Introduction

The little ctcm program from the German ct-Magazine is an extreme helpful tool to find out about your motherboard performance. The most important thing to do for a motherboard is to transfer data as fast as possible from one device to the other. In particular this is the transfer process between CPU, L2 Cache, Main Memory and PCI Devices. Your CPU can be as fast as it wants, as long as your M/B isn't able to get the data quickly from the memory or the graphics card to the CPU and vice versa, your computer will be as slow as a slower CPU in a fast M/B.

Exactly this is measured by ctcm. It checks the speed of your L1 Cache (which only is depending on your CPU speed really), of your L2 Cache - and here it checks all the different cache conditions - and of your main memory. You are also able to check the speed of the data transfer to and from your graphics card to learn about the speed of your PCI bus, but here it is also very much depending on your graphics card itself.

When you see the results, you have to take in consideration that one of the crucial things for your cache and main memory speed is the bus tact (or bus speed). As you know from my Pentium Reference Table , the bus speed is not the same in all Pentium computers, it depends on the CPU speed. A Pentium 120 has a bus speed of 60 MHz and has therefore a slower memory and L2 cache speed than a Pentium 100. A Pentium 133 has just as a Pentium 200 the same bus speed of 66 MHz - therefore the cache and memory speed is the same, except of the L1 cache.