Nathan's Computer Benchmarks

In may last post about Nathan's Computer I promised to share some quick benchmarks and thoughts about the build. So here they are, I'll start with the benchmarks. I just used Cinebench because that's a name I remembered and I wanted to see how fast the 8 threads would go through the picture on the CPU test. For monitoring temperatures I used Speedfan because I've used it a lot in the past.

 This was right after we got everything working before playing around with drivers or graphics cards. A respectable score for the CPU of 369. A reasonable improvement over my laptop.

Here we also tested the GPU, a GeForce GT730. This was the one that we ordered before finding the case with some stuff in it. The framerate of 30.39 is pretty close to 10x what my laptop scored.

And here we see the final configuration. The GTX550 that was in the case Nathan found. As we can see the score is nearly twice what the GT730 got so that was the card we left in this machine.

All the time these benchmark were running I was watching the CPU temp with Speedfan. I don't have any screenshots there, but none of the cores really went above the mid 60 degrees C.  These temps are much, much better than I have been used to with my laptop over the last few years and almost makes me want to build a personal desktop machine so I don't have to worry about the system killing itself when there is a constant high load. The cooler we used was a Deepcool Gammaxx 300 I was a bit nervous about having such a big heatsink hanging off the motherboard without any bolts going through. However if you don't push on the actual cooler itself then it seems to stay on fine. If there are problems however I'm sure we can find a solution at the hardware store.

If I were to do this again would I change anything? Probably not. However I probably would've looked longer for a motherboard. While the one we got was good and had everything we needed it is a custom HP part and doesn't have a standard power socket pinout or any labeled power switch pins. Eventually I did find solutions to each of these problems but it took a lot of searching. Because not many people are buying the motherboard out of a HP z400 to stick it in a completely different system without any of the HP stuff. So going down that route can cause headaches.

All in all I think it has been a good project and Nathan seems to be happy with this machine so far. If you would like to see some of the other projects I have on the go at the moment follow this link to my Projects page which I keep updated with the status of my other projects.

Speaking of other projects, now that this is finished I'll have to start on something else. Or perhaps finish building the shelves for the CNCs so I can do some more work on them.

Cheers,
Rex