PC Hacks

Hack #23. Determine Your CPU Speed

Benchmarking programs can tell your present system speed and if you've made any improvements.

If you expect 2.4 GHz performance from your 2.4 GHz CPU, you should find out if you're getting it. If not, find out what's holding your system back with the Benchmarking Modules in a utility such as SiSoft Sandra, which allows you to identify and compare performance of your CPU, memory, disk drive, and video adapter.

Once you've run a benchmark test on your system, you have a reference to compare with when you check the results of your CPU hacks. Figure 3-8 shows the CPU performance results from an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton series before overclocking. You may also wish to note the temperature before and after CPU hacking because excessive heat is the enemy of the delicate structure inside the CPU chip.

Figure 3-8. CPU performance measurements for a stock AMD Athlon XP Barton 2600+

Overclocking the CPU, as well as trying a handful of RAM speed tweaks covered in Chapter 4, is considered risky business by any standards. Certainly CPU-intensive work like graphics rendering, spreadsheets, and database sorting that involve a lot of math will benefit from a boost in just the CPU speed. Figure 3-9 shows the performance increase of this particular test system after increasing the CPU clock speed a mere 11.4%, from 1.91 GHz to 2.13 GHz. Raw CPU performance measured ...