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Disappointing XPS 440 Performance
My latest Dell desktop was a XPS 440 with the i7 940 processor. From reading the blurb I was expecting a fairly fast PC, certainly faster than my old ones.
However, I was very disappointed to discover than when running my regular number crunching apps that my old XPS 4 system with Pentium 4 3.8Ghz was a lot faster! When I say a lot I mean initially it was twice as fast. This is a PC I got nearly 5 years ago!!! Ok, the old one is Windows XP and the new one Vista but still that's a very large difference. Also, there's the difference betweem 32 and 64 bit but that still doesn't account for it all.
After turning off the hyper-threading the XPS440 just managed to equal the XPS4 peformance but difference in noise between the two is amazing. I can hardly hear the fans on the XPS4 but the XPS440 I can hear the fans all the way through the ceiling and walls in my house. Not only is it loud but the way the fans keep going fast / slow / fast / slow makes it even more noticeable.
The speed thing is the aspect I can't really understand though. Why on earth is it so slow? This XPS440 is supposedly faster in every department, memory, disk, cpu(?) but ends up being slower. Ok, if I'm doing lots of things at the same time it does have an edge but for there's only one of me and I generally can only do one thing at the time.
Anyone else been disappointed by the performance of the i7 processors? Any tips?
Thanks
Mark
sawaddi
611 Posts
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December 17th, 2009 15:00
What is an XPS 440? Don't see it on Dell's website.
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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December 17th, 2009 16:00
Do they have the same amount of RAM?
Did you look in Task Manager to see if some process is hogging the CPU?
Did you disable all the unnecessary stuff so there's less running in the background to hog RAM and the CPU?
Ron
sparkz
23 Posts
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December 17th, 2009 16:00
It was something that was available in the UK 12 months ago. I see they only have the XPS 430 now.
Basically, it's spec was: Core i7 940 processor, 8GB 1067MHz DDR3 ram, 512MB ATI Radeon 4850 Graphics card, 2 x 640GB Serial ATA II (7200rpm) Raid 0 drive and Vista 64.
My old XPS 4 has a Pentium 4 3.80GHz, 2GB DDR2 ram, Windows XP 32 and a 7200rpm SATA II drive (no raid).
sparkz
23 Posts
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December 17th, 2009 17:00
My XPS4 which only has 2GB (DDR2) ram compared to 8GB (DDR3) on the XPS 440.
On the 440 there's nothing really taking up any time. I've been through reducing all I can. No virus checkers or firewall. No windows indexing. The CPU usage on all 4 is pretty much a flat zero.
On the other hand my XPS4 has all sorts of things active. Virus scanner, Skype, etc. Around 70 processes in total!
I just can't help feeling this i7 is over hyped. It's a nuisance as I'm about to get a top spec laptop and of course the i7 ones are considered the best by others. Just not by my experience!
Has anyone else got a fast old XPS and a new one with an i7 processor?
Mark
sparkz
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December 18th, 2009 05:00
I hadn't actually tried this for a few months. I'd given using it to be honest because of the poor performance. I just tried another benchmark and it was quite a bit different. The only difference I can think of is that the temperature of my office is a lot cooler now (snow outside at the moment) not that it was that hot earlier on in the year. Certainly the fans didn't make half as much noise as they usually do e.g. not as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
I know this processor tries to be efficient and also protect itself from heat damage. Is this what you'd expect? Or maybe the fans aren't efficient as they should be? Or maybe the cooling system is faulty?
Regardless of this, I've never had any problem with my previous Dells regardless of how hot it was. I'm very disappointed that this one seems so fragile when it comes to temperatures.
Masi_GC
268 Posts
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December 18th, 2009 10:00
Sparkz,
Many people have been disappointed with the performance of multi-core processors with certain applications. Here is a good article that explains why this occurs:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/23/google-microsoft-programming-technology-cio-network-multicore-hardware.html
The sad fact is, many applications would require optimizations to take advantage of multi-core processing. Hence the continued interest in over-clocking.
Masi_GC