Memory and Sisoft Sandra

[hardcastlej]

Hi,

After reading oc'ing guide for C2D I downloaded Sandra to use the Memory bandwith benchmark...

However, if I run the benchmark 5x in a row I get 5 completely different results..


Int buffer Float buffer
#1 5.74 4.52
#2 6.05 6.03
#3 5.69 5.79
#4 5.79 5.84
#5 5.62 6.28

Why are they SO different?

(2Gb sticks of Samsung PC2-5300 at 333Mhz)


thanks

J

[kalniel]

How many processes are also running at the same time as your test?

[hardcastlej]

nothing... only what crap Vista usually has in the background...

[kalniel]

Quite, so not nothing. On XP I have about 22 processes running.

[hardcastlej]

... I thought this benchmark was supposed to check "total", not what is currently spare?...

[kalniel]

How can it check total bandwidth if something else is also using memory?

The only way you can check every last bit of memory is to run a program before booting up the OS, and even then you can only test parts of the memory at a time, before shifting your test environment to another area and testing again.

Sandra does the best job it can, but it doesn't stop windows processes from interferring with the results - you have to run as little as you can in the background and then average.