenom 1 has absolutely no chance, no matter how well-threaded app is. Like others said, HDD bottleneck. For equal comparison btw, you should have fresh windows OS on each. I remember when I had the old 320 gb, and it was full of files, even upgrading new cpu, it kept getting slower and slower as it filled up. And it will still probably smoke his 5400 hard drive. Using 256ssd + 1tb hd now

 

[Abwx]

yes, literally 2.2x ipc, when you count something like 3dgaming or anything else (like memory bandwidth blah blah).
Then when you start talking about 4.6 g3258,
the phenom 1 has absolutely no chance, no matter how well-threaded app is. Like others said, HDD bottleneck.
For equal comparison btw, you should have fresh windows OS on each. I remember when I had the old 320 gb, and it was full of files, even upgrading new cpu, it kept getting slower and slower as it filled up. And it will still probably smoke his 5400 hard drive. Using 256ssd + 1tb hd now

I dont know if you noticed but on X264 it has 1.6x the ST IPC and in 7zip it is 1.3x, also ST, i guess that the "litteraly" is of circumstance, it s incredible that people dont even bother to look at the numbers, myths seems more credible.

As for 4.6 you are right that one just can talk since it s not guaranted at all but i guess that myths are one more time OK..

Indeed the OP nailed it :

Quad cores that came out in 2008-09 will out perform this processor in everything but gaming, and single threaded performance.

The biggest update he ll get will be the SSD given that he seems to use integer based apps and is quite loading his CPU.

 

[lyssword]

Btw the AT links he provided is for 2nd gen phenom (athlon II x4 620), which has about 10-20% better ipc than the 65nm 9550 OP is talking about. And 620 is 2.6ghz vs 9550 2.2
My 4.6 g3258 is at least 3x faster in single thread, and twice as fast in multithreaded compared to 4 core 9550phenom: 4954 vs 2554 according to passmark. And good luck oc'ing 9550 : avg overclock gives you 400mhz more.

 

[Lepton87]

Btw the AT links he provided is for 2nd gen phenom (athlon II x4 620), which has about 10-20% better ipc than the 65nm 9550 OP is talking about. And 620 is 2.6ghz vs 9550 2.2
My 4.6 g3258 is at least 3x faster in single thread, and twice as fast in multithreaded compared to 4 core 9550phenom: 4954 vs 2554 according to passmark. And good luck oc'ing 9550 : avg overclock gives you 400mhz more.

I'd say that your figure is accurate when you actually compare Phenoms with L3 caches, Athlon doesn't have L3 cache so its IPC advantage is much smaller, barely there.

 

[lyssword]

I'd say that your figure is accurate when you actually compare Phenoms with L3 caches, Athlon doesn't have L3 cache so its IPC advantage is much smaller, barely there.

Ah, you're right, its just I was comparing 2.2 vs 2.6 620. A 9850 2.5 is just a tiny bit slower than 620.

 

[JumBie]

Okay guys, I gotta confess, I did not install the drivers that were on the motherboard disk. Usually I never bother installing the drivers off the disc as I figure its never anything crucial. Well I decided to give it a go and install everything on the disk. Since doing so I have noticed huge improvement. Its like night and day, I am able to open multiple programs and tabs with no noticeable slow downs. Everything from opening apps and folders to browsing the web seems a lot more fluid than it did before. The only possible thing I could point to solving this were either the chipset drivers or the SATA drivers, but honestly I never figured it would have this effect.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Ah ha! Makes sense. Interesting that the default SATA driver in win8.1 is so bad for you. You'd think MS would handle the H81 chipset better than that.