Adding More AMD RadeonSI Linux Driver Test Coverage
This week I put together another system for adding to the LinuxBenchmarking.com test setup in the elaborate basement server room. This system is part of the open-source graphics performance tracker with an AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card as another test candidate to complement the Radeon R7 260X, etc, in stressing the RadeonSI open-source driver code.
The Radeon HD 7850 was paired with an AMD A10-5800K "Trinity" APU. For refreshers, the A10-5800K is quad-core at 3.8GHz with 4.2GHz turbo. While there's the Radeon HD 7660D graphics, those were disabled and just using the discrete Radeon HD 7850. The A10-5800K was used simply since I've had it laying around in my APU/CPU collection and wasn't actively using it with any system.
The motherboard I used for this build was the Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-H. I went with this micro-ATX FM2+ motherboard simply as it was one of the cheapest I found ($39 USD and $10 mail-in-rebate) while fitting my needs for this system that won't do anything besides daily Linux benchmarking. This motherboard plays fine with any modern Linux distribution.
The A10-5800K was cooled by an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 as an Intel/AMD cooler able to cool CPU/APUs up to 150 Watts, will fit fine in a 4U chassis, has three double-sided heatpipes, and costs only about $20.
On the memory side was a Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3-1866MHz 8GB memory stick I happened to have laying around. While I would have liked dual channel memory, this was just the lone stick laying around and is fine since at the end of the day all I care about is comparing the system's performance over time with the same hardware configuration.
The storage on the system was the OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD. This 240GB SSD retails for just $89 USD and the OCZ ARC 100 runs fine under Linux and have the same model running in a few other test systems at Phoronix.
The power supply for this build was the EVGA 430 Watt 80PLUS certified. I've bought several of these EVGA PSUs for test farms due to their low cost yet being highly rated (560+ reviews on Amazon with 4.5 star rating) and all of them that I've bought so far over the past several months have been running fine in the test farm. $35 USD for 430 Watts or $45 for 500 Watts.
The build has been running fine since launching it a few days ago with Ubuntu 15.04 while testing the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa code on a daily basis over at LinuxBenchmarking.com. Head on over there to view the results daily along with the 50+ other Linux systems doing daily automated benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those wishing to help support this costly, upstream open-source performance testing for tracking regressions, etc, can help out by subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a PayPal tip, and/or sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
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