Buying a new computer in 2015

Past Systems

I have a bunch of happy systems: Well, actually, all the 2008-era systems are dying; first the e7300 died, then the q9300 I pulled out of storage to replace it died within a week. Time for a new system. Requirements:

Looking at Amazon's top sellers in desktops, the first entry with a tower and a non-sucky CPU was #14, Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 70A4000HUX i3-4130. The barebones version was $235.

I clicked 'buy' on that about five minutes after starting my search. Hard to imagine a more careless decision on my part... but how far wrong can one go buying a Thinkserver? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, even after they were sold to Lenovo, right?

It arrived promptly as usual. Here's a picture of the inside:

The case is great. There are flexible no-screws-needed carriers that slide in and out for two hard drives; it's the slickest system I've ever seen. (You do have to supply your own disk cable, but you can just recycle one from an old computer. And if you want more than two internal drives, you may have to work harder to mount them.) Nice touch: it has two front panel connectors for external hard drives.

I recycled an old 64GB Intel SSD for the system. Ubuntu 15.04 beta 2 installed uneventfully. Oh, man does it boot fast.

Moving a btrfs /home drive from an old system utterly failed - lots of "INFO: task btrfs-transacti:2296 blocked for more than 120 seconds." messages - so I gave up and reformatted it with ext4 and was happy.

Power Consumption

At idle, with no tweaks, the system uses 25 watts. (The old LCD monitor we're using uses ~1 watt at idle and ~30 watts when active; it's a good sign that the CPU uses less power than the monitor :-)

Performance

Feels snappy enough, and thanks partly to the SSD, cold boots in about 20 seconds.

Here are some benchmark results for the i3-4130 (vs. the e7300 it replaced):

For comparison, the i5-4460 system I bought a few months ago scored passmark 6683, peacekeeper ~4300, geekbench3 9236 (though Chrome has changed, so you can't quite compare the peacekeeper results; I should rerun that).

I measured time to build Wine without and with -j4: 

$ sudo apt-get build-dep wine
$ apt-get source wine
$ cd wine1.6-1.6.2/
$ time debuild -b -uc -us
...
real	23m31.221s
user	21m25.264s
sys	1m14.884s
$ dh clean
$ time debuild -b -uc -us -j4
...
real	12m15.822s
user	38m5.952s
sys	1m56.456s
12 minutes to build Wine ain't shabby. 'Course, that's how long it took in 2008, too, but Wine was smaller then :-)

For comparison, on my five-year-old i7 920 running Ubuntu 14.10 and btrfs, the same builds took rather longer: 

$ sudo apt-get build-dep wine
$ apt-get source wine
$ cd wine1.6-1.6.2/
$ time debuild -b -uc -us
real	35m46.976s
user	33m1.168s
sys	3m55.429s
$ dh clean
$ time debuild -b -uc -us -j4
real	13m42.491s
user	41m22.856s
sys	4m14.683s
That's right, the new i3 beats the old i7.

And here's the result from a new i5-4460 running Ubuntu 14.04 (and gcc-2.8): 

$ sudo apt-get build-dep wine
$ apt-get source wine
$ cd wine1.6-1.6.2/
$ time debuild -b -uc -us
real	21m44.769s
user	20m1.008s
sys	2m39.749s
$ dh clean
$ time debuild -b -uc -us -j4
real	8m12.016s
user	23m25.585s
sys	2m46.650s
The i5 took about 2/3 as much time time as the i3 to build Wine with -j4.

Problems