Q9300... it has seen better days.

[Deders]

I've noticed this on some machines. I think it has something to do with how each browser is tuned to modern hardware (and not tuned for older)

Even with GPU based hardware accelerators set aside, things like the amount of SSE type registers can affect some software.

For instance with the significant boost in SSE registers that Sandybridge had over previous gens, any software developer who decides that they aren't writing code for previous gens might make more use of the SIMD's that would result in instructions queuing up on older hardware, but not on new.

Before I upgraded from Lynnfield to Skylake, Firefox was definitely laggier. I used to install Chrome on people's never upgraded P4 machines which used to make a huge difference (more so over IE than Firefox), but even now Chrome has moved on.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just for the fun of it (and based on our experience with CPU and GPU balance), for someone that owned that refurbished E3300 rig what would be the best upgrade for browsing?

$6 shipped E8400? (2180 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8400+@+3.00GHz)

$9 shipped E8500? (2314 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8500+@+3.16GHz)

$10 AR shipped Power Color HD5450? (Does give control panel in Windows 10)

A combination of those items? Or something else?

EDIT: LGA 771 mod is also an option allowing 5xxx quad core Xeon (eg, $13 shipped E5440 with 4022 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5440+@+2.83GHz) due to the G41 series chipset (but that is a bit of work and needs a $2 LGA 771 to LGA 775 adapter).

I have a number of Zotac GT630 1GB DDR3 cards (relabled as GT730 these days), Kepler 384SP, that I could potentially throw in, and I probably would, except for the small annoyance, that I took the low-profile brackets for all of the cards and set them aside, and now I can't seem to find them...

Edit: $7.99 shipped for a pair of NV-compatible LP brackets. Ouch. I figured they would be like $2-3.

 

[escrow4]

Just for the fun of it (and based on our experience with CPU and GPU balance), for someone that owned that refurbished E3300 rig what would be the best upgrade for browsing?

$6 shipped E8400? (2180 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8400+@+3.00GHz)

$9 shipped E8500? (2314 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8500+@+3.16GHz)

$10 AR shipped Power Color HD5450? (Does give control panel in Windows 10)

A combination of those items? Or something else?

EDIT: LGA 771 mod is also an option allowing 5xxx quad core Xeon (eg, $13 shipped E5440 with 4022 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5440+@+2.83GHz) due to the G41 series chipset (but that is a bit of work and needs a $2 LGA 771 to LGA 775 adapter).

A new i5. Its 2016, Core 2 is obsolete. If you are not on Sandy Bridge at the very least you are missing out (and Sandy Bridge's chipsets are creaky and lacking compared to Haswell/Skylake).

 

[VirtualLarry]

A new i5. Its 2016, Core 2 is obsolete. If you are not on Sandy Bridge at the very least you are missing out (and Sandy Bridge's chipsets are creaky and lacking compared to Haswell/Skylake).

Let me ask you this: Given what we know about the necessity of GPU acceleration for a smooth web experience in this modern era, would you still prefer a Sandy Bridge or even Haswell (let's keep it fair, and call it a dual-core Celeron versus dual-core Celeron), with iGPU, versus a Core2-era dual-core, with a real GPU? Assume that the total RAM is the same in both cases, and sufficient (8GB?), and both rigs have SSDs.

Edit: And H61 isn't that creaky of a chipset. It is missing the "3" - USB3.0, SATA III, and PCI-E 3.0. But other than that, it's a solid chipset.

 

[escrow4]

Let me ask you this: Given what we know about the necessity of GPU acceleration for a smooth web experience in this modern era, would you still prefer a Sandy Bridge or even Haswell (let's keep it fair, and call it a dual-core Celeron versus dual-core Celeron), with iGPU, versus a Core2-era dual-core, with a real GPU? Assume that the total RAM is the same in both cases, and sufficient (8GB?), and both rigs have SSDs.

Edit: And H61 isn't that creaky of a chipset. It is missing the "3" - USB3.0, SATA III, and PCI-E 3.0. But other than that, it's a solid chipset.

H61 is creaky precisely because its missing all that. I wouldn't use a dual core period anymore. No Celeron, not a (pointless buy a Celeron) Pentium, no (coked up but still a dual core) i3. A real quad core will keep up over the years, a dual won't with all the rubbish stuffing the internet now. And if you try a newer VP9 encoded 1080/60 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAs8F919xvk

which is software decoded unless you have Maxwell you'll see Core 2 struggle (right click the video, stats for nerds).

 

[VirtualLarry]

H61 is creaky precisely because its missing all that. I wouldn't use a dual core period anymore. No Celeron, not a (pointless buy a Celeron) Pentium, no (coked up but still a dual core) i3. A real quad core will keep up over the years, a dual won't with all the rubbish stuffing the internet now. And if you try a newer VP9 encoded 1080/60 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAs8F919xvk

which is software decoded unless you have Maxwell you'll see Core 2 struggle (right click the video, stats for nerds).

My Q9300 (now OCed to 2.85Ghz) hit 60-70% CPU usage playing that back full-screen, Stats For Nerds showed 13 dropped frames out of like 2000, but some of that could have been caused by me transitioning between windowed and full-screen.

Mime-type showed AVC 1.6xxxx codec. Unsure if it was VP-9 or not, maybe you only get that with Chrome, and I was getting H.264?

Either way, it played back fine, and seemed to be 60FPS.

I have a R7 260X 2GB GDDR5 in this Q9300 box.

Edit: I guess you're right, if it's taking up 60-70% of a 2.85Ghz Q9300, it would swamp a dual-core C2D Celeron for sure.

Edit: And to also confirm what you're saying about preferences for quad-cores for surfing the internet; my mom recently asked me if her living-room PC was a dual-core or a quad-core (it's a G1610 Celeron dual-core with 16GB of DDR3), and then asked me if the new computer I refurbed for her was a quad-core (it is, it's a Llano quad, my older HTPC).

If even my non-technical mother is asking me whether her PC is a quad-core, then that argument must have some merit. Although, I have her using Firefox, which is mostly single-threaded, so it really doesn't matter for her actual performance, unless she switches browsers, or Firefox implements their much-touted mult-ithreading support that's in development.

I know that you're a Chrome user, so that makes a quad-core that much more potent, but with Firefox, it hardly matters, except for media playback, which apparently is multi-threaded already.

Edit: Just for the heck of it, I downloaded the Firefox 47a2 Developer Edition alpha of their browser, which has a checkbox in options for "Enable Firefox multi-process". I'm not sure if that allows multi-threaded rendering of a single tab, or just opens each tab in a process like Chrome. I'll have to play with it some more.

One thing that I noticed, though, is in scrolling this forum, there's no "beat frequency" in the scrolling. (Though, there is on a Newegg product page.) I don't have NoScript installed, so I'm getting ads on both Newegg and this forum again.

 

[jihe]

You're kidding. I am browsing this forum on a mobile L9400 and intel igp, scrolling is 100% smooth.

 

[cbn]

I have a number of Zotac GT630 1GB DDR3 cards (relabled as GT730 these days), Kepler 384SP, that I could potentially throw in, and I probably would, except for the small annoyance, that I took the low-profile brackets for all of the cards and set them aside, and now I can't seem to find them...

Edit: $7.99 shipped for a pair of NV-compatible LP brackets. Ouch. I figured they would be like $2-3.

I did find an ebay listing selling low profile brackets with DVI and HDMI for $1.07 shipped. (Seller is from China and shipping takes 12 to 36 business days).

Looks like the only thing missing is the hole above the HDMI port:

However, I have never used the hole above the HDMI port on my cards.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You're kidding. I am browsing this forum on a mobile L9400 and intel igp, scrolling is 100% smooth.

You're using the middle-mouse-button click to autoscroll, in the newest Firefox?

 

[TheRyuu]

Even with GPU based hardware accelerators set aside, things like the amount of SSE type registers can affect some software.

For instance with the significant boost in SSE registers that Sandybridge had over previous gens, any software developer who decides that they aren't writing code for previous gens might make more use of the SIMD's that would result in instructions queuing up on older hardware, but not on new.

The number of SSE registers does not change. The only thing that increased the number of registers was the addition of x86-64 which doubled the register count and is only available for 64-bit applications.

What you're probably alluding to was the introduction of AVX on Sandybridge which doubled the register width to 256-bits. Applications must explicitly support AVX though so any performance increase will not be due to "more SSE registers" but simply due to the increased IPC of the newer hardware.

 

[cbn]

Edit: Just for the heck of it, I downloaded the Firefox 47a2 Developer Edition alpha of their browser, which has a checkbox in options for "Enable Firefox multi-process". I'm not sure if that allows multi-threaded rendering of a single tab, or just opens each tab in a process like Chrome. I'll have to play with it some more.

I just downloaded FF 47a2 Developer Edition alpha and scrolling the same web page I used for the test in post #19 I got 64% usage one one core and 57% usage on the other core (as the peak measurement). Overall, the CPU usage looked more balanced at other data points as well.

Will check on my E5440/GT630 Windows 10 rig later on as well.

 

[cbn]

With my E5440/GT630 on my Anandech forum test page (using 1080p monitor) here is what I got at peak scrolling speed:

CPU1: 3%
CPU2: 6%
CPU3: 44%
CPU4: 9%

With the Firefox developer edition using the same webpage:

CPU1: 9%
CPU2: 3%
CPU3: 38%
CPU4: 34%

 

[cbn]

Comment retracted.

 

[cbn]

Let me ask you this: Given what we know about the necessity of GPU acceleration for a smooth web experience in this modern era, would you still prefer a Sandy Bridge or even Haswell (let's keep it fair, and call it a dual-core Celeron versus dual-core Celeron), with iGPU, versus a Core2-era dual-core, with a real GPU? Assume that the total RAM is the same in both cases, and sufficient (8GB?), and both rigs have SSDs.

Edit: And H61 isn't that creaky of a chipset. It is missing the "3" - USB3.0, SATA III, and PCI-E 3.0. But other than that, it's a solid chipset.

H61 is creaky precisely because its missing all that. I wouldn't use a dual core period anymore. No Celeron, not a (pointless buy a Celeron) Pentium, no (coked up but still a dual core) i3. A real quad core will keep up over the years, a dual won't with all the rubbish stuffing the internet now. And if you try a newer VP9 encoded 1080/60 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAs8F919xvk

which is software decoded unless you have Maxwell you'll see Core 2 struggle (right click the video, stats for nerds).

Passmark score of E8600: (fastest C2D, $17 shipped at this time): 2431 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8600+@+3.33GHz

Passmark score of E8500 (second fastest C2D, $9 shipped at this time): 2314 CPU marks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8500+@+3.16GHz

Passmark score of E8400 (third fastest C2D, $6 shipped at this time) :2180 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E8400+@+3.00GHz)

Passmark score of G530 (slowest Sandy Bridge Celeron): 2154 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G530+@+2.40GHz
Passmark score of G1610 (slowest Ivy Bridge Celeron): 2522 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1610+@+2.60GHz
Passmark score of G1820 (slowest Haswell Celeron): 2819 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1820+@+2.70GHz

Of all those CPUs only the G1820 partially supports VP9:

http://techreport.com/news/27677/new-intel-igp-drivers-add-h-265-vp9-hardware-decode-support

So It would be interesting to see how E8500 with a modern GPU (Maxwell 2 or better) compares to the G1820 in VP9 video and also general web browsing.

 

[waltchan]

Edit: And H61 isn't that creaky of a chipset. It is missing the "3" - USB3.0, SATA III, and PCI-E 3.0. But other than that, it's a solid chipset.

Very identical to AMD A55.

 

[cbn]

One more comparison to throw in:

Passmark score of G3900 (slowest Skylake Celeron): 3167 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G3900+@+2.80GHz

That is pretty fast, but according to the following Anandtech article Skylake only has partial VP9 support :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/4

Intel is also hedging their bets on HEVC by also implementing a degree of VP9 support on Skylake. VP9 is Google's HEVC alternative codec, with the company pushing it as a royalty-free option. Intel calls VP9 support on Skylake "partial" for both encoding and decoding, indicating that VP9 is likely being handled in a hybrid manner similar to how HEVC was handled on Broadwell.

 

[TheRyuu]

One more comparison to throw in:

Passmark score of G3900 (slowest Skylake Celeron): 3167 CPU marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G3900+@+2.80GHz

That is pretty fast, but according to the following Anandtech article Skylake only has partial VP9 support :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/4

Just for the record, most stuff currently doesn't have any VP9 support in hardware save for a few Nvidia cards (950/960). VP9 is actually pretty fast using software decoding unless you're watching 4k or some higher resolution/fps variant.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm looking forward to testing a Skylake Celeron (G3900) for media playback, specifically 4K H.264, and VP9 (1080P60). It should be interesting.

I will also mention, I disconnected my Q9300 rig, and hooked up my i3-6100 rig, using the HD530 iGPU.

I found that the scrolling in Firefox was mostly smooth, but not 100%. There was still occasional bits of jerkiness.

I wonder how much the uber-smooth scrolling on my G4400 OCed rig, with PCI-E SSD and 7950 3GB, is down to the CPU's raw ST speed, versus the high-end GPU, versus the low-latency PCI-E SSD?

 

[Deders]

You can see if disk access is making any difference by disabling the disk cache in Firefox. There are instructions on how to do it, and to set the memory cache correctly online.

I keep it disabled so that I know that every time I open a page, with all its tiny little files, or watch a 1080p YouTube video, my SSD isn't dying a little on the inside.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGP6Y0Pnhe4

At 720p/60p and 1080p/60p

Then try some flash or java heavy sites. The Core 2 won't be butter smooth.

My 5930K with poky GT 730 hits 10% or less with software decoding of the VP9 codec above.

My i3-6100 (with internet radio playing in the background as well, hit 12-28% CPU).

 

[2is]

I have a Pentium Dual Core e6300 OC'd to 3.6GHz running in a box. With a GeForce 8400GS it had some hiccups scrolling. With a Radeon HD 5870 browsing is perfectly smooth running Windows 10 using Edge

 

[Sheep221]

I'm sure you just have disabled smooth scrolling in browser settings.
Other than that, I still use E7300 desktop at work with Windows Vista and it's horrible.
However company is not going to replace it any time soon or as long as it works because I got the i5 laptop for travels but I'm lazy to grab it from the bag and turn on everytime i return to office so I just use the lagging/freezing Core2.
I'm going to add some more ram to it and probably install a better CPU because it is total lag-fest.

 

[SandInMyShoes]

I checked Device Manager, and it's running a WDM 1.1 video driver, for the G41 IGP, in Win10.

I'm wondering if this is your problem right here. Before WDM video drivers came along, I almost always got choppy scrolling with the generic video drivers--no matter the video card, or Windows version. WDM drivers have somewhat solved this it seems, as I don't notice the choppy scrolling as much as I used to... But I see it occasionally. Installing the full AMD/NVIDIA driver fixes it in these rare cases.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I think the general feeling browsing wise is dramatically better if these towers have a ssd.Was using a Dell for a while which i upgraded from a E5200 which was sucky to a Q6600 and with a SSD it seemed perfectly fine for Netflix/Youtube/Facebook user.

A q6600 and a G1820 really feel nearly the same if paired with a ssd.Benchmarks show numbers sure but for the most basic of tasks many people may not notice to much of a difference till some multi tasking started up.Then the Q6600 sorta still shines.

Modern or older games that don't push pass 2 cores,the Q6600 gets domolished by the G1820.

 

[2is]

Modern or older games that don't push pass 2 cores,the Q6600 gets domolished by the G1820.

It's been a long time since I've played a game that didn't push past two cores. Which games are you playing that don't? That's not to say the Q6600 would be better. It's clocked much lower and has a much lower IPC but a much newer dual core outperforming the first consumer quad core Intel ever released doesn't equate to games not pushing past two cores.