How To: Benchmark Your PC without Breaking the Bank

Posted 02/08/2008 at 5:12pm | by David Murphy

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Benchmark Your Hard Drive

If you’re looking for the source of slowdowns in your system’s storage performance, the free HD Tach benchmarking utility is a must-have. With one click of a button, the application tests burst speeds, CPU utilization, random access speeds, and sequential read speeds.

The program gives you a ton of numbers once it’s finished. The most important of these is the average read speed of your drive—it takes less time to pull data from the inside layer of a platter than the outer, hence the “average” in the calculation. On the whole, this number is a good measure of your drive’s general performance.

If you have two identical hard drives in your PC, a large disparity in benchmark results could indicate a faulty drive. Back up now!

HD Tach’s burst speed measurement represents your drive’s ability to transfer data from its onboard cache to your CPU. Higher numbers indicate faster file transfers. The random access measurement indicates the time it takes the drive to access a random sampling of data from all over the drive. In this case, a lower number is better.

There’s not much you can do to improve the performance of a subpar drive. Check your BIOS to make sure you’re running at the fastest interface speed possible—SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 1.5, for example. Defragmenting the drive might help, but performance degradation over the life of a drive might indicate hardware failure.

Measure Your Overall System Performance

The open-source program COSBI OpenSourceMark attempts to replicate real-world benchmark scripts, similar to SysMark’s and PCMark’s. We’ve found that OpenSourceMark, which uses a number of real-world operations, is one of the better ways to analyze your computer. Install the program and click the “official run” button to start the tests—which include file compression, audio encoding, spreadsheet calculations, and image-editing activities. The program detects multiple cores and automatically reconfigures the benchmarks to take full advantage of your rig’s hardware. And if you just want to test a particular subset of performance—say, file encoding—just select the “custom run” option and handpick your benchmark suites.

OpenSourceMark lets you save information about your CPU utilization to a text file.

OpenSourceMark is a great way to test whether your computer tweaking is actually having a measurable effect on your system’s performance. Do you really need to defragment your drive 12 times a week? How much does your antispyware program actually slow down your PC? What’s the hard benefit of all that extra overclocking?

Test Your Rig's Stability

Prime95 runs your PC at full loads until one of two things happen: You’re content with your testing or your rig shuts down.

Whether you’ve been overclocking an old rig to wring out more performance or you just purchased a new overclocked machine, stress testing your computer’s stability should be high on your priority list. (Stock-clock users can join in the fun too, but it’s not as critical. You can test whether a beta driver you downloaded mucks up your system in some capacity, but for the most part, a stock-clock machine should be inherently stable hardware-wise.)

An overclock can push a rig past safe (or stable) operation. You might not notice this instability or Windows might crash once an hour. Either way, one sure way to determine whether you’ve gone too far is to run your computer like a madman, and if it survives the rite of passage, you’re golden.

We use Prime95 for stress testing in the Lab. In a nutshell, the program calculates new Mersenne prime numbers and taxes the heck out of your processor and RAM in doing so. If you’re on a single-core machine, all you have to do is fire up Prime95 and select the Torture Test from the options menu. Run the test for 10 hours on small FFTs, which nails your CPU, before switching to large FFTs for the RAM.

Owners of multicore machines will want to download the .zip version of Prime95 and extract its contents to a new folder for each core of your machine. Run the program out of each folder, which will open up one instance of Prime95 per core. Click “Affinity” on the program’s advanced menu and set each instance to run on a different CPU core. Dual-core owners should run a small FFT on one core and a large FFT on the other; just double that equation if you’re rocking a quad-core PC.