Arrived
Posted by Mike Haller
on Wednesday, January 7. 2009
at 22:06
in Private
Yesterday evening, it has arrived. I'm so excited!
Just after Christmas, I ordered a Lenovo Thinkstation S10, which seems to be a fine workstation with 4GB RAM, quad core Intel processor, nVidia graphics accelerator and SATA hard disk.
After unpacking, i didn't hesitate to boot it up and sure it was loud as hell. At initial startup, all the fans are running at full power to quickly burst for a few seconds. If this monster would have been that loud all the time, I couldn't run it at night or else I would wake up the neighbours living on the other side of the street.
The case looks and feels quality. The handle on top can easily be used to drag the machine around if necessary. There is no separate power-switch on the power supply unit.
However, half a minute later, the fans calmed down and Vista was ready to be configured with language settings and account details and some last installations ran.
So i began to install the bare minimum of software components:
- Driver for DWL-G122 (D-Link Wireless USB Stick) to get online. I'm so glad I had this driver already on a storage. I tried to get this wireless USB stick working with my Mac Mini, unfortunately this doesn't work well. The connection abort every few minutes and after 2 or 3 trials, the power is gone and I've to remove the stick completely. On Windows, the stick is running much better with constant network access.
- Firefox for downloading the others:
- JDK 6.0 Update 11, 64-Bit Version (Some JRE was pre-installed in Vista Business)
- ICQ and Jabber Client (Miranda-IM)
- Flash-Player
- Blender for benchmarking: first test-render went really smooth, thanks to the four threads being distributed to all four processor cores. Wow, that's really nice to watch
- Crysis for benchmarking: it took ages to install. Of course, i'm so eager to try it that I stared at the progress bar - that pretty much made time passing really really slow
The first in-game test didn't look good: the automatically found "optimal" settings were a little bit too high and I only got 15fps. I blame the nVidia Quadro drivers, as they're pre-configured for 3D/CAD quality and not for performance of games. Switched off vertical sync. See benchmarks below.- Crysis Patch 1.2.1
- nVidia ForceWare updates to 178.46 WHQL (Performance Drivers, but I think this is still wrong for me, as the 'Performance' Drivers are optimized for 3D Studio and Autodesk AutoCAD
- Windows Vista updates
- Restarting Windows (sigh)
Benchmark Crysis: (DX10, 32-bit, 800x600, Windowed, Low/Mid Settings, No AA)
- GPU Benchmark: 48.74fps
- CPU Benchmark: 48.44fps
- CPU2 Benchamrk: 29.45fps
Notes: according to the task manager, only one core was really used and windows vista update thingy was running in the background
Benchmark Crysis: Optimal settings (DX10, 32-bit, 1024x768, Windowed, All High, Motion Blur 50%)
- GPU Benchmark: 12.53fps
- CPU Benchmark: 11.31fps
- CPU2 Benchmark: 7.24fps
Notes: only CPU2 benchmark used a second core a little bit.
Benchmark Crysis: Optimal settings (same as above, but 64-Bit)
- GPU Benchmark: 12.53fps
- CPU Benchmark: 11.33fps (two cores used)
- CPU2 Benchmark: 7.21fps (three cores used, approx 20-50%)
Notes: often, only one core was used
Benchmark Crysis: Same as above, but fullscreen
- GPU Benchmark: 13.08fps
