LostInTechnology

How To Benchmark Your PC

Posted on 31. Dec, 2009 by UzEE in How To

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Evaluating the performance of our computers is probably one of the most basic tasks everyone has to perform. Whether its to determine application compatibility or just for sheer bragging rights, everyone is interested to know exactly how fast their computer is. But how do you measure the performance of your computer? And no the answer just isn’t clock speed – the prime factor which most people consider solely while making buying decisions. And its not the number of processing cores, or the amount of RAM or hard drive or your graphics card.

The only correct way to measure the performance of your computer is to benchmark its execution, that is, measure the time it takes to run a program. For this purpose, we have benchmark applications, which are simply called benchmarks.  Let’s get started on determining how much better your computer is than your friend’s down the street.

Types of Benchmarks

There are two basic types of benchmarks, synthetic benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. Synthetic benchmarks are specially constructed pieces of software that perform specific tasks to measure the performance of the computer. These tasks though don’t perform any practical computations.  They are usually a good estimation of any real world tasks that we may perform on our computers, so they give a nice generalized view of the overall performance of the system. Popular synthetic benchmarks include consumer oriented suites like PCMark Vantage and industry standards like SPEC2006.

Real-world benchmarks are essentially real applications which are slightly modified to perform a predefined set of instructions like decoding a specific audio file or doing a flyby of a specific section of a map in a game. Since they are based on real applications, there effectiveness is limited to that particular application only. For example, one processor may excel at video transcoding while another may be good at multitasking. Looking at only the stats of a transcoding benchmark may result in an incorrect estimation of the overall system performance.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the benchmark, lets get into how you can actually benchmark your computer.

Step 1: Decide What to Evaluate

First things first, you need to decide what you actually want to evaluate. Do you just want to measure the performance of a specific hardware component, like the CPU or graphics card or do you want to evaluate the overall performance?  The choice of the benchmark depends on what your want to evaluate.

In our example, we’ll be evaluating the performance of the entire system.

Step 2: Get the Benchmark

Once you have decided what you want to evaluate (the whole system in our case), you need to find a suitable benchmark. Depending on your decision from the previous step, you may have a lot of options to choose from. If you just want to measure how your system performs in a specific game, then all you need to do is simply run the benchmark that is included in the game. Most games have it.

In the case of our example, we need to evaluate the overall system performance, we can go with industry standard (very expensive) benchmarks suites like SPEC2006, or something more consumer oriented like PCMark Vantage or even the default Windows Experience Index included with Windows Vista onwards.

Of course the accuracy of the results would vary with different classes of benchmarks. A low cost utility like Windows Experience Index may cost nothing, but may produce very vague performance results. Slightly more expensive options like PCMark Vantage Advanced Edition produce far better results for the $20 price tag. Other options you can consider are PC World’s Worldbench which is a real-world benchmark and costs $250 or SYSMark which goes for around $400.

Step 3: Running the Benchmark

You might be wondering why did I break this into a new section? I mean running a benchmark is as simple as double clicking on the icon right? Wrong. In order to perform a successful system benchmark, you need to create the right environment. By that, I mean you should ensure that you have all the latest updates to your operating system installed, all the drivers are up to date and that no background processes (including anti-virus) are running in the background. You should also make sure that your computer is running in high-performance mode with all visual effects turned up high.

Once all that is done, you can start the benchmark. Benchmarking may take quite some time to complete so consider grabbing a cup of coffee or even watching a movie (on a separate machine of course).

Step 4: Crunching the Numbers

The last and probably the most important step (because this is what you had been waiting for) is getting the results of the benchmark. Again this process would vary greatly depending on the benchmark you used. Windows Experience Index would have given you a simple rating like 4.5 for example. It determines the overall score from the lowest subscore of its 5 performance tests. In contrast, PCMark Vantage would result in a huge result sheet with performance scores of all different suites.

SPEC results are usually normalized to a standard reference machine, like the VAX from the 80s. In-game benchmarks may present a totally different story by showing an average FPS rating or a timeline graph plotting the framerate over time.

In any case, the results simply can’t speak for their selves. In order to get an idea of just how fast (or slow) your machine is, you should run the exact same benchmarks under the exact same conditions on another computer. If that’s not possible, then at least bing for (yeah I didn’t say google) someone else’s scores on the internet. But take these results with a grain of salt because, no matter how ideal the situations are, benchmarks never truly are able to represent real life performance experience.

I hope this guide was helpful. As always, we are open to comments, thoughts and suggestions so please share them via the comments section below.

Article By Uzair Sajid (UzEE), a technologist and a freelance blogger who also authors The Technopath.

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Tags: benchmark, game benchmarks, How To, how to benchmark, PC, pc benchmarks