01-09-2020, 08:13 PM
Another success story here. The stock Pentium dual core is out; a Xeon L5410 is in. My biggest reasoning going with this CPU is power consumption: the L54xx Xeon CPUs have a 30w lower TDP compared to the regular E54xx and 45w lower TDP than a Core 2 Quad, but it's not giving up any performance clock-for-clock. With a 50w TDP, it's actually 15w lower than the stock dual core.
That headroom allows tackling the other bottleneck on these prebuilt computers: the G31 chipset's graphics. The Intel GMA 3100 scores a 12 in Passmark G3D. Twelve. Think seconds per frame, not frames per second. An AMD R5 240 GPU is rated 30w max, so it doesn't tax the 200w-class power supplies these computers came with. This scores a 649; not stellar, but it's still an improvement and can even allow some light gaming.
That headroom allows tackling the other bottleneck on these prebuilt computers: the G31 chipset's graphics. The Intel GMA 3100 scores a 12 in Passmark G3D. Twelve. Think seconds per frame, not frames per second. An AMD R5 240 GPU is rated 30w max, so it doesn't tax the 200w-class power supplies these computers came with. This scores a 649; not stellar, but it's still an improvement and can even allow some light gaming.