Performance

Typically for testing or our LAN rigs, I try to get out to as many events as possible with it. Well with the overheating issues I originally ran into it has currently only made it out to one event. That said I have still spent 6+ months using the PC in different capacities and fine tuning things. It’s been in the office hooked up to an amazing 34 inch curved ultrawide monitor and from time to time I have been gaming on it and the rest of the time I have been using it to run our two 3dprinters. That’s great and all, but before I finished up this article I had to know just what the system is capable of. To do that I went ahead and ran it through a list of benchmarks. With those, I want to invite you to open up a second window with our previous Lunchbox 3 coverage and we can compare the numbers between the two. Here is a link to the performance numbers for Lunchbox 3.

Because this is a build specifically for gaming I started off my testing in 3DMark. I tested Lunchbox 4 with all three resolutions of the Fire Strike benchmark as well as the new Time Spy benchmark. Of course when I made Lunchbox 3 the 4k Ultra benchmark didn’t exist nor did the DX12 Time Spy test so we can only compare the Performance and Extreme settings. That said The difference is clear. Lunchbox 4 doubled the score on both.

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Next, I tested out the CPU with wPrime and the i6-6700k left the old i7-4770k in the dust. Seriously, though, who would have thought there would be that much of a difference, the 4770k is still a great CPU today.

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In the overall Passmark benchmark, there isn’t as big of a jump. A lot of the individual tests do show a nice jump in performance but the overall score only goes up about 300 points.

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The Heaven benchmark that I used on Lunchbox 3 is really outdated now but I dug it out and ran it on Lunchbox 4. Here we doubled the average FPS. Just for easier comparison in the future and for anyone curious how their LAN rig compares I did also test using the Valley Benchmark, while we don’t have a number to compare with but at over 60 FPS I don’t think we can complain.

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I also tested with PCMark 8 and at first glance I was a little concerned. The overall score actually dropped 200 points for the new build but when looking closer I noticed a few things. For starters, if you look at the individual results, each and every test was faster on Lunchbox 4. Second PCMark actually has given the Home Accelerated benchmark that we used numbers and we are now on the 3rd version. Back in January of this year, Futuremark released an update that changed the scoring and moved the Home Accelerated benchmark to version 2. From then to now the test has changed again as well. So our score can’t be compared, but we can compare the individual tests and we know how that turned out. 

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I also benchmarked our two SSDs as well. Both performed very similarly to each other. Both are also much faster than the SSD and Hard Drive in Lunchbox 3. I’m sure a few people are curious why I didn’t end up going with an NVMe drive in this build. Well, it would have been a perfect fit but honestly, we just didn’t have an extra NVMe drive available at the time. At the start of the year, there weren’t many NVMe drive options and the biggest one the Intel 750 Series drive that I tested last year would have taken up our only PCIe slot. That said I may upgrade the build to one later on or save that for Lunchbox 5 ;).

Crucial MX200 1TB SSD

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Crucial MX200 M.2 500GB SSD

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The last bit of my testing was focused back on temperatures. Remember all of the issues I had with overheating with both our GPU and CPU. Well, I ran our normal test for testing a GPU, I looped Valley benchmark and documented the temperatures. Without changing the fan profile on our video card at all it ran solid at 76 degrees Celsius. While I wouldn’t consider that to be amazing, it was a huge improvement over the original numbers. More importantly, this was only two degrees warmer than the same card ran on a completely open test bench just last week when I reviewed it. That tells me that the case isn’t holding a bunch of hot air in one place causing our card to overheat. For the CPU I ran Prime95 and it ran solid at 59 degrees. Mind you that is while also forcing the GPU to run full bore, just to make sure that when they are running together things won’t heat up too much. If I ever feel like either is to warm I still have a lot of headroom on the fan profiles to crank things up, but for now, I will take the near silent operation and the decent temps over my ears bleeding but the PC running ice cold.

 

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #38104 23 Aug 2016 17:23
Today I talk about what I did with the Lunchbox 4 build to customize it and check out its performance

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