I7 950 is painful
droidy001
Posts: 282
I've been living in at work during the covid lock down, my main pc at home. To pass the time, when I'm not actually working, I've had a couple of projects on the go. One of them is fixing up an old Alienware pc. It has an i7 950 paired with a 560ti. I've been asked to come up with a background by a friend who wants to use it in a zoom background competition for her next works conference call. I'm so glad I don't need any figures in it. The gpu has already messed the bed and given up, so it's down to a 10 year old cpu to take the strain. Soooo slow.
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Slow is when you can see the front panel lights flickering or even slower is when you can hear the relays clicking.
Back in college in about '68 during the night shift we use to set an AM radio on the console of the IBM-1130 then go play cards in the other room while the computer was doing college finances or sorting students & classes, and figuring out a workable class schedule for the maximum #of students. We could tell by the RF-noise on the radio which state the sort had gotten to and when the system was about to fire up the 1403 line printer to start chattering out reams of fan-fold paper student/class/classroom/time lists.
The GPU hasn't messed the bed" so much as it's not working at all. In order to use the GPU to render, you have to have enough VRAM to fit the scene, and 1GB is basically nothing, so it just goes straight to CPU.
Slow is when you can see the front panel lights flickering or even slower is when you can hear the relays clicking.
Not quite at that level, but I have worn out 3 hamsters and a dozen elastic bands so far.Yep I'd call that messing the bed. Its amazing how quickly we get used to the latest tech.
...the 560ti is Fermi architecture which is no longer supported for Iray,.so the entire process likely occurred on the CPU and system memory. Depending on the scene size and memory of the system, it likely may have dumped to swap mode on the HDD, and that is even more painfully slow. Before I installed a Titan-X and expanded my main work system's memory, I had that occur rather frequently, as the uncompressed scene file itself and Daz programme also occupy system memory as well even in idle mode. There have been times I have seen the memory load with Daz and an open scene open taking upwards of 8.9 GB (out of 12, well, actually 11 available after W7 and system utilities). leaving me with only 2.1 GB of memory remaining to handle the render process The HDD light would be lit steadily until the process completed..
That is 10 year HW. The GPU is, as has already been stated not supported by iRay anymore and that i7 belongs in a natural history museum not in use.
With a recent(ish) GPU that actually worked you probably wouldn't see much difference between that CPU and whatever "modern" CPU.
Maybe in Daz but a 4c/8t CPU running at 3GHz from 10 years ago is about 1/5th as powerful as the same chip in the Intel lineup today, the i7 9700 or the R5 3600.
I doubt things as simple as running chrome iwith a bunch of tabs open will be a fun experience.
...the system I mentioned above now has a 2.9 GHz 6 core Westmere Xeon (LGA 1366) which is from around that era. It originally had an i7 930.. Memory is now 24 GB of DDR3 1333. Of course it also has that 12 GB Maxwell Titan X.
To suggest that an i7 950 will not run a web browser with a few tabs open is a load of malarky. Heck, this PC I am using at the moment is an even older Core 2 Quad (which doesn't support hyperthreading), and runs at a mere 2.4 GHz. It is perfectly capable of web browsing with multiple tabs. I wouldn't think of using it for Iray rendering, but that is a very specialized task and I have another PC for that. As has been stated, running Iray on CPU only is going to tax any CPU, regardless of vintage. I'm not a big fan of proprietary/OEM designs, but that PC was probably a reasonably good one in its day and remains perfectly serviceable for many day-to-day tasks, IMO.
That PC actually could be used for Iray rendering simply with the addition of a video card upgrade to an Nvidia-based post-Fermi architecture card so that the GPU could be used rather than the CPU. Attention must be paid to the amount of video ram on the card (the more, the better) and the number of CUDA cores (the more, the better). I don't know if the Alienware has more than one full length PCIE slot, but if it does, you could even keep the 560 Ti for display and use the new card for rendering only. Either way, be mindful of the power requirements and be certain that your existing PSU provides the necessary power requirements and connectors.
And natural history museums don't contain examples of technology, they contain examples of things like me.
Strange. I have a 4 core Xeon PC from 2013, and my work replaced that with a 12 core machine last year. When running the software at work (mostly SolidWorks, which is single threaded on the slowest & most used commands), I can honestly tell no difference between the generations of PC as a user. [Except the new Win10 Pro machine comes up with huge numbers of spurious messages I'm uninterested in, can't turn off and refuses to let me customise the PC as much as the Win7 Pro machine, despite Admin applying the same permissions settings on our server to be flowed out to each machine.]
The only user noticable speed improvement on our new PC's is the use of an SSD for the windows drive. That means startup is 30 secs rather than 5 mins.
Slow is when you're waiting for tape to print.
I remember having a discussion with a lecturer about speed, that was their comment. :)
An i7 950 is still a reasonable processor; i used a 920 triple chanel memory beast (back then) for 8 years, as intel were slacking on the improvements; they're paying for it now though.
Yes, I was using an i7 920 until the end of last year, it was pretty reasonable for most things (though not a patch on my current CPU of course).
Brings back memories.. the 1403 was a beast of a printer, spinning chain print head, hydraulic servos (a printer that leaks oil!), paper carriage control tapes (and if that broke the printer would basically start spewing paper out the back full chat) - changing the ribbon was a messy job if you weren't careful.. Having to line up the top of page every time you changed paper... fun!
Yes, but those old printers weren't made or treated like disposable items that self-destruct after a year or so, or their cartridges are no longer available.
Yes, they could last for years, but did need sophisticated periodic maintenance. And those old printers, even when beyond repair, can function quite satisfactorily as boat anchors.
Although, there's an upside to not having to calibrate the timing of 120(132?) hammers, or change vacuum filters or replace a character chain. And heaven forbid that the hinge on your 50 pound print-chain assembly door got bent, loose or wonky. The cost of a maintenance contract for a 1403 printer could buy a handfull of HP inkjet printers during the year.
However, if you want to print a box full of wide fanfold paper in a few minutes, a 1403 is up to the task, just make sure the passive refolding is monitored by a human being and be quick on the HALT button if it isn't. Especially if your computer room has a hurricane strength air-conditioner blowing through the room. Wheee.....
Back in the early '90s The Mitre corporation in Tyson's Corners, Virginia (NW of Washington, DC) had such a room. Cold enough to be a meat locker, windy enough to blow a hat off, and noisy enough to discourage conversation without shouting. The console was a teletype with the yellow roll paper typical of such devices. The operating system spit out lots of status information to the console all the time and the yellow paper could get quite long. It was supposed to fall into a cardboard box behind the teletype but if someone walked in the wrong spot, the hurricane winds in the room were diverted temporarily and could grab the paper and string it 20 feet through the room. Similarly, but more disasterously for the fanfold paper behind the printer.