Competitive Benchmarking Tips and Tricks - More Calculation Tweaks
(Page 3 of 5 )
Third tweak: "RAMDISK," period. There are more than a few RAM disk alternatives. Just do a quick Google search. RAM disk allocates memory that acts like a virtual system drive with read/write access. The data is stored in certain areas of RAM and not on a hard disk. Data transfer from hard drives is a lot slower than your RAM.
Even with SATA and high RPM drives, the time it takes to seek out your data is much slower. Ultimately a RAM disk increases read/write performance by a factor of more than 50. This tweak is very useful for other benchmarking utilities too, especially the PCMark Series (often the score is refused by ORB-the online result browser-because of RAM disk usage).
Hardware RAM disks are amazing inventions. Check out the Gigabyte i-RAM-it's very expensive, but awesome. It acts like virtual memory, too. It's just as fast as RAM but you can store data on it. It's very useful for storing utilities and applications that are used on a very frequent basis with nearly instantaneous loading speeds.
Fourth tweak: Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance Options -> Advanced. Set "Processor Scheduling" to "Programs," and "Memory Usage" to "System Cache." This is a simple method for tweaking your operating system. Keep in mind that this tweak lowers your gaming and graphical/video performance. Memory usage should be kept on system cache only when needed (such as for file servers).
Significant tweak: You may already know most of the time there are way too many services running on a Windows-based operating system. Maybe you need them and maybe not. There are dozens of articles, tutorials, and guides that explain how to find out which services are needed and stop or disable the rest, but that's beyond the scope of this article.
In this tweak, you want to stop all unnecessary services and hardware devices. After benching you should re-enable them by restoring your previous settings. Here's the easy way to disable all of these quickly:
Start->Run->msconfig->'Diagnostic Startup'->Apply->OK
The "Diagnostic Startup" mode loads only basic devices and services-those that are necessary for your system to run. Once you complete your benchmark you can repeat the above process to open up "msconfig" and select your previous mode (it was either "Normal Startup" or "Selective Startup").
More tweaks or myths: There are two tweaks that were spread all over the Net. The first was to use "Real-Time" CPU priority for the benchmarking utility (i.e.: superpi.exe) and the second was to close/kill "explorer.exe." These two tweaks are very relative and offer little in the way of improvement. They are inconsistent and generally worthless-and can even hinder your performance. You can experiment with them and hope for the best. Using real-time priority yields the best results for older systems like PII, AMD K6, PIII series, and so on. On newer systems there are usually no gains at all.
Another mythical tweak is that specific versions of Super PI Mod may result in better scores. For example, some say that the Japanese version scores better on Netburst-based processors while for Pentium-M it is usually the opposite.
There have been rumors and debates over operating systems too. Some experts say that Windows Server 2003 is better while others argue for XP Pro. Either way, all that I can say is that you shouldn't change, reinstall, or buy a new OS just for the sake of benching. You'd probably end up disappointed anyway since these aren't solid tweaks.
I've called these mythical tweaks because they can't be proven, only work once in a while, or are very system specific.
Next: Graphic Processing Tweaks >>
More Hardware Guides Articles
More By Barzan "Tony" Antal
| Recommended by Dev Hardware |
|---|
|
