Hi. I'm jon.404, a Unix/Linux/Database/Openstack/Kubernetes Administrator, AWS/GCP/Azure Engineer, mathematics enthusiast, and amateur philosopher. This is where I rant about that which upsets me, laugh about that which amuses me, and jabber about that which holds my interest most: *nix.
To upgrade or not to upgrade...that is the question.
I've refused to upgrade my workstation at work for years for fear I'd end up with a system that doesn't run OpenBSD very well. We recently had a departure and new hire, but the timeframe between one and the other was a few weeks. In the interim, I decided to test OpenBSD on the departure's brand new machine (it wasn't exactly a "departure", but we'll leave it at that). I now know the answer to the upgrade question...
The old machine was a P4 D with 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB SATA disk. Certainly not fast. It had an nvidia 5500 that I used to connect to dual 22" monitors. Because of limitations in the nv driver, I had to run these monsters in 1280x1024...which I wasn't too crazy about, lemme tell ya. It was sickening to run these things in dual-head mode with resolution much lower than they are capable of.
The new machine is an i7 with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SATA disk. Still not "bleeding edge", but incredibly nimble comparatively speaking. This one has an ATI Radeon HD 3450. After a bit of man-paging and googling, I had dual monitor 1680x1050 (the max resolution the monitors can handle). Holy...wow.
Graphics aside, I went from a single hyperthreaded core to true quad-core with hyperthreading, doubled system RAM, and doubled hard drive capacity...wow again.
The only real question left is...should I ask for a RAM/SATA upgrade (say, 8 GB/2 TB?) and build a BIGMEM kernel? Or would that be pushing my luck?
The old machine was a P4 D with 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB SATA disk. Certainly not fast. It had an nvidia 5500 that I used to connect to dual 22" monitors. Because of limitations in the nv driver, I had to run these monsters in 1280x1024...which I wasn't too crazy about, lemme tell ya. It was sickening to run these things in dual-head mode with resolution much lower than they are capable of.
The new machine is an i7 with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SATA disk. Still not "bleeding edge", but incredibly nimble comparatively speaking. This one has an ATI Radeon HD 3450. After a bit of man-paging and googling, I had dual monitor 1680x1050 (the max resolution the monitors can handle). Holy...wow.
Graphics aside, I went from a single hyperthreaded core to true quad-core with hyperthreading, doubled system RAM, and doubled hard drive capacity...wow again.
The only real question left is...should I ask for a RAM/SATA upgrade (say, 8 GB/2 TB?) and build a BIGMEM kernel? Or would that be pushing my luck?
Total Comments 3
Comments
-
Might be pushing, I do not know how deep the money pocket is. Your new machine sounds like a big jump. I can only dream about your new machine. I am still using one similar to your old one. When I get down and think I am on something slow and out of date and I think about the days when I was using an old 486 and upgrade to a p60. I will stay happy for a while with what I have and envy you.Posted 02-05-2011 at 02:16 PM by Larry Webb 
-
I wish this was my personal computer...but it's a company issue machine.
And I'd really prefer to not think about performance on my first computer (an IBM 5150) because it'd be too depressing haha.Posted 02-05-2011 at 02:45 PM by rocket357
-
I have yet to own more than a single core system. I want a new system so bad I can taste it, but really I have not need for it. Probably wait till the early multiple cores become legacy and can be bought for a song.
Posted 02-05-2011 at 09:54 PM by peonuser
