Performance:
Feels smooth and fast. It’s an awesome machine for me, running 8-14 Qubes in parallel with browsers, emails and various office-type apps, plus occasionally compiling, copying, imaging external drives, etc.
Browsing foto + video collections on a CIFS share from the NAS with thunar is smooth as well. Playing an mp4 in a maximized vlc window at 1680x1050 occasionally has a tiny short tear/hang that is barely noticeable, but would annoy me when watching a full length video. I’ve set the vlc output driver to x11 and didn’t experiment further.
I really love the 96GB of RAM and got rid of swapping (also I reduced vm.swappiness from 60 to 1 in all qubes).
Only remaining issue: websites with heavy animations and video still feel a little sluggish.
Playing youtube in theater mode on the internal display is okay-ish, but fast moving scenes feel a little sluggish (slightly more than VLC). It would be annoying to watch for longer. Youtube stats for nerds shows 1280x720@50. The qube has 6 vCPUs and 16GB RAM assigned statically.
Even switching to mullvad browser and disabling hw accelaration as suggested in this thread doesn’t improve the experience.
Haven’t watched a movie on an external 4k screen, but guess it’s bad.
Fan:
Noise at full speed is quite good, it’s clearly audible but not noisy.
I use the silent profile which ramps up to 100% fan speed only at higher temps and I rarely hit that level in daily use.
At low speed (20%) you can hear the fan in a silent room.
Performance:
I have a qube that CPU mines Monero whenever I have solar surplus. I get ~4200H/s sustained and ~4500H/s peak using all 16 cores and can still use the system.
CPU frequencies:
I have yet to figure out how to watch CPU frequencies of the 6 performance cores, 8 efficient cores and 2 ultra-efficient cores live. Curious how they clock with and without thermal headroom.
Tools like htop in dom0 show a static frequency of 2995 MHz.
The output of xenpm get-cpufreq-para shows that xen seems to know the various cores’ base and turbo frequency correctly, AFAICS:
The output of xenpm get-cpufreq-states says all cores are spending all their time at P0 at 1401 MHz (highest state) - which can’t be true?!
Happy for any tipps how to check this.
Onto the next issue:
No more hangs, awesome, ty! No side effects (like tearing) so far.
For future readers, note that I fixed a syntax error in the quoted text by changing the Section from “OutputClass” to “Device”. So copy this quote, not the original.