Upgrading hardware, checking performance increase

[odegard]

After several years I've finally decided to do a major upgrade. What I want to check is the general performance improvement. I'm not after specifically target CPU performance, or HD performance.

This is my current system:
Athlon XP 2000+ (~1666MHz)
512MB RAM
Geforce4 ti4200 128MB RAM
ECS 745 Ultra mainboard
Seagate Barracuda 7100(?) drive 120gb, 8mb cache, 7200 RPM (I guess the platter density is 60gb per platter)

This is my new system:
Core 2 Duo E6300 (~1800MHz)
2GB RAM
Geforce 7300 GT 512MB RAM, Fanless (Imagine that, as much ram as my system has now... and fanless!)
Asus P5B mainboard
P120 Spinpoint 250gb, 8mb cache, 7200 RPM (platter density is 125gb per platter)

I use inkscape alot, and handling large drawings bogs down the system considerably, I'm sure I'll notice a huge difference. But, how can I quantify the performance increase?

There's not only the hardware, I'll use more updated software as well.

Current software:
GCC 3.3.5
Kernel 2.6.7-gentoo-r8

New software:
GCC 4.1.1
Kernel 2.6.18-somerelease

what else (software) might impact performance in general? I will of course use different USE flags and optimizations. Now I use -Os, I plan to use -O2. Now I'm using x86, I plan to try AMD64. As I said in the beginning, I don't plan to make an apples-to-apples comparison since there are too many variables involved (hardware, software versions, optimizations and whatnot).

Alright, the obvious benchmark is to compile something big, like inkscape.
I guess hdparm -tT /dev/... will be interesting
Also I'll try mencoder

I won't play any games so I don't care about frames per second in Quake.

what else can I do... Bogomips?

[MrUlterior]

Things you can measure:

- kernel compile (same kernel version, same .config)
- sustained write to disk: dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file bs=1024k count=10240
- boot time (to login:)
- X start up time
- "emerge -e system" from bare stage3 time

Kind of a shame you're going to be running on a single HDD though, IO is going to be your bottleneck. Why not invest in 2 x SATA on RAID1 and put a striped LVM ontop of it?

Also don't forget to change your -J options to reflect 2 cores in your /etc/make.conf[/url]
_________________

Misanthropy 2.0 - enough hate to go around

[odegard]

Thanks for the suggestions. I plan to expand my I/O subsystem further, but I have to upgrade in stages.

I also plan to get:
150gb 16mb raptor to use as system disk, but right now I need more space
zalman reserator (fanless watercooling)
another P120 spinpoint disk and test raid, never done that before
new loudspeakers, possibly a separate soundcard

[Monkeh]

[odegard]

Nope. It has 512mb onboard. This is not a hypercache card.

[Monkeh]

[odegard]

http://www.pointofview-online.com/GF7300GT512pci.html

I don't care if it's needed or not, the 256mb variant is only a bit cheaper.