I hope the Sandbox structural diagram or Sandbox style sheet can prove helpful to someone else. Please feel free to use or abuse either at your discretion!

Some notes:

• Both of these documents are starting points only. They also apply mainly to the home page, but are easy enough to build on for sub pages.
• The diagram is just that – a diagram only. It doesn’t contain any code related to the actual Sandbox output.
• I swapped out the #header page links with category links for my site, but the structural diagram shows the default output using page links. This was changed by slightly tweaking the PHP, a relatively simple process for those so inclined.

• YEL = baseline system (Dell 745)
• GRE = performance increase from baseline
• RED = performance decrease from baseline

Benchmark Apps
There are a load of comprehensive (and expensive) system testing applications, but I used mostly freeware benchmarks out of cheapness convenience. Using my median system, a Dell Optiplex 745, as an arbitrary baseline, I ran several different applications for the most accurate comparison between systems. Not all of the applications worked where they were supposed to, though. I decided to exclude one of my favorite online hardware comparison tools, Passmark, because it would only run on two of my Windows systems. Also, most of the applications are Windows-only, so the Mac results come from one of the few cross-platform benchmark applications I could find, Geekbench. The XPS 9000′s Geekbench results were measured with its 32-bit app, so the score is probably lower than it should be considering the XPS runs Windows 7 64-bit. Here is a table showing the full breakdown of results.

• YEL = baseline system (Dell 745) / Average
• GRE = performance increase from baseline
• RED = performance decrease from baseline

Findings and Differences
There wasn’t too much here to be surprised about. Even though each benchmark has its own specialized tests with different combinations of hardware, many results fell within a similar range. Outliers seem to result mainly from testing unrecognized or different combinations of hardware. For instance, Brute Benchmark and Novabench didn’t seem to utilize my home server’s dual core CPU when factoring their results. On the other hand, my Dell XPS Gen2 scored an average of 23% below the baseline, but it ranked second (+70%) according to Crystalmark due to a higher emphasis on graphics performance. In fact, looking at Crystalmark’s graphics results alone, my 5-year-old Gen2 performed 180% better than my new XPS 9000.

Disclaimers
With such a wide range of hardware and software, including the countless ways they inter-operate, a true 1:1 comparison gets difficult. Even running the same benchmark software on the same computer can produce inconsistent results depending on the system state. At the same time, it still remains one of the best ways to get a quick overview of system performance along with potential areas ready for upgrades. In the future, I might try to produce even more comparisons by benchmarking individual hardware components. For now, I’m looking into deals on new video cards.

More recently
While the needs of a home server are pretty minimal, a multimedia system can be quite hungry for power. My Dell XPS Gen2 laptop has been a good multimedia workhorse for the past few years. This system has handled most of the digital imaging and video processing tasks I could throw at it. Games also played seamlessly, my preference being action/adventure RPG’s.

The “Mass Effect” Effect
Unlike most gaming consoles, PC games often require new hardware to experience the most out of their design. At the same time, games can be configured to run on (slightly) older hardware, usually at the expense of graphics quality. Mass Effect was no different. It was originally an Xbox 360 release, but it eventually made its way to the PC in mid 2008. I soon found that with the game’s lowest settings, my XPS laptop would overheat and crash after a half an hour. I even experimented with tweaking the graphics drivers to see if anything could be improved. Underclocking resulted in slightly more stability but much choppier gameplay. Overclocking actually did eke out better graphics performance but resulted in way higher temperatures and more frequent crashes. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far into the game.

Upgrayedd!
Gaming was just an added benefit to me, so I saw this “failure” as just one of many benchmark scores to measure system performance. Hitting the limit on a recent video editing project gave me a better excuse to take the upgrade plunge. My initial plan was to build a new system from scratch. It would have been great to recycle old parts. Unfortunately, I had almost nothing I could utilize towards a new system. Even my old desktop’s hard drives are all IDE (PATA), while most newer drives are SATA. I might have been able to use its mid-tower case, but that would leave me with too many obsolete parts at the cost of one older but working computer.

I priced out new parts over the past few months and came up with basic build requirements hovering around $900 minimum for something sufficiently future-proof. Then, I saw it: an end-of-year deal on new XPS desktops. The Dell XPS 9000 met or exceeded my needs for even less money than my custom build. I decided to go with the default RAM and graphics card to get the best possible deal, since individual component mark ups seem to cancel out any savings. I could have been more frugal with an XPS 8000, but the 9000 had too many added benefits: a larger case and beefier power supply, 8 GB more RAM (24 total), 1 extra internal HD (3 total), more slots/types of PCI cards and various extra ports. I’m still keeping an eye out for deals on individual part upgrades as I settle into the new system, but for now, speed is definitely not a problem.

Project Background
This project originally began a few months ago. My Swai Jiao school documented a 2-day seminar at the end of August, 2009, with the goal of possibly creating training videos of the private sessions. We have footage from multiple cameras shooting simultaneously, which is great for providing a range of angles. Multiple sources also means there is a range of video containers, with different naming conventions, clip lengths, dimensions, codecs and framerates. Collecting all of the videos alone was a challenge, taking a few weeks in all.

Conversion and Import = Fail
My main multimedia system was a Dell XPS Gen2 desktop-replacement laptop built nearly 5 years ago. The XPS has been good to me over the past few years, whether working on various multimedia projects or occasional gaming. I started out converting the hodgepodge collection of videos into something Adobe Premiere CS 1.5 could stomach, using a combination of VirtualDub and FFmpeg. This stage took place over another few weeks as I would let videos convert overnight when I had time. When I finally started importing the converted videos into Premiere, my system was showing it’s age. I soon found importing hundreds of videos was not possible, as it would completely freeze my system. Even limiting the project bins to just a few videos, the CPU and RAM would be pegged out just with the import alone. Trying to synchronize more than two videos together was a pain, since it was too choppy to tell what was going on.

As one possible option, I could have created a duplicate set of compressed/low-quality videos to work with, then attempted to swap in the high-quality versions to render the end result. I’m just not sure my system would let me accomplish that last part.

Project, Part Duex
That brings us back to now. Next case study post, I’ll detail my restart of the project with new hardware and software!