Home/ Questions/Q 6355071
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-24T22:41:33+00:00

Our IT team are going to get our machines upgraded. We are given 2

  • 0

Our IT team are going to get our machines upgraded. We are given 2 machines :- One is Quad Core i7 3.4 GHz 64-bit machine with 16 GB RAM. The another one is just an upgraded machine with the spec – Dual Core 2 GHz 64-bit machine with 8 GB RAM. Both have Windows 7 Professional on them.

Now, we are being given these 2 machines and are asked to test and see which one performs better (basically to see if the quad core one performs substantially better than the dual core one).
We mainly use Visual Studio 2010 as the development tool. Is there a way by which we can compare the 2 machines performance using Visual Studio (or any other way).

Is there some some sort of code which I can use to quantify the performance difference between the 2 machines?

Please let me know if you need some more information on this.

Thanks,
Abhi.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think this one belongs on ServerFault, but I’ll give it a shot.

    Cores:
    Visual Studio won’t specifically benefit from multicore processors. To my knowledge, it doesn’t use multithreaded compilation by default (though a savvy developer can make this happen through clever launching of MSBuild), so it won’t take advantage of multiple cores. However, if the developers are running several apps in parallel – say, Photoshop, Office, etc – VS will be less likely to have to share core time if more cores are available.

    Memory
    8GB of RAM is plenty these days. I use three different dev boxes, two with 8GB and one with 24GB, and I don’t see a significant difference in compilation time or IDE responsiveness. Caveat: if you’re working with very large projects, more RAM will improve virtual memory swapping performance. Some large C++ apps out there, with hundreds of source files and embedded resources, can suck up a LOT of compilation time and memory.

    Windows 7 Excellent choice.

    CPU Clock and on-chip cache speed and size will have the most noticeable impact on performance, as will the amount of on-chip cache.

    Also, make sure your video card/chipset is up to date, as that can be a UI speed bottleneck.

    In short: RAM and CPU clock – and, to some extent, hard drive speed – are the most important factors.

    This article has what appears to be a comprehensive overview of benchmarking processes, but I can’t speak to the validity of their approach or the quality of the tools they recommend.

    • 0