Gaming PCs Through the Ages - Performance Per Liter Showcase
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,154 words · ~5 min read
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origin and Intel reached out about doing a sponsored piece on the Kronos a
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desktop PC that origin brags is the most
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powerful and customizable small form factor
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desktop a very bold claim but as a bit
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of a small form factor Enthusiast the
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idea of cramming unbelievable Hardware into a tiny enclosure isn't exactly new
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to me so I wanted to go a totally different route with it and look at how
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changes in Hardware have fundamentally
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changed the kind of performance we can get out of tiny gaming PCs over the last
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10 years welcome to Performance per
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leader Through the
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Ages so at about 10.6 L the origin
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Kronos is bigger than some of the Indie SF F cases that I've seen the Dan case
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a4sfx that we featured recently is a mere 7.25 L but the extra 3 lers seems
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to have been put to good use at the front is an LED lit logo and a much more
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reasonable front IO configuration then the A4 sfx's single USB 3 and power
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button two USB 3 front audio power and
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reset switches most of the panels are vented and the internals are laid out so
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the four included Ed magnetic feet can be used to flip Kronos on its side
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depending on your space requirements then over on the left above the video
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card window is its biggest Advantage a
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single water cooling radiator with a slim 120 mm fan that's responsible for
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keeping the CPU and the socket area cool even with some overclocking moving to
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the inside we find our Decked Out Hardware config including a core i7
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extreme 6950x 10 core 16 gigs of ddr4
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memory a Titan X Pascal a 1 TB Samsung
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SSD with an additional hard drive for storage a 600 W power supply and an 80
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mm cooling fan so that's where some of
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the internal space went up to and some extra air flow for those
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drives so let's take a look then at what we're putting it up against we went back
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in time or at least we went to free geek Vancouver those guys are awesome and
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have been keeping us supplied with old hardware for our projects for a little while now and we sced up these gaming
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Enthusiast configs from 10 six and three
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years ago each build should represent a
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common Enthusiast DIY case at the time
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in spite of Intel's best efforts ATX is still with us so they're actually pretty
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similar in size the best of the best single CPU and a top tier GPU
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unfortunately we couldn't get a working 8800 GTX in time for testing but we can
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extrapolate values based on our 8800 GTS
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and it's based on the same G80 chip so we'll start with pure CPU performance in
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the last 10 years enthusiasts have gone from quad core machines that turn out
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about 3500 points in CPU Mark and 250
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points in cinebench to 10 core monsters that can do anywhere from 5 to nine
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times that performance in multi-threaded workloads though it should be noted that
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when it comes to single credit performance the gains aren't quite as
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impressive at a little over double our
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only real mixed CPU GPU Benchmark a 4K
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video export of adobe's test project at our usual LTT presets yields much
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smaller improvements a firmy or greater
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Cuda GPU with a fast enough CPU is still
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a great video editing solution with most of the perf per liter improvements
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coming from Chrono his size moving on to
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gaming we see impressive improvements on the performance side of things with an
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older game like halflife 2 ending up CPU
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bottleneck a few years ago at around 700 frames per second and a newer title like
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Metro last Light scaling beautifully to the point where today's system is 20
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times faster making it nearly 100 times faster per unit
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volume so how then did all of this happen well part of it is the ever
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shrinking manufacturing processes on which these components are built but
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that accounts only for the improved performance not for the shrinking of the
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systems so is it then that older systems
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consumed much more power and therefore output more heat so they needed these
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big enclosures actually not really going
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back to 2006 our system consumed only about 250
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Watts from the wall compared to 385 for our Kronos so a big part of the
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story here seems to be thermal management these CPU temps that you're
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looking at are interesting only from an academic perspective since we're using
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Intel designed thermal Solutions on all the older machines rather than something
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afterm Market or a consistent cooler across the board but what it does tell
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us is that Intel went from considering nearly
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70° acceptable back in 2006 all the way
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down to targeting about 60° which happens to be the load temp of our 10
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Core Extreme Edition gpus clearly
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underwent a similar change NVIDIA thought 90° was cool back in 2011 then
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dialed that back with GPU boost limiting the more modern chips to ADN
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change the other big part of the story seems to be fashion Engineers are driven
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by a demand from their management and ultimately consumers to create Sol
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Solutions and the availability of smaller and smaller gaming machines has
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increased dramatically in recent years presumably because people want them
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though with that said back to origin's Claim about the Kronos being the most
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powerful and customizable sfff gaming system even if we substitute the volume
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of small form factor cases that were available at the times of our older
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systems Silverstone ST1 and sto2 and
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fractal design node 304 ignoring though
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that the node 304 is a mini ITX case and there were no Mini ITX x79
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boards thanks to the latest components today it still Stacks up very well no
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matter how far back you go so thanks again to origin and Intel for sending us
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the Kronos and sponsoring us to lock Jake in the warehouse last weekend to
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complete all of these benchmarks for our Through the Ages investigation if you're
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looking for a new pc check out the link to origin PC in the video description
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they've got a ton of black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend deals including up
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to $578 in savings on all Eon 9 series
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custom desktop replacement laptops with the GTX 980m with free shipping and a
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ton of promotions on their desktops including free shipping free gift cards
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free ssds free backpacks or headsets and free games so check that out below
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thanks for watching guys get subscribe like dislike all that good stuff and we
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will see you again next time