Pov-Ray s a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports. We used Pov-Ray v3.7 for all tests, since it supports Dual Core CPUs. We used the build-in benchmark as suggested from developers.

It is a little unusual to see that with the setting at DDR 667, we have better performance than at DDR2 800 and not far behind DDR2 889. The best result came with the 1067MHz setting.

SuperPI has become an utility to benchmark modern systems. In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi and he collaborated with Dr. Y.Kanada at the computer center, the University of Tokyo. This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95 and called Super PI.

While the software offers up to 32M calculations of PI numbers, for all memory settings we tested only up to 2M calculations.