Boxx shipinabottle benchmark speed

Consider my FX53 beat.

What did you get on STAR and Patbench?

I've had problems downloading from Spec.org, and I've been working at customer site. I'll get to the others this weekend and post results.

Great numbers, Matt! Any chance of posting a complete hardware list for those of us about to go shopping?

Art

-Boxx 3204 (off the shelf - didn't pay the listed price)

-AMD Athlon 64 FX57 (single processor, single core)

-3Gb DDR400 RAM

-nVidia FX 3450 PCIe 256 Mb (single card, dual capable)

-74 Gb 10,000 rpm SATA drive

-XP Pro (32 bit)

-Asus mobo, nForce chipset, SLi capable

-500W power supply

Interesting Star 2.1 results

sw05 sw06

35.8 38.2 time 3.70 3.35 rebuild

So the "time" gets longer, but the "rebuild time" is less in 2006. What's the difference between time and rebuild time?

Patbench

4 = 2.39 s 8 = 6.18 s 10 = 15.4 s 11 = 105.0 s

Specapc (best scores from spec.org site in parentheses)

sw2005.Result.score = 2.88 (2.2) sw2005.Result.graphics = 1.6 (2.34) sw2005.Result.cpu = 5.78 (2.03) sw2005.Result.io = 3.38 (2.18)

The graphics score is kind of middle of the road, but the cpu is way better than the top scores on the Spec.org site. I didn't think the number was valid, but I ran it twice and got similar results. I/O is also about double the average score from the spec.org site.

STAR is timed by a real time timer. As such you have to average a few scores to get a good idea because if other things are running it will slow down. The first time is on the recursive routine that models the cubes. It is run outside of the graphics system using some tricks SW has in their API toolbox. The second time, for rebuild, is just that, a timer on either side of a call to rebuild and it is again outside the graphics system.

The first routine simply draws a box as a set of coordinates passed to a subroutine and then extrudes it. The algorithm came from a book called Algorithms in C by Sedgewick. When you watch it work in the graphics system (turn off dbadd and display calls) you will see that as the feature tree gets longer it also takes longer for each sketch and box. The only explanation for this is that the nature of the algorithm coupled with the way SW establishes parent child relations increases the time for each feature. If you analyze the feature tree you will see that the last feature is actually the child of all the features in the feature tree even though parent child will not necessarily tell you this. The second routine simply calls a forced rebuild. This suggests that there is some difference between the checking that goes on when a feature is built and when it is first created.

PATBENCH is older. I discovered by accident that it can run a system out of memory. I think originally I wanted to see what all this limitation on the size of a pattern was all about. It turned out to also show that patterns are real memory hogs during creation. Curiously different releases of SW behave quite differently to Patbench. I think

2006 actually showed a small performance improvement on this benchmark. The big jump between 10 and 11 iterations may be going from L2 cache to main memory. I'm not 100% sure about that though.

On SPECapc it doesn't surprise me that CPU and I/O are higherl. The FX57 is just plain fast. It looks like they put a Western Digital Raptor in. That coupled with the large L2 cache and memory bandwidth of the AMD chips should help I/O.

One more small favor. Would you run Ship in a Bottle per the instructions in

That will give a better feel for cpu vs graphics performance.

Hello Matt,

First of all, thanks for posting this information. Such postings are very informative.

I noticed your comment (off the shelf - didn't pay the listed price). What do you mean by this? Does Boxx offer pre-built systems or returns at a discounted price?

Boxx doesn't have "preconfigured" systems just waiting to be shipped. You spec the box from the list of components on their site, they put it together, test and ship it. What I meant by "off the shelf" was that I haven't done any customization or added components. I haven't done any bios or registry tweeks. I got a system without an OS and installed that myself so there was no unnecessary junk and the hard drive was configured the way I wanted it.

If you configure the system the way I did on their site, you come up with a number roughly 10% higher than what I paid. Boxx doesn't have discounts per se (except for volume, and even then it's not much), but maybe they had a price increase since I ordered.

If you're looking at a Boxx system

I'd encourage you to also look at Xi because they seem to be equivalent machines at a slightly lower price. Boxx comes at a premium for some reason (they cater to the CGI/movie industry).

The reason I picked what I did, which is actually their lowest model line, is that it was the only machine that you could spec an Athlon FX chip in (as opposed to an Opteron). A Boxx rep told me, and it seems to be true, that the Opterons are optimized for multiprocessor use, so getting a single Opteron didn't seem like a good idea. SolidWorks doesn't benefit much from multiprocessors, so I decided to go single processor, single core, but get the best one available. The Athlon FX series was touted as being the absolute nuts for single threaded games, and since kelner (TOP) had reported great results with one of the FX chips, I figured it wasn't a bad bet.

Good luck,

Matt

HI LO

24.4 18.2 edges shown 23.4 17.5 no edges 26.4 18.5 wireframe (not shaded) 27.3 18.9 hlr (not shaded) 25.3 19.2 hlg (not shaded)

Using low quality transparency, zooming out until invisible, changing from 16 to 32 bit colors and turning off the gradient background don't seem to improve things at all.

Moving the ship off the screen improved an 18.5 run to 17.75.

Reducing the size of the SW window from approx 1024x728 to 800x600 (system set up at 1600x1200 resolution) improved an 18.5 run to 17.5.

Reducing the graphics window to nothing (only can see the feature manager) reduces the 18.5 time to 15.8.

On the Spec.org site, the computer that seemed to really crank is one with dual video cards. I've got a very graphics intense project looming on the horizon. Maybe I'll see if I can pop in a second 3450 to save some time on that.

Thanks for your feedback. I have talked with both Boxx and Xi. They both seem like good companies, but I really like the support offered by Boxx. The provide lifetime support for their hardware. (The fact that they are located about three miles from my home doesn't hurt either.) Having toured their facilities, I can tell you they are a very professional and knowledgeable operation.

I would like to gain some experience with Xi computers, but I can't afford to buy too many computers.