Question about comptuer speed

[JManion]

Hey everyone

How can I tell if my computer is performing at its maximum output? Basically what can I do to speed it up to get the best performance.

Any help would be appreciated.

[brianr]

Assuming you mean best performance for computer chess, you could try this benchmark and see how your hardware compares to similar configurations in the list.

http://www.jens.tauchclub-krems.at/dive ... marks.html

[JManion]

Yeah

I meant best performance. I also meant what can I do to speed up my computer to get the best performance.

I have a Q6600 Quad, and win xp 64

[Mark Mason]

Hi,

One way is to reduce the number of Windows services running in background which consume CPU and RAM. For chess engine use you can run Game Booster which with one click temporarily stops all services other than those essential to run the game software. One further click and normal service is resumed immediately. Its free to download:

http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

Mark

[brianr]

I also have a Q6600 (but under Vista).

Overclocking from the stock 2.4GHz to 3.1 is not hard (and has proved _very_ stable for 2+ years), provided you have an overclockable motherboard and more than the stock cooling fan.

As far as tweaking various services and ancillary background processes, just do not start more engines or parallel searching than 4. Look at Task Manager (or Linux equivalent), and there will likely be no other processes with any measurable CPU consumption, so I do not bother beyond keeping track of how many engines and how many cores each can use. Even if you could measure the CPU resourses from tweaking other things, the miniscule difference would likely have absolutely no ELO impact at the chess engine performance level.

Of course, also properly configure hash and other tables to totally avoid any main memory paging.