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[Ronski]

Nice result, and very good upload speed on the second one. I'd love to have FTTP available, but unfortunately stuck with FTTC or Virgin, so Virgin it is.

i5-6500T (4 core/4 threads), full speed test result, hits about 80% on all cores
i5-2405s (4 core/4 threads) full speed test result, briefly hits 100% then drops to about 80% on all cores
i5-10600 (6 cores/12 threads), full speed test result, can't say it makes any difference
3900x (12 cores/24 threads), full speed test result, can't say it makes any difference
Xeon E5-2699V3 (18 cores / 36 Threads), full speed test, can't say it makes any difference

Yes I do have far too many computers, there are two other PC's, a couple of laptops, and a couple three more that are passing through.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I certainly wouldn't be picking a PC based on a web browser speed test.   However I would be upgrading from Celerons purely for how much faster using websites will be.

I do have a huge selection of PCs though.

I recently upgraded my mum from an i5 2500k AIO to an Intel NUC i5 8259U.
My Torrent box is an i5 8250U (was going to be a spare appliance for in case my router dies or needs more cores once on FTTP).
My AI video upscaler box is an i5 4690.
My AI photo upscaler box is the Mac Mini M1.
Main desktop an i9 9900k.
Gaming PC a Ryzen 9 5950X.
Portable AI upscaler is the Macbook Pro (M1 Pro).
My server has the i5 8600k.
Windows laptop has an i7 8750H.
Spare Windows laptop (intending to send to a friend in Texas if I can ever figure out how to ship it safely) a Ryzen 2500U.

Not to mention a few CPUs knocking around that are worth practically nothing as its quite hard to find motherboards for now.  For example I upgraded the AIO from an i3 for the better GPU.  A couple of Rasberry Pis knocking around I never got round to using for anything.

[Terry74]

Just a small addendum to complete this thread, I recently bought, off ebay, an HP EliteDesk 800 G2 mini PC with i5 6500 processor.  An Ex business machine with 16GB of memory. So, 4 cores @ 3.2GHz which seems to perform nicely. Discarded the Windows 11 which came with it and loaded Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
This managed to perform the speed test showing >500Mb/s down and >70Mb/s up whilst utilising about 40% on all 4 cores.

So, I guess that the answer to my original question of necessary spec to perform these tests lies somewhere between my 2014 Celeron 2957U and this 2016 i5 6th generation processor. More modern processors will have no difficulty at all.

Regards to all who helpfully replied
Terry

[Alex Atkin UK]

Yeah that's 6.7 times the speed of the Celeron in multi-threaded workloads, 2.7x for single-threaded.  That's got to feel a lot nicer to use.

[craigski]

But Jo sees all these little plaques from others plastered around the technical web sites like "Kitz.co.uk" showing 944Mb/s down and 110Mb/s up and wonders why he's not able to reproduce something similar.
He wants that plaque.

Jo has his plaque now 

[Terry74]

Hi Alex
Yes, Firefox opens in 2 secs instead of 10secs previously, so much nicer to use. Thanks for the actual speed difference. I figured twice for the doubled clock speed plus a bit more for the double number of cores.

and

Hi Craigski,
That made me smile!!! Thanks for that.

Best Wishes to both
Terry

[Alex Atkin UK]

Thanks for the actual speed difference. I figured twice for the doubled clock speed plus a bit more for the double number of cores.

That's based on CPU Mark benchmark but its a reasonable estimate IMO for common workloads.

[Terry74]

Hi Ronski,
We live in the wilds of Norfolk. We only got 30Mb/s (on a good day) FTTC in 2018 before that it was 4Mb/s ADSL which gradually improved with changes of modems, filters etc to a usable 8Mb/s. Then in Jan 2020 Openreach announced Fibre First towns and to our surprise, Watton was on the list.
We watched them cable up the lanes but it wasn't until Nov 2021 that FTTP became a reality. It then took until Jan 2022 and a couple of failed attempts before it arrived at my house.
So you never know!! One day it may come your way. Here's hoping.

Best Wishes
Terry

[Ronski]

Thanks, hopefully one day Openreach will install FTTP, but I get the feeling it will be some time yet, at least we have decent speeds albeit with VM.

PS nice speed test.

[Bowdon]

I was recommended to use the fast.com website speed test.

Though I think its more accurate to try and download a file.

@Ronski when they announced my town it was upto 2025, then within months the OR markers started appearing on roadworks website. Now they have nearly completed the town.

As your area been announced yet?

[sammyadam]

TCP-based speed tests are often problematic in my opinion. They are measuring the speed of the particular protocol and it’s implementation, not the speed of the link.

If you must use TCP, then consider downloading a large file using say ftp and time it. See https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download

However a much better result is obtained by performing a large number of downloads at the same time as this will thoroughly thrash the link. I suggest that the number of downloads should be max( 4, npipes × 2 ) where npipes is the number of internet connections that you have bonded together, if you do have any such bonded connections.

Remember that other processes may be using your own internet connection at the time of the test, either on your own machine or on other machines on your LAN. This includes background processes such as doing backups to the cloud.
Also a server at the remote end or the link coming from it may be overloaded. Do several tests and at least two in the middle of the night.

You are right in terms of pure timings, but real world performance is something else. I'd argue 16GB on the preferred channel would be faster in a lot of use cases that actually use more than 8GB at once.

More benchmarks or a follow-up post would be appreciated as the topic in itself is quite interesting.

[Weaver]

Welcome to the forum, SammyAdam!

[HoraceC]

Hello everyone...

Neither a computers CPU or browser will have an effect on the speed the computer receives - this is down to the speed of the ethernet or wireless adapter/connection. That said, a slower computer will generally struggle with tasks including browsing. For example any images/videos displayed on a website might download quickly, but struggle to be played/rendered by the computer.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On the contrary, the speed the computer receives will be largely dependent on how fast it can process what it just received and request the next piece of information.  eg I might be able to push 9.4Gbit to/from my NAS with perf3, but try doing that over NFS or Samba and it NEVER reaches those speeds, even between NVMe storage which is much faster than that, because there are protocol bottlenecks that eat CPU resources.

Plus every packet of data coming into the ethernet adapter has to be dealt with by the CPU, the weaker the CPU the more chance it wont keep up.  The cheaper the NIC, the more CPU load its likely to incur (as higher end NICs have hardware offloading on the NIC itself) and more likely it is to only support a single CPU core to deal with all the packet processing, whereas modern and server NICs can load balance so that incoming packets don't stall on a busy CPU core.

Download speed is hugely impacted by CPU speed if the CPU is slow and the network is fast.

Another example is game downloads.  A lot of services like Steam will download and decompress the data at the same time.  If your CPU maxes out, your download will slow down.  If your storage isn't fast enough (because even a 70Mbit/s download could easily extract to much larger than this), the download will slow down.

EVERYTHING your PC does is impacted by the CPU speed as it has to organise everything that is going on.