Review: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

 

Well, the name says it all: RAMspeed is a simple but quite effective command-line utility to measure cache & memory performance (i.e. a benchmark). It's written entirely in C and should be portable to most platforms & operating systems. You can get it from alasir site

There are four routines called INTmark, FLOATmark, INTmem and FLOATmem. First two operate with linear data streams, passed through ALU and FPU respectively; they create an array in memory, and write it with data of different continuous blocks sized as a power of 2, from 1Kb to whatever you like. When an array is filled, then data written is read in the same manner. This simple algorithm allows to show how fast is your cache (all levels), as well as memory.

Second two contain four well-known memory tests, called COPY, SCALE, ADD, and TRIAD. These are synthetic simulations, see README for details; you've seen them probably within STREAM and SiSoft Sandra.

For those of you not around in the days of DOS and wanting to try this application yourself, ill break it down into step by step instructions, you can also follow my screenshots and benchmark results below for the commands. Firstly extract the ramspeed application, move the EXE to your C drive - root (top) level. go to START/RUN. Then type in "CMD" for the command line. this brings up a DOS prompt. navigate to your root C stucture by typing "C.." until it displays C:\ you are now in the correct directory to run the application.

Type in "ramspeed -h" for the help list, you can also see this in the first image below, this allows you to run specific tests. so for example if you wanted to run the INTmark test you key in "ramspeed -i", simple as that. for FLOATmark "ramspeed -f". All in all its a great little program and ive used it quite a lot in the past for testing ram performance along with Sandra.

The final two tests INTmem "ramspeed -e" and FLOATmem "ramspeed -p" have some online comparisons although the guy could do with updating the test machines !

 

The image above shows the scoring for the INTmark and directly below "ramspeed -f" is the FLOATmark result.

The last two tests above are the INTmem and FLOATmem tests, there are some online comparisions on the website, but they are pretty old, for example 2x Intel PIIXeon-400\512k (4x100MHz) + Intel 440GX + SDRAM ECC 100MHz CL2 scores 327.2 and 331.7 respectively while this test system scores over 1500 in both!