How to Properly Benchmark Your PC

Posted 01/27/2010 at 8:00am | by Gordon Mah Ung & Loyd Case

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To casual observers, PC builders who fixate on benchmarks are geeks unable to see the forest from the trees. “Why,” they ask, “can’t you just enjoy your new computer and let it be?” Our answer: the difference between a person who cares about benchmarking and one who doesn’t is how much that person values their free time.

Case in point, we recently did something as simple as download two large zip files at the end of the work day. Instead of strolling out at 6 p.m., we ended up waiting 15 minutes for the files to be decompressed on our work-issued PC. To care about benchmark is to care about performance. And to care about performance is to care about having more free time on your hand.

But you shouldn’t just download any benchmarking tool to run--there’s a right and wrong way to benchmark your machine if you want to get meaningful results. We’ll teach you proper benchmarking techniques and how to interpret your results. Read on to learn how to benchmark the Maximum PC way.

Preflight your PC

Getting repeatable, reliable benchmark results isn’t just about picking the right benchmark, it’s also about configuring your PC properly too. Here are some basic tips every armchair benchmarker should perform before running his or her first benchmark run:

Turn off any screen saver: Even though the screen saver is supposed to stay inactive during use, you should always completely disable the screensaver.

Turn off power saving modes: Unless you’re interested in measuring power consumption of the machine using a Watt meter, all benchmark runs should be conducted with the machine set to high performance mode in the OS.

Disconnect from Internet: Remove any Ethernet cable or disconnect any Wi-Fi connection unless it’s needed for your benchmarking run.

Disable antivirus apps: Unless you want to see the impact of having AV overhead on a machine, disable any antivirus tools for your benchmarking run.

Turn off autoupdate: Windows update should be switched off to prevent it from download a massive huge patch (You did disconnect the network connection right?) or to prevent it from eating CPU cycles looking for one. Other apps that autoupdate should also be turned off as well.

Defrag your hard drive: If the drive is heavily fragmented, we recommend that you invoke a defrag of the disk. Those with SSD’s, obviously, need not perform this step.

Disable System Restore: Turning off System Restore will prevent Windows from creating those restore points.

Reboot: Self explanatory.

Wait for the machine to fully boot: As we all know, it takes a minute or a few minutes for the OS to load all of the files it needs – even after you’re presented with the desktop. Wait a few minutes until disk activity has subsided.

Run ProcessIdleTasks: Spawn a “DOS box” by typing run CMD and type: “Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks” This will order Windows to perform all of the tasks it would normally do when the system is idle.

Repeat your benchmark: We recommend that you run your benchmark at least three times to five times and to take the median score.

The Three ‘Rs of benchmarking

Real-world

Real-world benchmark wasn’t always the en vogue. Years ago, the enthusiast community mostly relied on synthetic benchmarks (some prefer the term ‘artificial benchmarks’). That trend broke when people realized that vendors were skewing their drivers to increase performance in the synthetic tests, which actually hurt real-world gaming performance. This move pushed benchmarkers toward real-world apps and games with the thought that performance enhancements will deliver real benefit.

Relevance

Just like you wouldn’t bring a Klingon d’k tahg to a phaser fight, you shouldn’t use a CPU benchmark to test a hard drive. As easy as it would be to understand, you wouldn’t believe how many times we see people cite a benchmark intended as a GPU test to illustrate CPU performance. For every benchmark you run, you’ll want to understand what component it’s most influenced by: CPU, GPU, RAM or HDD.

Repeatability

So you’ve found a benchmark actually works for your needs. Great! But is it repeatable? Can you run it five times on the same machine and have it produce the same results within a tolerable level of variance of, say, three percent?

Synthetic vs. Real World

As we mentioned, real-world applications have been established as the preferred benchmarking tools for quite some time, but that doesn’t mean synthetic benchmarks are irrelevant. In fact, synthetic benchmarks can be quite useful in evaluating a focused set of components such as RAM, the CPU or hard drive. Some synthetic tests can even be considered partially real-world.

The classic complaint against synthetic tests is that they used tests or engines that were optimized solely for the benefit of the benchmark results. But many synthetic tests today are based on real-world engines or use algorithms developed from popular applications. PC Mark’s hard drive tests, for example, uses traces of what apps or the OS does. It then runs these traces against the hard drive to measure hard drive performance.

You can see how the line between synthetic and real-world benchmarks can get easily blurred today. In some cases, actually finding real-world benchmarks that stress a particular component is difficult. RAM is probably one of the best examples of that. It’s actually very difficult to find real-world benchmarks that will exploit either the low latency or high bandwidth features of modern RAM. It’s only through synthetic benchmarks that you can actually see that you’re benefiting from any additional bandwidth at all. Hard drive features is also fairly difficult to discern without the use of at least some synthetic benchmarks.

Next: Let's get on to the actual benchmarking tools!