Can you benchmark desktop "snappyness"?

Astrowind

Weaksauce
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Sep 28, 2018
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I read someone insisting Intel CPUs are snappier on the desktop. How would you even test this?
 
It's not something you're going to benchmark and not likely something you're going to be able to tell the difference with outside of some really extreme cases. Also, it's not likely the CPU which is making the difference.

That said, I do remember an old AMD Athlon x2 4000+ I had. I think it was on AM2 or something, definitely not one of the earlier ones. It ran stock 2.1Ghz and I could get it to 2.8Ghz with barely a bump in voltage and 2.9Ghz with a ton of extra voltage. On the desktop it definitely felt smoother and snappier than the Intel E6400 system I also had. The E6400 had a higher clock speed, twice the RAM, discrete video card and faster hard drives but anything to do with the UI felt snappier and smoother on the AMD. It was really odd but not something I could have tested for or benchmarked.
 
The differences perceived are likely not due to the cpu architecture.

Random access time (storage) and ram (timings and latency) are major factors.
 
I always notice with a new build everything is snappier/smoother/more responsive. Guess it relates to everything being new along with a fresh os install. Then of course you get used to it (get adjusted) and it all seems nominal in terms of speeds/snappiness.
 
I read someone insisting Intel CPUs are snappier on the desktop. How would you even test this?

The processor that’s slower on nearly all measurable metrics is always the snappier one.... According to the owners of said processor. AMDs FX series was widely said to be snappier too by its owners.
 
Test Suites such as LoadRunner can measure gui response times and this "can" encompass some minimal coding. This timing / delay factor is critical for automated test suite scripts in enabling automation. I have not seen a freeware "app" that measures gui response time.
 
I always notice with a new build everything is snappier/smoother/more responsive. Guess it relates to everything being new along with a fresh os install. Then of course you get used to it (get adjusted) and it all seems nominal in terms of speeds/snappiness.

Does Linux Mint slow down a bit as well?
 
A high speed camera could capture any differences. Video card can also come into play if mem/GPU speed is very low being on the desktop doing almost nothing. Power settings of the OS also come into play. It has been some time for me that desktop snappynessl was an issue.
 
If I defrag my OS SSD partition or restore a backup, it is always snappier than an install running for a few weeks.
I'm not recommending defragging an SSD as a general thing, but the OS partition once every 3+ months isnt excessive. It doesnt rewrite the whole OS, just a small part of it.
fyi
 
If I defrag my OS SSD partition or restore a backup, it is always snappier than an install running for a few weeks.
I'm not recommending defragging an SSD as a general thing, but the OS partition once every 3+ months isnt excessive. It doesnt rewrite the whole OS, just a small part of it.
fyi

I prefer to just re-image once in a while (usually after big Windows updates) to get that feeling. All the important stuff are on other SSD/HDD and/running into VM.
Never had luck with defrags in the past lol
 
I don’t notice an applicable difference in snappiness from a fresh install va one that’s a couple years old on modern SSDs. Boot times only slowly but even that only lasts until I get everything I want/need loaded.

On my main box I have all my game launchers loading on startup. Epic, Uplay, Origin, Steam, Battle.net. Some
I don’t use often at all but I can’t stand going into one of them and greeted with a 20-50gb update so I just have all of them loading on startup. I also have my adobe creative cloud load on startup for the same reason. Even still startup times are not at all unreasonable. Heck one of the reasons reason I went with a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, 32GB of memory and a 12 core CPU is so I can have the convenience of having all that loaded without an appreciable performance hit.
 
It just perception. Snappy to me means shit opens fast and without hanging or lagging behind. I am talking Microsoft Word better be fully loaded in less than 3 seconds. To me that is snappy. To another person just having a 5 min boot time and not 15 like their old machine is snappy.

I'd like to say snappy means smooth with little to zero lag time when doing day to day operations.

You can't benchmark an opinion, and all snappiness means is someone's opinion.
 
You can't benchmark an opinion, and all snappiness means is someone's opinion.
But you can benchmark system response time. Hence the definition of "Snappiness" as used here. A person's amount of Patience in terms of "wanting" or "having" to wait for a system response is subjective.
 
It's true. Intel systems do feel snappier. AMD's CCPC2 (Collaborative Power Performance and Control 2) feature is supposed to combat what's known as application burst performance. The CCX / CCD topology of the Ryzen CPU's creates a latency problem. The larger cache sizes vs. Zen and Zen+ are one thing AMD did to address that.

You can read more about this here.

Essentially, the difference between an AMD based system and an Intel based system isn't the type of thing you would ever notice if you were to work on one system, get up and do something else and then sit back down to the competing platform. You probably wouldn't even notice the difference if you used the systems for different things. However, when the two are side by side using nearly identical configurations doing the exact same workloads or tests, you can see it. At least, I could when I was testing the 3900X and benchmarking it against the 9900K. The monitors and other hardware were the same across both test systems and I felt the difference. It was minimal to be sure, but consistent.
 
I think it's a case of placebo effect. You think you're going to see a difference so you subconsciously do when you switch to whatever "team" you think you like better.
I don't think it's placebo, there are often huge differences in snappiness between configurations using the same cpu.

Also I noticed when pushing CPUs to the brink the effect is reversed. For example safe voltage 2.5Ghz feels snappier than extreme voltage 2.6Ghz.
 
a lot of things i think add up to "snappiness", an additional thing to benchmark would be the pointing device. i tried a brand new chromebook out of the box and the touchpad scroll -> on-screen scroll was so so so satisfying. gestured on the pad were reflected like, instantly it seemed. like faster than instantly. some kind of nice tuning on those things.
 
There is no such thing as snapiness. If you've got problems with basic application launch, this is more about the speed of your SSD, cache of your ram over SSD, and how much RAM and how fast, number of cores if your OS is launching several application or have other application in the background. AMD finally you'll get milliseconds of difference on rather equivalent setups. Even more you'll get differences between the moment you try to launch an application, provided that relaunching an application you closed some time ago will remain in some RAM cache and may relaunch much faster. There are also some applications that have launchers that maintain some part of the application in the background or in RAM cache so that the launch is instantaneous, like reopening a windows.
 
Bought my first SSD 9 years ago on my Phenom II 720 BE build. I felt this was pretty "snappy" and a fast overall load from BIOS to Desktop, Batch file opening multiple programs, then shutting down all in 48 seconds.

 
My Intel 6700k system becomes rather snappyless where other stuff is going on in the background. AMD system seems way more consistent in application loading, response, loading when cores are loaded down. 3900x at 100% CPU usage and one would not be hindered (depending upon what is consuming that 100% CPU usage), Intel 100% CPU usage on anything it seems becomes a slugfest. I would like to see some actual testing of this, for me I have a total opposite experience dealing with Intel and AMD -> AMD is more snappier in general in what I do. As for just single type sessions, scenario etc. I don't see much if any difference between them.
 
My Intel 6700k system becomes rather snappyless where other stuff is going on in the background. AMD system seems way more consistent in application loading, response, loading when cores are loaded down. 3900x at 100% CPU usage and one would not be hindered (depending upon what is consuming that 100% CPU usage), Intel 100% CPU usage on anything it seems becomes a slugfest. I would like to see some actual testing of this, for me I have a total opposite experience dealing with Intel and AMD -> AMD is more snappier in general in what I do. As for just single type sessions, scenario etc. I don't see much if any difference between them.

That most likely is a placebo effect cuase I use a amd and a intel at work , and the snapiness in the amd is no where close to my 9900k @ 50. Reason is easy amd takes a high hit on memory latency somewhere around 65ns on high end memory when intel is around 39ns to 42ns. Also that's why intel hit higher fps in games. Latency is where you get the snappines. Even winrar is faster intel despite the core deficiency , which more core speed and the memory control so close to the processors on the die , it just get more cycles done quicker.
 
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