Original title: The measured performance of the diskless system in Internet cafes is 60% worse than that of different systems under the same configuration.
[PConline gossip]After returning from the visit to Zhongshan, our PConline cafe visiting team has always had a doubt. How is the development of Internet cafes in a big city with more brutal competition and rapid changes? Will the development be more advanced? With these doubts, we were lucky enough to visit Bayou Internet Cafe and its owner, Mr. Ouyang, located in Gangding, Guangzhou. Next, the PConline Internet Cafe Visiting Team took everyone into Bayou Internet Cafe to uncover the secrets of all aspects of the Internet Cafe. In this issue, we will mainly continue the previous test of the diskless system in Internet cafes, and see what the difference is between it and the common system with the same computer.
This is the past content of our Internet cafe visit series. Interested friends can click on the portal below to watch!
[Secret of Internet Cafe You Don’t Know] Issue 1: Can you remember the youth of blowing in the wind in the Internet Cafe industry in the past 20 years?
[Secret you don’t know about Internet cafes] Issue 2: Why don’t the computers in Internet cafes get stuck? You can’t even think of the reason!
[Secret you don’t know in Internet cafes] Phase 3: 3,000 Internet cafe computers easily eat chicken insider boss spent millions of magic change.
[Secret of Internet Cafe You Don’t Know] No.4: The owner of Internet Cafe revealed himself: Why did I spend 1 million to modify water cooling?
Bayou Internet Cafe is located in Gangding, Tianhe District, Guangzhou. Gangding is a relatively prosperous area in Guangzhou. Digital enthusiasts who live in Guangzhou should know that Gangding is the "holy land" of computer hardware and digital accessories in Guangzhou, where Pacific Digital Plaza, Tianhe Computer City and Bainaohui are concentrated. When the PC industry was brilliant, it was once the most influential computer hardware store in South China. Nowadays, although consumers prefer to buy computer hardware online, it is still the most important place for Guangzhou people to buy computer hardware and digital products offline. In addition, there are Jinan University and South China Normal University around Gangding. As we all know, students are a very noteworthy consumer group, which also affects the business direction of Gangding, a local shop. Mr Ouyang and his partners started the Internet cafe business in this digital place.
The business style of offline shops has always been determined by the attributes of the consumer groups living nearby. Because of the geographical location, the target audience of Bayou Internet Cafe is the consumer groups with strong spending power and high requirements, such as nearby college students. Therefore, Bayou Internet Cafe attaches great importance to the design of the store environment. Mr. Ouyang revealed that although most consumers of Internet Cafes are for e-sports games, they also have different needs, so he divided the various areas of Internet Cafes.
The overall environment of Internet cafes will feel like a coffee shop, which is completely free from the dirty, chaotic and poor phenomenon of previous Internet cafes. Besides, smoking is also prohibited in Internet cafes, and the overall atmosphere is more comfortable and casual.
The front desk of the Internet cafe is a water bar. Mr. Ouyang revealed that 30~40% of the income of Internet cafes now comes from value-added services, which is also the biggest difference between Internet cafes and Internet cafes in operation.
Near the bar is a leisure and entertainment area, which is mainly equipped with an all-in-one machine and relatively cheap, but it is quite suitable for customers who like to play small games and surf the Internet.
The e-sports area is naturally the largest in the area, and it is full of computers configured for e-sports games, including Razer peripherals and HKC e-sports screens.
Recently, the rise of chicken-eating games has also made a lot of changes in Internet cafes. Bayou Internet Cafe has specially set up private rooms to bring friends to consumers to eat chicken in multiple rows.
There is a high platform in the e-sports area, which is a high-end configuration experience area. The configuration is GTX1080 and i7 6700K with full split water cooling blessing. There are six computers on one side and twelve computers on both sides, and there is a big screen live broadcast in the middle. It seems that the original intention of the design is to broadcast the LOL 5V5 game live, but now the consumption above is eating chicken, and the screen is also playing the anchor’s chicken-eating video.
The leisure and entertainment area on the other side is relatively small and fresh in decoration, with curtains on the seats to give consumers private space, which is very suitable for couples or friends to get together, chat, play games together and watch a small movie.
In addition, Bayou Internet Cafe also set up a mobile game area in a forward-looking way, which is also a test of Mr. Ouyang’s preference for consumer groups. After all, Internet cafes are positioned as a place for friends to meet, and now mobile games are hot, and everyone can get together to play mobile games. Can also achieve the purpose of the party.
Generally speaking, the atmosphere of Internet cafes makes people feel very comfortable. Dividing different sections can also adapt to the needs of various consumer groups, completely refreshing the cognition of Internet cafes in a winter. Next, we will continue the previous experiment to test the difference between the diskless system of Internet cafes and the computer performance of Internet cafes under our own system. In the third phase of our test of SO Hao Internet Cafe, we found that there is no difference in hard disk running scores between the two systems, but the diskless system will lead slightly in the number of game frames. Let’s see if it is the same in Bayou Internet Cafe.
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Whole machine core configuration
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| CPU |
Intel i5-6500 |
| mainboard |
ASUS EX-B150M-V3 |
| memory |
Samsung 2133MHz 8GB X 2 |
| display card |
Sotai GTX 1060 3GB |
Whole machine configuration:The computer host is in a small iron box under the game table, and there is no separate chassis, so the design is more integrated, and most people can’t find the existence of the host. In terms of computer hardware configuration, the core configuration is i5-6500+GTX 1060 3GB+16GB memory, which is a very balanced configuration. CPU, graphics card and memory will not be short boards, and they can basically play various 3A masterpieces smoothly. Next, let’s look at the differences between these hardware and our daily use one by one.
Memory:
In terms of memory, Bayou Internet Cafe uses Samsung DDR4 2100MHz general bar. We found this product in Taobao, and there are not many merchants selling it. It is estimated that it is mainly delivered by work packages, and its performance is quite satisfactory, but it is better than Samsung’s reputation of stable and reliable particles. Memory is more prone to problems in computer hardware, and internet cafes are taboo for computer instability, so it is reasonable to choose this memory stick.
Graphics card:
Bayou Internet Cafe uses GTX1060, which Internet Cafes prefer, but since Bayou Internet Cafe opened its doors for business the year before last, there was no GTX 1060 5G version at that time, so GTX 1060 3G version was adopted. From the picture, the specific model of the graphics card is Sotheby GTX 1060 3GB Destroyer. The performance of this graphics card can play most games smoothly, and the only shortcoming is the video memory. Many new games represented by eating chicken will occupy about 4GB of video memory even at 1080p resolution, but the video memory of this graphics card is just not enough, and playing some games will lead to the explosion of video memory.
Motherboard:
The motherboard uses ASUS EX-B150M-V3, and B150 motherboard and i5-6500 are considered as a cost-effective gold partner. As a first-line manufacturer, ASUS’s motherboard is also famous for its stability.
Next, we will be the same as before in Zhongshan.Test the performance of the original diskless system on the same machine and the performance after adding the Mingjue A6 Big Mac solid state (with win10 system) we brought. The graphics card drivers are NVIDIA 391.01.
CineBench R15 is a convincing CPU testing system. The Cinema 4D special effects software engine developed for the film and television industry is used to test a high-precision 3D scene rendered by CPU, which can support up to 256 logic cores. In addition, the new version also strengthens the investigation of shaders, anti-aliasing, shadows, lighting and reflection blur, and the detection of CPU performance is more accurate.
Summary:The test showed strange results. In our solid-state system, the CPU performance met the score of i5-6500, but it was obviously abnormal in the original diskless system, far from the normal level of i5-6500. Is it a software problem? Let’s keep testing.
CPU-Z is a well-known CPU detection software, and it is the most used software to detect CPU. Its own Benchmark can accurately judge the multi-core performance and single-core performance of CPU.

Test summary:In the CPU-Z test, the computer is still in an abnormal state under the diskless system. Is there something wrong with our CPU-Z software? I began to doubt life one winter.
X264 FHD Benchmark can effectively test the floating-point operation performance of CPU and the actual file-changing ability of multimedia audio and video.
Test summary:In the software for testing the actual ability of CPU, the performance of the computer under the diskless system is still poor, so it seems that it is not the software problem we brought.
Winrar is a commonly used compression/decompression software, and its own benchmark performance test can test the compression ability of a computer, which is similar to that of a computer.Processor performance and memory performanceIt matters.
Test summaryThe test results were still very embarrassing.
Fritz Chess Benchmark is a chess software, which can be used to test the computing performance of CPU.
Test summary:Chess is a software that simply measures the performance of CPU. It seems that the performance of i5 -6500 is obviously inhibited under this diskless system. Let’s see if other computer hardware will behave abnormally.
7-Zip is a completely free and open source compression software, and its own benchmark performance test can adhere to the decompression/compression ability of the computer, mainly measuringProcessor and memoryPerformance.
Test summary:The decompression performance is basically the same, but the compression performance of diskless system is still almost the same, but it basically belongs to the same performance.
AIDA64 is a tool for testing software and hardware system information, which can display every aspect of PC information in detail. AIDA64 not only provides many functions such as assisting overclocking, hardware debugging, stress testing and sensor monitoring, but also can comprehensively evaluate the performance of processor, system memory and disk drive..
Test summary:In terms of memory performance, this diskless system is much worse than the memory writing performance.
3Dmark is a software specially designed for measuring the performance of graphics cards by futuremark Company, and it has released 3Dmark99, 3Dmark2001, 3Dmark2003, 3Dmark2005, 3Dmark2006, 3Dmark vantage, 3Dmark 11 and The new 3DMark. Now, 3Dmark is not only a software to measure the performance of graphics cards, but has gradually turned into a software to measure the performance of the whole machine. 3DMark’s test physical score can be basically calculated.Actual game performance of CPU.
Test summary:From the test point of view, the graphics card performance of the platform is no problem, and the problem still appears on the CPU. This is the case under the running software, so how does it perform in the game?
Test summaryThe game "Survival of the Jedi" needs no introduction for a winter. I believe everyone is very familiar with it. In the test, we used the same DEMOS. Under the diskless system in the Internet cafe, the machine ran 46 frames, which was nearly 30 frames less than using our own system. Assuming that the performance under the diskless system is 100%, then the performance of the machine game has soared by 60% under SSD. How on earth is this fat?
What is behind this huge performance gap?Distortion of human nature or moral decayWhat’s the reason? After our conversation with Mr. Ouyang, we infer that there are several reasons. Let’s start with the startup principle and mechanism of the diskless system.
First, the network card of a diskless workstation is equipped with a Boot ROM. When the workstation is started by LAN, it will send a boot request signal to the server. When the server receives the signal, it will send boot data to the workstation according to different mechanisms. After the workstation downloads the boot data, the system control will be controlled by the Boot ROM.Go to some areas of memory.. That is to say, the diskless system will occupy part of the memory, SO whether it’s SO Hao Internet Cafe in Zhongshan or Bayou Internet Cafe in Guangzhou, they will give priority to ensuring that the memory is 16GB, and I believe other Internet cafes using diskless systems are also the same. And the memory is occupied, so it is understandable that the memory reading and writing performance will be affected to some extent.
Internet cafe system desktop
Second, when we communicated with Mr. Ouyang, we learned that the system of Internet cafes needs to meet the needs of consumers such as ordering food, calling service, charging and timing, so there are many programs hanging in the background, which leads to a certain degree of influence on the CPU performance of computers. However, the system of Soho Internet Cafe that we visited in the past did not have these humanized functions, which is related to the fact that the business direction of Soho Internet Cafe is more inclined to the positioning of traditional Internet Cafe, which mainly relies on network fees, while the positioning of Bayou Internet Cafe is more inclined to "coffee", and the user experience such as environment and good value-added services is more important, SO the system of Soho Internet Cafe is relatively streamlined, and it is even a little faster to run games in our previous tests.
The third reason is that the performance of disk reading and writing may encounter a bottleneck. The Internet cafe machine is divided into two parts: server and client. Under the diskless system, the client does not need to be equipped with a hard disk. All clients connect to the super-large hard disk in the server through the network and start it by using the system image in the hard disk. The files in the server hard disk can be read by all clients. If they are connected,Wire, network bandwidthIf it is not enough, it may cause data reading and writing to get stuck.
At present, most mature Internet cafes have a mature diskless system provider. When choosing a diskless system, Internet cafes will think and choose according to their business orientation. However, the difference in computer performance between customized systems is beyond our expectation. Therefore, PConline suggests that Internet cafe operators should check whether the diskless system has a great impact on hardware performance when choosing a diskless system provider. For example, the diskless system we evaluated this time has a great inhibition on computer performance, and it is a pity that the computer only played its original performance of 60%.