guys you may want try this

[Tony]

I often read the comments section on Anandtech as there is always constuctive criticism to found about reviews etc.while there i noticed something pretty interesting about super pi.

Now a while back i helped a reviewer who wanted to measure USB2 and firewire thruput from an external HDD over a motherboard controller. We came up with a ram drive to read and write to from the external drive....it worked real well.

Now here is the thing, a poster on the comments section suggested super pi actually reads and writes to the HDD and so incures a speed penalty as you have the speed of the HDD to consider.This is just the same as my USB2 benchmark and the reason why we worked on a ram drive.

So, i put theory to test on my workstation, testing to the normal C drive and to Z which is a BH5 1gig ram drive....using Z super pi ran almost 2secs quicker on a 2M test.

So, if you have the means, create a 200MB ramdrive, load superpi onto it and have a play..i think you may end up breaking a few more records here.Please note though you will have to make sure the ram is 100% stable as it will be acting as a physical drive.

hope this helps

Tony

[coop]

Try running it from a floppy, it is very slow.

[bachus_anonym]

Some time ago I moved from WinXp to WinServer2003 for benching.
I can tell you one thing though, RAMDISK doesn't speed-up SuperPI at all on Server2003, very insignificant difference, even on 16M and 32M runs. Maybe it helps on WinXP. But again, Server2003 is tad faster in SuperPi than WinXP.
RAMDISK is "kind-of" usefull in case where HDD is veeeeeery sloooowww ;)

Thanx for sharing Tony, though :toast:

[D_o_S]

It helps on Windows XP, I got 38 seconds with the Ramdisk instead of 39 without. Anyhow, without the ramdisk and a patched SuperPI I get 37s for 1M, at stock (2210 MHz).

[ZMarre]

Too bad RamDisk free only works up to 64MB :(

PS: what's the clue with the patched version? :confused: //EDIT/ ah ok, it's only with SSE3-cpu's :toast: