What benchmarks to use

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Well, I've finally built my first new machine in 8 years and I'm very impressed...

Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7
Devils Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU
MSI Radeon R9 290X LE Gaming Edition 4096MB

I've installed Win 8.1 64 fine and now before I go too much further I'd like to do some benchmarks -- nothing too crazy, just really to check its running in the right ballpark for the setup.

I'm very behind on these things --- any suggestions on which benchmark tools to run on CPU & Graphics ?
 
Get heaven benchmark downloaded for the gpu I think they have another one also.
Can't remember what to use for the CPU.


Great spec also. Same as what I'm looking into getting.
 
Firestrike, Heaven and RealBench all good suggestions. I also like to use memtest86+ though it's far from perfect (not as exciting to watch as some! :P).

Things not to use:
Furmark - not representative of any usecase ever other than running furmark. Originally could kill cards, now they auto-throttle when they detect furmark but it doesn't even tell you anything about the cards cooling capability as the temps will depend on how aggressive the auto-throttling is rather than anything interesting.
Prime95 - used to be a goto option but again not very representative and causes somewhat unrealistic temperatures.

I'm sure others could add to both the good and bad lists :)
 
Prime95 - used to be a goto option but again not very representative and causes somewhat unrealistic temperatures.

This does require a bit more explanation than usually given: Prime95 is a heavy user of AVX instructions, which causes the on-die power regulator to raise the voltage an extra 0.1V. This obviously causes a big rise in power use/heat output.

This is an uncommon workload, so only really useful to test with if you are actually running AVX heavy software. That said, when Prime is running alongside say Realbench I didn't see the extra voltage applied on my system.
 
Thanks Ronald, good explanation :) I'd actually forgotten myself why Prime95 was poor to test with, beyond that it used specific instructions. Great to have the refresher :)
 
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