I found a benchmark saying my old Intel chip is 20% slower than a Pi 5 but the machine is noticeably faster. Both boot from SSD. The Pi 5 has modern fast NVMe SSD with PCIe set to 3. The Intel box has ancient mSATA SSD. The Pi 5 has a graphics chip. The Intel a GPU board.
Part of the problem is the benchmarks not stating what they test or the articles reporting benchmark results not stating the settings they use. I found one article from a popular tech news site reporting a massive speed difference between two SSDs. Another article at a hard to find but more technical detailed said the difference was the HMB, the buffer in the Windows OS. One brand used 50 MB and the other used 250 MB. Any write benchmark of more than 50 MB but less than 250 MB would show one brand as amazingly fast when compared to the other.
When computers are not exactly the same, an overall speed test is better. The Pi 5 introduction of the PCIe interface makes some speed comparisons to a Pi 4 useless as an NVMe on PCIe 3 is completely different to the best you can get from a Pi 4.
For an overall test of a whole computer, I like to start LibreOffice and see how long it takes to get that menu bar in place. For faster computers, I open a known document with images. A Gimp fractional rotate, just a few degrees, is another good stress test.
Part of the problem is the benchmarks not stating what they test or the articles reporting benchmark results not stating the settings they use. I found one article from a popular tech news site reporting a massive speed difference between two SSDs. Another article at a hard to find but more technical detailed said the difference was the HMB, the buffer in the Windows OS. One brand used 50 MB and the other used 250 MB. Any write benchmark of more than 50 MB but less than 250 MB would show one brand as amazingly fast when compared to the other.
When computers are not exactly the same, an overall speed test is better. The Pi 5 introduction of the PCIe interface makes some speed comparisons to a Pi 4 useless as an NVMe on PCIe 3 is completely different to the best you can get from a Pi 4.
For an overall test of a whole computer, I like to start LibreOffice and see how long it takes to get that menu bar in place. For faster computers, I open a known document with images. A Gimp fractional rotate, just a few degrees, is another good stress test.
Statistics: Posted by peterlite — Wed May 14, 2025 11:28 pm