{"id":783,"date":"2011-10-01T18:49:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-01T17:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/?p=783"},"modified":"2023-05-23T20:33:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T19:33:09","slug":"hp-proliant-microserver-benchmarking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/2011\/10\/hp-proliant-microserver-benchmarking\/","title":{"rendered":"HP Proliant Microserver | Benchmarking"},"content":{"rendered":"

HP Microserver 1: <\/strong>AMD Athlon II Neo N36L 1GB RAM 160GB (P\/N: 612275-421)<\/p>\n

I finally got round to benchmarking<\/a> some Graphics cards on the HP Microserver. Although I have not played around with much benchmarking before I thought I would start here as it seems to be a hot topic at present.<\/p>\n

My first thoughts were “What do people really want out of the HP Microserver?<\/em>” – Originally I wanted it as a replacement to my Acer Aspire Revo 3600 and run it as my dedicated HTPC<\/a>. However this developed through time to become a replacement for my NETGEAR MS2000 Stora<\/a> NAS while streaming the shares and content to my Acer Aspire Revo 3600 running XBMC.<\/p>\n

I was previously using the Negear Stora, but was not satisfied that if the drive failed that I could easily get the data from one of the mirrored disks due to its XFS<\/a> file system. There are some guides to doing this and I played around with accessing the XFS HDD from a Linux VM but this got quite messy and I had to refer to the good old rule “K.I.S.S.<\/a>” therefore decided to purchase 2 x 2TB hard drives for the Microserver, RAID1 them and then dump all my media onto here and share using the Dreamspark version of Windows Server 2008 with shared folders. A nice method, however this didn’t allow me to use Streaming Media to my DNLA<\/a> enabled devices, TV, iPhone, WDTVLive & other Windows 7 Computers.<\/p>\n

With the release of Windows Home Server 2011 and dedicated DNLA support I decided I would install this as a VM on top of Windows Server 2008 R2<\/a> – 100% NOT SUPPORTED and definately frowned upon by many. But it is all in the name of testing and experimenting with the system. The reason I did this was that in order that I was still able to play around with Hyper-V and Windows Server 2011.<\/p>\n

HP Microserver Number 2: <\/strong>AMD Athlon II Neo N36L 1GB RAM 250GB (P\/N: 633724)<\/p>\n

I recently purchased my 2nd Microserver to play around with Citrix Xen Server<\/a> and would allow my current Windows Server\/Home Server 2011 to stay in one piece. Xen works fine on this box, however I have not put it to the test and only had a limited number of VM’s on the system so will look at the development of this later on.<\/p>\n

Following on from my original article I decided to see how well the performance was of the Radeon HD5450 Graphics Card. There has been a lot of talk about whether this card will do a good job as it seemed to be the fastest low profile card (at time of this article) that could be found. To try and improve performance I decided to run with Windows 7 x64 as the base OS, this offered fully supported drivers for all the graphics cards.<\/p>\n

Windows 7 was installed on an external HDD and attached using the eSATA connection. A good solution if you don’t want to mess around with the current drives and OS already installed.<\/p>\n

I ran through a number of tests on the following cards:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Original Radeon 4200 (This is the onboard graphics card) – VGA with no Audio<\/li>\n
  2. PNY Geforce 8400GS (Low Profile PCIe) with Heatsink – HDMI with Audio<\/li>\n
  3. Sapphire HD5450 (Low Profile PCIe) with Heatsink – HDMI with Audio<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I used the following tools for benchmarking: (There maybe better tools available however as I have only played around with this brief this is what I went with)<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Passmark Performance Test 7.0<\/a> (Trial Version)<\/li>\n
    2. 3D Mark Vantage<\/a> (Free Basic Version) The latest version of 3D Mark 11 only works with Directx 11 cards.<\/li>\n
    3. PC Mark 7<\/a> (Free Basic Version)<\/li>\n
    4. CPUID<\/a> (Free)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      Although it isn’t a fair test comparing onboard vs a 1GB DDR3 Graphics Card. I was really curious as to how much better the performance actually worked out at. The test results don’t display a massive contrast between cards until the 3D results come into it. Throughout all my testing I have come to conclusion that the HP Microserver still isn’t man enough to handle large 720\/108o .MKV<\/a> video files (I could be doing something wrong?). Running media over a 1GBps network link & even playing content locally I still have performance issues and glitching whereby the same media streams perfectly to my WDTVLive.<\/div>\n
      \n

      Passmark Performance Test Scores<\/strong><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Original Radeon 4200 – Score: 440.9 ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder<\/li>\n
      2. PNY Geforce 8400GS – Score: 455.6 ngg_shortcode_1_placeholder<\/li>\n
      3. Sapphire HD5450 – Score: 468.7 ngg_shortcode_2_placeholder<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n

        3D Mark Vantage<\/strong><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Original Radeon 4200 – Score: TBA<\/li>\n
        2. PNY Geforce 8400GS – Score: P435 ngg_shortcode_3_placeholder<\/li>\n
        3. Sapphire HD5450 – Score: P1091 ngg_shortcode_4_placeholder<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
          \n

          PC Mark 7<\/strong><\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Original Radeon 4200 – Score: 974 ngg_shortcode_5_placeholder<\/li>\n
          2. PNY Geforce 8400GS – Score: 994 ngg_shortcode_6_placeholder<\/li>\n
          3. Sapphire HD5450 – Score:1034 ngg_shortcode_7_placeholder<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n

            CPUID Temperature Tests<\/strong><\/p>\n

              \n
            1. Original Radeon 4200 N\/A<\/li>\n
            2. PNY Geforce 8400GS ngg_shortcode_8_placeholder<\/li>\n
            3. Sapphire HD5450 ngg_shortcode_9_placeholder<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              Power Tests:<\/strong><\/p>\n

              Another question I always asked myself was whether the Microserver could be left on all day without costing too much and eating up too much power? The results from a electric meter gave a good indication to this and looks similar to leaving a couple of lights on.<\/p>\n

              Wattage when Idle (GF8400GS Card, 1 x eSATA & 2 x SATA HDD)<\/strong><\/p>\nngg_shortcode_10_placeholder\n

              Wattage when Underload (GF8400GS Card, 1 x eSATA & 2 x SATA HDD)<\/strong><\/p>\nngg_shortcode_11_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

              HP Microserver 1: AMD Athlon II Neo N36L 1GB RAM 160GB (P\/N: 612275-421) I finally got round to benchmarking some Graphics cards on the HP Microserver. Although I have not played around with much benchmarking before I thought I would start here as it seems to be a hot topic at present. My first thoughts were “What do people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,38,39,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-hp","category-hp-proliant-microserver","category-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOPt8-cD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardsd.co.uk\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}