Tim:
I was already planning to comment on Neal's message yesterday referring
to the 600 PassMark criterion, so I'll post my thoughts here now.
I had not heard of PassMark until yesterday, but I downloaded and ran
the performance test. My quad-core machine scored just under 1100 but
would have scored much higher if it had not been for the on-board video.
So isn't it possible to have a machine with a blazingly fast video card
and Gigabit Ethernet (I'm using Wireless-N only, to avoid having a cable
breaching my lightning-protected zone) but a slow CPU that would achieve
a PassMark score of 600+ but be totally inadequate for running PowerSDR?
73
Alan NV8A
On 12/10/10 10:16 am, Tim Ellison wrote:
Tom,
It is hard to be specific, as one poorly engineered subsystem in a laptop can
be the culprit. And there are a lot of subsystems in play.
Most laptops are not engineered for real-time I/O performance which is required
for running a program like PowerSDR. They are primarily engineered to be light
weight and have long battery life. Even laptops that are supposed to be for
gamers are only optimized for video and the soundcard and these two subsystems
are not that critical for a real-time audio processing application, like
PowerSDR.
Case in point. Several years ago I purchased a top of the line multimedia
laptop from Dell. It had a very fast Core2 CPU, lots of RAM and a TI Firewire
chipset running XP. No amount of tweaking and turning off services and
hardware (like the wireless and Bluetooth transceivers) would make this laptop
work with a FLEX-5000 or FLEX-3000 that would give even barely acceptable
performance.
On the other hand, there are older IBM laptops that work exceptionally well.
Go figure.
My example here is to point out that "specs" really don't mean that much if how
the components and subsystems in the laptop were poorly engineered. It is a bit of a
crap shoot.
If I was going to test out a PC to see if it was a good candidate for being a
SDR computer, I'd do the following
- Load the Firewire driver and then test the 1394 host bus adapter to see if
it is compatible
http://kc.flexradio.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50456.aspx
- Run DPCLAT to see what the baseline or idle DPC latency is for the computer.
Spikes above 1500 us is too long.
http://kc.flexradio.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50058.aspx
- Run Passmark on the machine to see what it rates out at. It has been stated
that a score of 600 is the minimum
http://www.passmark.com/
What I would not do is load PowerSDR in Demo mode as it is NOT representative
of how well that PC will work with PowerSDR running and a FlexRadio Systems SDR
connected to it. In demo mode, the PC sound card is used to do the D/A
conversions and getting it to work right in Win7 and Vista can be a challenge.
When you have a FlexRadio Systems SDR connected, that hardware is doing the A/D
and D/A conversions using native hardware drivers. The difference is night and
day.
-Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Bewick
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 9:05 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Flexradio] Gateway Laptop for Flex 3000
Greetings everyone,
I'm planning on getting a flexradio 3000 in the next few moths and was
wondering if anyone on this list had used one with a Gateway P-7815u FX
Edition laptop?
It is a good quality gaming computer with good specs and has a IEEE 1394b port
for fire wire.
I had read somewhere, I think either in the knowledge center and on other
websites, that laptops did not always work well with the flexradio but there
was never any details given as to why or what issues laptop specifically had.
If anyone has this latop and is successfully using it with a flexradio or cares
to take a few minutes to look at the specs and let me know I would appreciate
any info.
Here is a link to the gateway page with the specs for his computer. You have to click the
"Specifications" tab to see what the computer has as far as hardware etc...;
http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668662.php
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