Measuring build "snappiness"?

bfeist · June 17, 2020

I've been wanting to ask the community this for a long time, but I don't quite know how to phrase it properly. Has any work been done to measure the real world, every day quickness or "snappiness" of a build?

When I put together my last build (3 years ago now) which is a 6-core 6850K on an ASUS X99-PRO mobo, I was very surprised to find that the Windows 10 environment performance was very close to what it was on my then 6 year old i7-950. What I'm talking about here is photoshop loading; things like that. Sure, in a rare moment that the computer is working on a CPU or GPU intensive problem I can see the huge performance improvement, but what can be done to select the right motherboard, or measure the effect of adding apps to Windows, or whatever might be causing the OS to drag its ass?

Having the OS on an m.2 SSD has only a marginal improvement for me against having it on a SATA3 SSD, in spite of the huge raw performance difference. Windows is clearly spending more time on other things and is not bound by the throughput here. Where is it bound? How can we make a new computer *feel* super fast outside of the benchmarking world? Add to this the occasional driver hell nightmare of adding bluetooth or some other USB peripheral with substandard driver support. How can we measure the effect of all of this added together to make a system?

I hope I'm making sense. I'm getting close to due for a new workstation build. The new 32 core AMD systems looks seriously awesome, but thinking through this I was reminded of the underwhelming, seemingly incremental everyday feel after my last build. Any advice?

Enderman · June 17, 2020

4k high QD speeds and latency are what matter most for snappiness, not the sequential speeds.

Look at some reviews of the 905P if you want to see why that SSD costs like 10x more than other 'normal' M.2 SSDs.

Stuff like clean installing your OS once a year also makes a huge difference to speeds.

Froody129 · June 17, 2020

That's basically why people don't buy i7s for simple office machines. With an SSD there's no real difference, and certainly one worth paying more for. Higher-end CPUs will only really make a difference for load-intensive tasks, as you've discovered.