what benchmarking programs to use ?

Arge · 2 Jan 2007 at 13:39

I should be recieving my new core2duo rig tomorow and want do some benchmarks of my old socket A machine tonite so i can compare the two whan it arrives.

What benchmarking programs can i use to test the different parts of the system individually? (ram,processor,graphics,etc.)

And which should i use to test the system as a whole ?

Obviously freeware would be good, but i am willing to pay if there is a particually good program.

cheers

steve258 · 2 Jan 2007 at 13:47

For general PC performance benchy: Futuremark PCMark 06

For games: Futuremark 3DMark 05 / 06

Others like SiSoft Sandra 07 (processor arithmetic / multimedia & memory bandwidth) and the popular Super Pi are all good performance indcators. All of them are free unless you want to pay for the pro versions.

But there are no better ways then actually using it and feel the difference yourself, just play some games that you could never play or encode some DVDs...etc and feel the difference!!

gumbald · 2 Jan 2007 at 13:50

If you can find a version of Everest Home Edition floating about, that was free. Also Prime95 (http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm).

Just done a Google for "CPU benchmarking" and got this:

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_cpu.html

There's other tools on there too if you want to test more than processor

semi-pro waster · 2 Jan 2007 at 14:18

My advice would be to not get too hung up on benchmarks, I do run them immediately on building a new PC but after seeing that performance is in the right ballpark I then forget all about them.

Personally I use SuperPi, Fritz Chess Benchmark, 3dmark 2001se for general CPU based, you could use Memtest for Ram to check for errors, 3dmark 03/05/06 for graphics cards and HDTach for your hard drive. Some or all are worth running but like I say I wouldn't get too worried about any of them unless your results are way off.