Competitive Benchmarking Tips and Tricks - Calculation Tweaks
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Calculation Tweaks
Tweaks in this section mostly apply to calculation benchmarks like SuperPI, wPrime, Hexus Pi-FAST, PcMark Series, and so on.
These utilities do intense mathematical calculations on your system. Common sense tells us that to get better results we need to speed up the process, thus enhancing mathematical capabilities and using all of the system resources up to their maximum capabilities.
The Super PI 1MB and 32MB tests are often called "generic" or default styles of running. These are the most popular sets of benchmarks and that's why we're going to focus our tweaking especially on these two. Of course, tweaking these usually (but not always) leads to an overall better system performance, thus a better score in every test. With wPrime, the standard, popular test sets are the 32M and 1024M ones.
First tweak: We enthusiasts call it the "MAXMEM" tweak. It basically lowers the amount of physical memory that Windows is allowed to use for system processes. This tweak often slows your system down but ultimately yields better results with Super PI benching.
Apply this tweak only if you're aiming for the top and want the absolute best. Here's how to enable it. Use a text editor such as notepad to open C:boot.ini manually or go to Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Settings -> select your operating system (that's the default one, usually) -> Edit. Now go to that line that ends with the '/fastdetect' command. Append to the end of that line the following command: "/maxmem=104" (without quotations marks). It should look similar to the example below:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003"
/fastdetect /maxmem=104
Save the changes, close the file, and then reboot. Experiment with this value. Apparently 104MB leads to the best results for a Super PI 1MB run but 600-650MB is the best option for a 32MB run. So when you plan to run Super PI on 32MB, don't forget to set an amount around 600MB, let's say 625MB. When you're not benching at all, delete that key to use your maximum physical memory.
Second tweak: We call it "copy-waza." Actually this tweak is originally from Team Japan, the mighty gods of over clocking; kudos to them. This tweak yields the best performance on 32MB Super PI runs. On 1MB the difference is usually unnoticeable. The technique works like this: you copy a very large file from one partition to another one. Then, exactly as soon as the copying process is done, you hit the "OK" button to start benching.
Why does this work? OPB (Onepagebook), one of the best overclockers in the world, performed a few tests regarding this tweak. Hundreds of others also tried and tested it. They found out that the process of copying very large files lowers the amount of memory allocated for the "explorer.exe" process from around 18-20MB to around 8-10MB.
It's both funny and weird. You're skeptical? Just give it a try yourself! Again, the results may not be astonishing at first glance but, hey, every little improvement helps. Why? Because applying all of these at the same time in a perfect correlation often gives you that must needed one-second or half-second difference.
One last note on this tweak: The "very large file" I've been talking about needs to be at least 2GB but 3-4GB works the best. I've personally been moving around (cut-paste also works, because it's copy-paste-delete) a DVD image file (~4.7GB).
Next: More Calculation Tweaks >>
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