Benchmarking

The MagPi, Issue 90

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The MagPi Issue 90This month’s MagPi, the official magazine of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, comes with a surprise bonus: a cover-mounted stand, available to download for 3D printing or laser cutting in the digital version, designed to hold up to three Raspberry Pi 4s in a vertical orientation. Naturally, it needed testing – and so you’ll find a feature comparing the stand to five commercial cases also designed to improve cooling.

My thermal testing feature in Issue 88 proved that putting the Raspberry Pi on its edge, rather than flat on a desk, could improve cooling and allow it to run faster for longer. The same test workload is repeated here on the bundled vertical stand plus cases from FLIRC, Argon40, Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, and SensorEq – and many thanks to all involved for their assistance with review samples.

Each case is installed as per the manufacturer’s instructions, then the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB inside is given a ten-minute run of a very thermally-intensive workload – an unlocked glxgears to put load on the GPU and a four-thread stress-ng FFT run for the CPU – followed by five minutes cooling. The temperature of each is graphed along with the operating speed of the CPU – which drops as the temperature rises above 80 degrees Celsius.

Finally, each case was placed underneath a thermal camera to see how effective it is at distributing the heat from the SoC. With the notable exception of one case – the case from The Pi Hut, which is constructed from light-transparent but thermally-opaque Perspex acrylic – the imagery helps to indicate whether a design has thermal headroom for longer workloads or is already working as hard as it can.

The feature is available in full in The MagPi Issue 90, which can be purchased in print from newsagents and supermarkets now or with global delivery from the Raspberry Pi Press store. It’s also available for free download under a Creative Commons licence; while the digital version doesn’t include the cover-mounted stand for obvious reasons, the design can be downloaded for home or commercial 3D printing or laser cutting from the magazine’s GitHub repository.

PC Pro, Issue 302

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PC Pro Issue 302Following on from my group test of small form factor machines in Issue 297, this month’s PC Pro magazine sees me take the helm of the regular Labs Test once again to put nine more traditional desktop PCs through their paces – with some available for as little as £300 including a Windows 10 Home licence.

The feature follows the usual Labs format: an introduction is followed by a features table listing all the key specifications, including pricing and warranty data, on each of the nine machines on-test; four large focus reviews follow, along with six shorter reviews; there’s a two-page buyer’s guide with hints and tips on getting the most bang for your buck; the View from the Labs opinion editorial; and a full-page feature-in-feature which, this month, takes a tour of the desktop PC’s storied history from the minicomputer era forwards – with special mention, of course, to IBM’s Personal Computer and the horde of ‘IBM Compatibles’ which followed.

Each machine on test was photographed inside and out in my in-house studio, disassembled to check the fit and finish as well as confirm how upgradeable each design is post-purchase, and tested through a gamut of benchmarks including power draw, productivity performance, gaming performance – less of a focus for this Labs than most, owing to the fact many machines are at the very bottom of the budget and designed more for general-purpose computing than blasting aliens – as well as browser performance and disk speed. This Labs also comes with an added bonus: boot timings for each machine, measuring how long it takes each to load Windows ready for use from a cold start.

As always, these group tests wouldn’t be possible without the cooperation of the hardware vendors themselves. My thanks go out to CCL, Palicomp, PC Specialist, QuietPC, Chillblast, Cyberpower, and Currys PC World for their assistance with hardware loans, and also to Box.co.uk for the loan of a system which was unfortunately not able to be included in the group this time around. A special thanks, too, goes to UL Benchmarks and Unigine for the provision of benchmarking software used in the test.

The full feature is available in PC Pro Issue 302, on-shelves now at supermarkets, newsagents, and on the hard drives of the usual digital distribution services.

Custom PC, Issue 194

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Custom PC Issue 194My regular Hobby Tech feature provided two opportunities to break out the thermal camera, thanks to a detailed analysis of a range of cooling products for the Raspberry Pi 4 and a review of the Libre Computer Project’s La Frite single-board computer – and there was even time to take a look at Brian Dear’s exhaustive title The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture.

First, La Frite. Funded, as with all Libre Computer Project boards, via crowdfunding, the compact single-board computer is designed to compete with the like of the Raspberry Pi. It certainly has its selling points: there’s a mounting point on the underside for an eMMC storage module, though it uses proprietary mounting holes; there’s a clever midship-mounted Ethernet port to reduce the overall height; and it even comes with the option of a clever two-piece aluminium case that doubles as a heatsink. Sadly, the board’s performance isn’t there, its software support struggles, and despite the name of the organisation its openness is limited to targeting mainstream Linux kernels; the board itself is a proprietary design.

Moving on to the topic of the Raspberry Pi 4, there’s no secret now that the new high-performance processor at its heart runs a little warm. For my analysis of the issue and a look at some potential solutions, a benchmarking workload was executed while temperature and clockspeed were measured and charted – demonstrating handily the loss of performance you get when the system-on-chip begins to heat up.

These data are joined by the same workload while the Raspberry Pi 4 is enjoying the benefits of a range of third-party cooling products: the Pimoroni Heatsink and Fan Shim options, the former running in passive-only and fan-assisted modes and the latter in always-on and software-controlled modes, along with the 52Pi Ice Tower heatsink and fan assembly as supplied by Seeed Studio and running in 5V, 3V3, and wholly passive modes. The temperatures across the run are then charted, while thermal imagery provides a visual insight into how the whole board heats under passive and active cooling.

Finally, The Friendly Orange Glow is a book I’d heartily recommend to anyone interested in the history of a surprising range of modern technologies – from flat-panel plasma displays and multiplayer gaming to Microsoft’s FreeCell. Charting the rise and fall of PLATO, a computer-assisted learning platform now largely forgotten by history, the book is about more than just technology: as its subtitle, The Untold History of the Rise of Cyberculture, suggests, PLATO and those who built and used it were responsible for cultural movements that wouldn’t be repeated elsewhere in the world for decades.

You can pick up the latest issue of Custom PC Magazine at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or online at the Raspberry Pi Press Store, or grab it in digital form via the usual distribution services.

Raspberry Pi Geek, Issue 09-10/2019

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Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 09-10/2019The launch of the new Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer brought with it, as usual, my detailed analysis over on Medium. The post has drawn considerable interest, in particular the benchmarking and thermal imagery aspects. German publisher Computec got in touch shortly after publication to ask if they could licence the post for translation and republication in the local enthusiast magazine Raspberry Pi Geek – and that issue is on shelves now.

Effectively a blow-by-blow recreation of the Medium post, translated and reformatted for the confines of a paper magazine, the seven-page feature walks through what’s new in the design, carries out numerous benchmark tests from synthetic and real-world performance workloads to power draw and – as has become a signature of mine – high-quality thermal imagery showing just where the extra power demanded by the Raspberry Pi 4 is going on the board.

Each benchmark includes a graph for easy at-a-glance performance comparisons between the new model and every version back to the original launch Model B. High-quality photography of the board and its various components are also featured, and have translated particularly well to the page.

Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 09-10/2019 is on shelves now in Germany, and is also available from Computec’s online outlet.

Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+

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Back in March, the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+—the Pi 3 B+ to its friends—brought a chance to take stock and review just how far the project had come since its launch via a series of benchmarks. Now the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ brings a bold claim: a dramatic drop in size, weight, and price over the Pi 3 B+, but without any loss in performance.

In other words: it’s benchmark time once again.

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Custom PC, Issue 152

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Custom PC Issue 152In this month’s Hobby Tech column I review the Proster VC99 multimeter, the Intel/Arduino Genuino 101 microcontroller development board, and discuss the challenges in developing meaningful benchmarks for testing devices where memory is measured in kilobytes.

Unusually for a hardware review, the multimeter was actually a personal purchase: I’d been using a Maplin-branded multimeter for quite some time, but the low cost and seemingly broad features of the Proster VC99 – also known as the Vichy 99, and sold under a variety of badges – convinced me it was time for an upgrade. While doing so cost me a back-lit display, I gained a variety of functions from frequency counting up to a neat analogue bar-graph on the display for seeing spikes and dips that would otherwise be lost on a numerical output.

The frequency counter came in particularly handy for my Genuino 101 review: writing a simple Arduino Sketch which does nothing more than toggle a pin on and off as fast as possible, I was able to read how quickly that happened to give me an idea of the IO performance of the Genuino compared with other Arduino boards I have lying around. Coupled with a look at the Intel Curie module which powers the device, providing Bluetooth connectivity and an integrated accelerometer, that’s enough for a solid review.

I don’t want to do solid reviews, though, I want to do great reviews, so the last page of this month’s five-page spread looks at how I benchmarked the compute performance of the Genuino 101 against an Arduino Nano for a direct, head-to-head comparison. It’s not as easy as it sounds: with mere kilobytes of memory, it’s not like I could just install PC Mark and be done with it. Interested parties will find a detailed explanation of how I went about modifying the traditional Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks to run on both devices, including trimming things to fit into the Arduino Nano’s tiny memory allowance, and how to interpret the results.

All this, plus stuff by people who aren’t me, is available at your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or from the comfort of your home via digital distribution services including Zinio.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 161

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Linux User & Developer Issue 161To say this month’s Linux User & Developer is a bumper issue is something of an understatement: in addition to my usual four-page news spread, you’ll find a three-strong group test of Steam Machines and a detailed step-by-step guide to building your own Linux box from a pile of parts.

First, the group test. Editor Gavin Thomas contacted me with the news that they had an Alienware Steam Machine in, and asked whether I would be able to source and review a rival device for a head-to-head. I went one better, the overachiever that I am, and thanks to the very lovely people at CyberPower and Zotac I was able to pick up a Syber and NEN to be run through their paces alongside the Alienware.

For Linux User & Developer, the Steam Machines were very new territory. The magazine has previously focused largely on professional uses for Linux, but the launch of mainstream-targeted console-beating gaming PCs running Steam OS – Valve’s gaming-centric customisation of Debian Linux – couldn’t be ignored. I started by designing a series of benchmarks which could be run across all three machines in order to provide a performance comparison, which then needed to take into account the price difference between the two entry-level machines from Alienware and CyberPower and the top-end Zotac NEN. The winner? Well, you’ll have to read the review.

A major group test like this would normally be enough, but Gavin also asked me to come up with a cover feature for the issue: building your own Linux machine. As with the group test, this issue marks the first time Linux User & Developer has strayed into the PC-building arena, and Gavin was looking for someone who could lend an expert eye to the hardware side of the feature.

After an initial hiccough with a parts supplier that let me down, the wonderful people at Overclockers UK were kind enough to loan me a shopping cart full of hardware, including an Intel Skylake processor. The specifications of the machine were kept low enough to appeal to buyers on a budget looking for a future-proof bargain, while having enough poke to ensure a pleasant experience. Naturally, the hardware was chosen specifically with Linux compatibility in mind – though the Skylake family of processors does require the Linux 4.4 kernel or newer to run at its full potential, which is covered in the software-centric second half of the feature.

Issue 161 is definitely a personal highlight, containing as it does such a large percentage of contents from my trusty keyboard. You can see the result for yourself with a trip to your local supermarket, newsagent, or through digital distribution services such as Zinio.

PC Pro, Issue 213

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PC Pro, Issue 213This month’s issue of Dennis Publishing’s PC Pro magazine sees my first contribution, and while it’s a minor one it’s still worth celebrating.

As with many mags, PC Pro has taken a look at the Raspberry Pi sub-$35 microcomputer, running an in-depth review on its capabilities and specifications.

As part of the review PC Pro used details I had gathered for my coverage on Bit-Tech, including the benchmark results from my pretty exhaustive testing. At some point, I may revisit the benchmarking to get a more thorough idea of the true performance of the Pi – but to do so I will likely need to compile the benchmark code manually to optimise it for the Pi’s ARMv6 processor.

My contribution makes up only a small portion of the review – which is well worth reading, by the way – but it’s always nice to see my name in a new magazine.

PC Pro Issue 213 is in shops now, or can be downloaded from the Zinio website.