OS Configuration Tips for benches

[tcclaviger]

I have gotten pretty decent times with my 3820 setup, however I see some setups out there, Primarily the 2600k, that a handful are able to beat my scores with slower ram, and the same CPU speed

Was hoping to maybe gain some insight into OS tweaking for maximum performance during benchmarking.

Currently I start up with very little starting in the OS. Stripped down a bunch of services, kill all non windows critical tasks, set wprime to high priority, and don't start CPUz until after the BM is done. I do nothing, not even mouse moves while its running. Honestly looking at the scores it seems like some people are bullsh*ting about their CPU speeds, and lowering it before doing CPUz screen shot.

What am I missing to gain that extra couple percent? I don't get what I am missing for the software environment, the 3820 is slightly stronger IPC vs 2600k.

Wprime32: 5.022
Wprime1024: 154sec 65ms
SuperPi 32m: 7minutes 01second

these are all done on stable OSs, long term Prime95 stable not suicide runs.

Examples Below:
Wprime32
http://hwbot.org/submission/2284106_...3820_5sec_22ms <--My best sub 5.1ghz 32 time
http://hwbot.org/submission/2205260_...00k_4sec_951ms <-- 2600k at 5 that is faster, wtf?
Wprime1024
http://hwbot.org/submission/2284000_...20_154sec_65ms <-- My 1024
http://hwbot.org/submission/2276376_...k_153sec_780ms <-- wtf 1024

[Janus67]

Probably a more stripped OS (or using a pre-stripped one). Wprime also tends to give an oddball better score if you re-re-re-re-run too.

his memory speed was a bit faster than yours in wp32 (not a ton, but a bit) with slightly tighter timings.

for the 1024 why do you have so many windows open? again it is probably a pre-stripped OS and slightly faster memory speeds.

[BeepBeep2]

Pretty much nothing but CPU speed helps in wPrime and running it multiple times can often give you a better score. You might gain a few hundredths from OS or ram timings, most important thing about wPrime 32M though is to make sure that all threads start about the same time, on a bad OS they will start a little after another, and you will end up waiting for the last thread to finish costing you a few tenths of a second.

Win 7 always gives me better results in regards to that than WinXP. Stripped OS (correctly stripped) is probably the best bet for SuperPi 32M for example, other stuff it doesn't matter much other than to just disable services.