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Benchmarks

A wide-spread misconception is that just adding memory will increase CPU performance. There is a very limited truth to that. While memory that runs stable at higher bus speed can have a positive impact on the CPU integer performance due to the higher external clock speed, other functions such as floating point operations are generally not affected at all. This is important for selecting benchmarks or even applications that will benefit from an increased amount of system RAM. As a rule of thumb, RAM is orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest swapfile. Therefore, the name of the game is to keep the swapfile (virtual memory) out of the loop, even for large amounts of data. Examples are large image files, e.g. Photoshop or, even more dramatic, video or java playback.

There are very few benchmarks that actually measure this but one example is Ziff-Davis JMark 2.0, the virtual Java machine which measures CPU performance and AW playback.

CPU performance remains unchanged, whereas increasing the memory from 128 MHB to 640 MB resulted in a 75% increase in JMark AW playback scores from 3980 to 6987.

Similarly, the MrSid image compression of a 400 MB PhotoShop file to 20 MB showed a performance increase of about 35%

Relative performance increase achieved on the AMD Athlon 600 reference system by increasing the system RAM from 128 MB to 640 MB. Image compression time dropped from 668 sec to 495 sec (35% faster) while AW playback scores went up from 3980 to 6987 (75% better).

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