I’ve recently upgraded my Homeserver to the latest 1.5ghz version, more out of curiosity than necessity, luckily I could use the same 2tb samsung hard disks, as the price has lept almost 400% in the last month. I was interested to see how the performance differs from the original machine so I ran the latest Passmark benchmarks against each machine (for reference the 1.3 version has been upgraded to 4gb ram and the new 1.5 version has the standard 2gb ram it ships with).
|
AMD Athlon II Neo N36L Dual-Core 1.3ghz |
AMD Turion II Neo N40L Dual-Core 1.5ghz |
| CPU Mark |
862.9 |
959.8 |
| 2D Graphics Mark |
111.1 |
131.4 |
| Memory Mark |
257.3 |
293.9 |
| Disk Mark |
550.4 |
593.3 |
| PassMark Rating |
409.5 |
465.2 |
The numbers stack up in an interesting way, the process came out 11% faster (rather than the 15% on paper you would expect), but it also helps to boost all the peripheral parts of the server that you wouldn’t expect to get a boost, disk performance goes up by almost 8% and the overall score by 13%.
Obviously it’s not going to be a compelling upgrade for most existing owners, but for new buyers still a great deal, at £250 in most stores, with £100 cash back from HP. I’d love to see a Core i3 version of the server, as there will always be users wanted to do more video compression, I’m looking forward to seeing if this new faster processor can keep up with the new quad tv tuner I have on order to work with DVBlink on the Microserver.
