Optical Drive Scores on Performance Test 7.0

[PerformancePC]

The top scores on Performance Test 7.0 seem highly inflated by the optical drive performance.

5 of the top 10 scores have CD marks with read speeds over 1GB/s which is well beyond the limitations of any optical media device.

Is there a bug in the program that allows users to submit ram disks as a selected CD drive?

[PerformancePC]

Any response would be appreciated. We've set the Passmark record several times and currently have a system that should be very close, but for these inflated optical drive scores.

[Michael (Passmark)]

People get these scores by making virtual CD/DVD drives that are actually RAM disks (People also do the same with the HDD tests).

There is no way for us to detect people doing this on the program side. We don't see it as being a bug in our software, as there is a legitimate reason to use RAM as a replacement for a CD drive. We have in the past tried to set hard limits on what should be possible, however;

a) Technology is always improving and these limits quickly become out of date.
b) Sometimes people do have some absurd hardware set-ups that pass whatever limit we choose.
c) People would just figure out the limits and make RAM drives that are artificially limited to the max we allow.

The only other method of stopping these results appearing in the top 10 would be for us to manually police it, however, this still falls afoul point b above. Seeing as the top 10 is merely a curiosity rather than any kind of proper competition manual policing is also too time consuming.

Note that one change we did make between version 6 and 7 was to change the overall Passmark rating calculation so that no one system component could too greatly inflate the overall score, and weak components pull the whole score down. For instance you will never see an old original pentium in the top 10 even if they somehow managed to cheat to get an absurd CD score of 100s of terabytes a second.