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Freeware Files: Five Punishing Game Benchmarks for your GPU!

David Murphy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:00:00 -0500

What's the first I did upon hearing the numbers for ATI's new HD Radeon 5870 graphics card? I scrambled for benchmarks, because that's the one thing an announcement and subsequent review of a smokin' new piece of hardware can do for a rabid enthusiast: inspire.

It's been a while since I've actually sat down and crunched the numbers for my killer custom PC (that's killer as in legendary, not NICs). I'm not lazy. Rather, I don't have access to the expensive system benchmarks that magazines and Web sites typically use to analyze the all the new hardware that comes out. I don't have all-in-one benchmarks like PCMark Vantage, GPU-punishing titles like Crysis, and--worst of all--preconfigured demo runs for any number of titles that would help ensure the validity and repeatability of the delivered scores.

In short, I have nothing. You might not have nothing, but odds are good that you are similarly ill-equipped to benchmark your graphics card (and any tweaks or modifications you make) in the style of a professional review. Nothing... until now.

This week's freeware roundup will show you five different games that you can use to punish your poor graphics card into frames-per-second submission. They might cost a grand total of zero dollars, but these tests are repeatable and easy to use--the perfect combination of characteristics for aspiring benchmarkers who might not want to get their hands dirty, but still want some kind of way to determine exactly how powerful their graphics card really is.

X3: Terran Conflict

This demo for the open-ended space simulation game X3: Terran Conflict is like having the Four Horsemen pay a visit to your house and kick your graphics card. It's a DirectX 9 benchmark, which isn't as ideal of a scenario as you'll find in some modern titles that support DirectX 10 functionality. Still, the point of a benchmark is to tax your system to its limits. To that extent, X3: Terran Conflict is a free, fire-starter of a test for your GPU

Download it here!

Resident Evil 5

Killing zombies is fun. Killing zombies at a maximum framerate is even more fun because, er, it accelerates the killing. Right. Although it was original designed, in-part, to test out the 3D capabilities of the game for those equipped with Nvidia-based graphics cards, the Resident Evil 5 benchmark demo is still a solid solution for testing your graphics card's capabilities regardless of manufacturer. Better yet, the RE 5 benchmark comes with the option to run in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 modes. It's the ideal solution for those looking to test on either a current or legacy architecture... or both.

Close your eyes and download it here!

BattleForge

Okay, everyone who's a DirectX 10-or-higher benchmark, raise your right hand.

*A number of different games raise their hands*

Now everyone who's a DirectX 11-compatible benchmark, raise your left hand.

*BattleForge shoots its second hand in the air and screams as if it was on a rollercoaster*

'nuff said. This game is as graphically punishing as it is future-proofed, for this is the only title on the market as of this article's writing that now supports DirectX 11 functionality. Of course, that's slightly hampered by the fact that there are only two DirectX 11-compatible graphics cards right now. But. Er. The benchmark is free, as BattleForge itself is one of EA's "Play4Free" titles--downloading the game itself costs nothing, as the various bits and pieces that flush out the title's main RTS experience come as microtransactions. Boo those, but yay for free DX11 benchmarks!

Download it here!

Tom Clancy's HAWX

You'll appreciate the GPU benchmark found in Tom Clancy's HAWX in part because the game is just so damn pretty. Watch as your death-from-above aircraft soars over beautifully rendered satellite-generated terrain... provided your graphics card can handle the punishment, that is. This DirectX 9- and DirectX 10-compatible benchmark isn't quite as challenging on the former as it could be, but it's a real killer if you crank the settings on the latter. Can your system handle this game's intense aerial combat? Or will you long for the days of the less graphically robust A-10 Tank Killer?

Download it here!

Crysis

This is the biggie. It's the age-old retort to any video card boast: "Yeah, but can it run Crysis?" There's only one way to find out, and this is it. Install the Crysis demo, then be sure to grab the third-party Crysis Benchmarking Tool. This helpful little utility auto-detects whether you're running the full game or the demo. It also opens up access to a wealth of configurable options that you can set prior to the run--and believe me, you'll be doing a lot of tweaking. This is the end-all be-all of current graphics benchmarks, save for the aforementioned BattleForge DirectX 11 test. But that game just uses the new APIs; Crysis bends your videocard over its knee and slaps it right on the bottom.

Download Crysis here!

Download the Crysis Benchmarking Tool here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you're dying to recommend!

Murphy's Law: Is a Firefox 3.5 Really That Fast?

David Murphy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:45:58 -0500

Happy day-after-Firefox-release day. If you're one of the 3.2 million Americans to download the latest release of the browser as of this column's writing, congratulations. You, like your peers, have recognized the value of upgrading to faster and better technology products! If that sounds weird, that's the point. It should. According to Net Applications, around twenty percent of users (out of a survey sample of around 160 million people) still use an older version of a Web browser, be it Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 2, or either Safari 3.1 or 3.2. You are not among them; I salute thee.

You've probably read a lot of marketing in the last 24 hours about how fast, awesome, and packed-full of features the new Firefox 3.5 release is. Since you've had a chance to play with the release candidate of this latest upgrade starting in early June, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. But let's cut through the press release and examine the real facts: Just how much faster is Firefox 3.5 over its browser brethren? Has Mozilla's newest TraceMonkey JavaScript engine delivered a princess or a barrel?

Yes and no.

If we're just considering a Firefox-only universe then, yes, the browser's performance is quite an improvement over its predecessor 3.0.11 release. You can partially thank Adobe for that. Mozilla interwove the company's just-in-time compiler nanojit, released as open-source in 2006, alongside a new tracing system to create Firefox's new JavaScript engine. Without getting too technical, the tracing engine streamlines Firefox's operations by recording the path that frequently accessed JavaScript code takes through an interpreter. It then compiles this trace into native code, which can be called up and duplicated faster than passing the code through the interpreter once again.

The industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript benchmark attempts to highlight differences in browser performance by running through a series of real-world use patterns. More than that, the program runs through enough iterations of the tests to calculate a measurement of the run's statistical significance--a determination of the accuracy of your results and their validity for real-world comparisons. Using this very benchmark, Harry McCracken of Technologizer notes that Firefox 3.5 delivers a performance improvement that's 2.4 times faster than Firefox 3.0.11. But Google's Chrome 2.0 beta takes the cyber-cake in the end, just squeaking by Mozilla's masterpiece on the benchmark charts.

(+1) Google Chrome

Samara Lynn from ChannelWeb ran her own SunSpider browser evaluation, sticking to Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5, and Internet Explorer 8. Her numbers gave Chrome an advantage of nearly 600 milliseconds, or a 39 percent decrease in time from Firefox 3.5 to Chrome. Internet Explorer 8 sank to the bottom of the listing as if it had a rock tied around its status bar, delivering a time of 8,131.8 milliseconds to Chrome's 924.2 (lower is better).

So who's right? Lynn? McCracken? TGDaily, which puts Chrome's time at 628.4 milliseconds (a 48 percent decrease compared to Firefox 3.5)? Nobody and everybody. While the rankings between the browsers remain the same within these three sites, as well as my own personal comparisons of Firefox and Chrome in SunSpider, the numbers vary depending on the system setup. That makes it a little difficult to decide the close races, especially since TGDaily has Chrome beating out Safari by roughly 60 milliseconds. At least we can all agree that Chrome is faster than Firefox 3.5, right?

(+1) Google Chrome

A similar situation occurs on Futuremark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark. Although TGDaily claims that Chrome won't run it, both Lynn and I received scores when running the program through Google's browser. She has Chrome beating out Firefox 3.5 by a score of 2747 to 1843, a 49 percent speed increase from Firefox 3.5 to Chrome. I found a 55 percent increase in performance on my own benchmark run, with Chrome overtaking Firefox 3.5 to the tune of 3,073 to 1,978. Just for the sake of a good joke, Lynn pegs Internet Explorer's performance on this test at a whopping 675. That's not even half of her recorded score for Firefox.

(+1) Google Chrome

Just to throw one more benchmark in for good measure--because I don't exactly trust Google's Chrome V8 benchmark that suggests Chrome is nine times faster than Firefox 3.5--TG Daily ran one of my favorite evaluations that tests Flash performance in a browser. The run, called Le Crabe, measures how many individual animations your screen can hold before the frames-per-second score dips below a particular amount (25). On this, Firefox 3.5 crushed the competition, holding out for 636 total crabs on TG Daily's setup to Google Chrome's 241. Stranger still, even Internet Explorer itself pulled out of dead last to deliver an impressive second-place performance amongst Firefox 3.5, Safari, and Chrome.

(+1) Firefox 3.5

You made it this far--so which browser is faster? Eh. To really get a sense of how your browser performs, you have to factor in more than just the JavaScript benchmark numbers. What's the memory use of the browser? What kind of content exists on the sites are you hitting up? What's your Internet connection? While these benchmarking tools have allows us to legitimize the differences between Firefox's versions on a functional level, and help highlight the various browsers' abilities in certain areas of rendering, there's no clear-cut winner based on the numbers. After all, it's difficult to weigh certain performance aspects over others. And as you've seen, individual performance characteristics can vary greatly depending on the testing platform. Browser benchmarks are great for comparing version performance--for a big-picture guide, there's just so much more to consider.

Speed up your geek involvement by befriending David Murphy @acererak. He's three-point-five times as fast a twitterer as any other geek, save perhaps Nathan.

AMD: Notebook Battery Life Claims are Bogus

Paul Lilly — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:00:00 -0500

AMD isn't happy with the way some battery claims are made, saying the reliance on a test called MobileMark 2007 doesn't yield an accurate indicator of what to expect. The problem, says Patrick Moorhead, a vice president for marketing at AMD, is that the parameters for the test include dimming the screen the just 20 percent brightness, turning off WiFi, and making sure no music, video, games, or webpages are running. Not only is the test flawed, says Moorhead, but it also favors Intel.

"Intel is advantaged in this environment because they have optimized their architecture to have bettery battery life when the computer isn't doing anything," Moorhead said.

Intel shrugged off AMD's complaint, saying if the No. 2 chip maker is so passionate about the subject, it would "encourage them to bring any new proposals or edits to the nonprofit industry consortium called BAPCo."

But is AMD out of line? Not likely. In the June issue of Maximum PC, Editor-in-Chief Will Smith discussed the topic in his Ed Word titled "Notebook Battery Life is a Trap."

"You'd think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results -- in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time," Smith wrote.

AMD warns that either the industry starts better regulating itself, or there's a high possibility of a consumer filing a lawsuit or the FTC stepping in.

Image Credit: techtree.com

How Fast Is Windows 7? Faster Than You Think!

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:21:13 -0600

After Windows Vista's disappointing performance versus Windows XP, and controversial benchmarks of a pre-beta build of Windows 7, everyone's wondering how Windows 7 compares, not just with Windows Vista, but also with the "operating system that will not die" (Windows XP SP3).

ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 maven, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, rose to the challenge and has put Windows 7 build 6956 up against Vista SP1, Vista RTM (the original and worst), and Windows XP SP3 in three benchmarks: boot time, Passmark Performance Test 6.1, and Cinebench R10.

Not surprisingly, Windows Vista SP1 blew the doors off its RTM ancestor, but was similarly run off the road by Windows 7, which also made Windows XP SP3 eat its dust in virtually every test. The only test in which Windows XP SP3 held off its two-generation newer rival was in the OpenGL version of the Cinebench R10 benchmark. If this performance level continues until Windows 7 sees the light of day sometime next year, Windows 7 users will be very happy, and Windows XP diehards who have resisted "Mojave" will finally upgrade.

Hit Comment to chime in on how you rate Windows 7 versus its predecessors.

Is Windows 7 M3 Build 6801 Really "Vista R2?"

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:56:08 -0600

InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy has put Windows 7's Milestone 3 pre-beta build 6801, a freebie from last month's Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference, through a variety of benchmark tests, and isn't all that impressed:

As I reported on my Enterprise Desktop blog, the more I dug into Windows 7, the more I saw an OS that looked and felt like a slightly tweaked version of Windows Vista.

At his blog, Kennedy complains that Windows 7 is:

Just as slow as Vista...Just as consumer-focused as Vista...Just as confusing as Vista...

Kennedy cites these similarities:

The number of execution threads in key subsystems is almost the same in Windows 7 as in Vista
Benchmarks of Windows 7 and Vista Ultimate SP1 using the DMS Clarity Studio tools suite show almost identical results
Similar amounts of RAM are used by Windows 7 and Windows Vista

From these facts and visual similarities between Windows 7 and Vista, Kennedy concludes:

Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.

Is Kennedy right? Here's what I think is the problem with Kennedy's performance analysis: he's comparing a pre-beta with a finished product that already has one service pack under its hood, and he's complaining that the pre-beta he tested isn't any faster than its mature predecessor. In my experience, this is actually outstanding performance for a pre-beta.

I'm the author of two books on Windows Vista and I have contributed to several others, and as a consequence I was using various beta versions of Windows Vista from early 2006 on. Those releases of Vista were almost unbearably slow on my HP dv5000-series laptop, but the same computer running Vista Ultimate SP1 is now much faster when performing the same or even more complex tasks. Day 1 performance of Windows Vista was way better than with the early betas, and it's even better now with SP1, and yet a pre-beta of Windows 7 is already reaching comparable performance levels. I'd have been thrilled with this level of performance on the betas of Windows Vista I ran, and we're still many months away from a production release of Windows 7.

Although I haven't had a chance to try Windows 7 yet, many reviewers online and MaximumPC.com readers have tried the pre-beta of Windows 7 and like it, reporting better speed than with Vista and high overall satisfaction, whether running it as a native OS or within the limitations of a virtualized environment.

So, what should you believe? Hopefully, by the end of 2008 or in early 2009, you'll be able to make up your own mind by installing the public beta of Windows 7. In the meantime, hit Comment and tell us your experiences with Windows 7 (good, bad, and ugly).

PCMark Memory Benchmark Favors GenuineIntel over AuthenticAMD

Paul Lilly — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:21:00 -0500

By now, everyone's aware that Intel has the fastest chips on the market, and with Nehalem getting closer to release, the chip maker's position doesn't look to change anytime soon. But what you don't know is that Intel also has the faster name. Confused? You're not the only one.

Before clarifying, let's first look at how manufacturers label their processors. Each chip contains a processor-specific character string detailing the manufacturer, make, model, and available features. The two common ones you're probably familiar with include GenuineIntel and AuthenticAMD, neither of which can be changed. That's not the case with VIA's Nano processor (CentaurHauls) and it's here where things get interesting.

Looking to expose any irregularities in PCMark05's benchmark results, ArsTechnica ran the suite on a VIA Nano processor and then re-ran the benchmark two more times after changing the chip's CPUID to GenuineIntel and AuthenticAMD. To prevent unbiased results, a point Futuremark touts heavily with its benchmarking program, altering this string shouldn't have any effect on performance. And for the most part it didn't, but ArsTechnica did discover a troubling discrepancy in PCMark05's memory results.

By changing the CPUID from CentaurHauls to AuthenticAMD, the news outlet noted a 10 percent jump in memory performance. Even more surprising, changing the string to GenuineIntel saw memory performance jump up by a staggering 47.4 percent. To eliminate the possibility of user error, ArsTechnica claims to have "benchmarked each CPUID multiple times across multiple reboots on completely clean Windows XP installations."

Before crying conspiracy, the news outlet points out a simple explanation as a likely cause for the irregular benchmarks, and that's sloppy coding. Based on the CPUID PCMark05 reads, it could be disabling various optimizations on the assumption that they're not supported, even if they really are. Even if this is true and assuming ArsTechnica's results can be verified, Futuremark will still have plenty of egg on its face, and it might take more than a software patch to clean it off.

Do you have a different theory as to what's going on?

Image Credit: Futuremark

No BS Podcast #55: The "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" Edition

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:31:37 -0600

This week, Dave, Gordon, and Andy talk tons about Maximum PC's self-created storage benchmark of complete awesomeness. We also preview all the sweet Game Developers Conference announcements (and rumors) for next week, and light the funeral pyre for HD-DVD. We hardly knew thee.

Of course, there's the usual round of mega-important listener questions. And feel free to listen to Gordon's big weekly rant--this time, it's personal.

To learn more about our Intel-sponsored LAN parties, mosey on over here.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? Just need someone to talk to? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337, operators are standing by. Also, get your game on with the editors of Maximum PC by joining our Steam group or Facebook Page.

Modders and modding aficionados, check out Mod Shop: submit and vote on the coolest mods around—and win prizes!

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

How To: Benchmark Your PC without Breaking the Bank

David Murphy — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:12:56 -0600

We run benchmarks at Maximum PC because we have to; there’s no other way to determine the minute differences between systems without a repeatable standard of comparison. But you don’t have to be a reviewer to run a benchmark; in fact, regular benchmarking can give you valuable insight into the status of your system. For example, benchmarks are the best way to decipher whether the various performance-enhancing applications you’re running on your PC actually do anything or whether that latest batch of drivers hurt your gaming performance more than it helped.

The Maximum PC suite of benchmarks costs upwards of $1,000—a bit out of the price range of users who just want to see if their machines are up to snuff. But there are cheaper (and by that we mean free!) alternatives; we’ll show you how you can use them to test your rig in the comfort of your own home.

Time: 22 hours

What You Need

A PC
Cinebench
www.maxon.net
3DMark05
www.futuremark.com
Call of Juarez DirectX 10 Demo
http://tinyurl.com/2g6dhr
HD Tach
www.simplisoftware.com
Cosbi OpenSourceMark
www.sourceforge.net/projects/opensourcemark
Prime95
www.mersenne.org
Patience

Score Your CPU

We scoured the Internet and racked our brains to find the most appropriate (and most free) CPU test for your machine. And trust us, it wasn’t easy. Whittling down the list of options to just those that are free was difficult enough—there’s not much out there that will cost you absolutely nothing.

After picking through that small pile of programs, we discovered an important corollary that bears repeating: Just because a program claims to be a CPU test doesn’t necessarily mean the score it generates is a proper reflection of your CPU’s performance, particularly if you’re running a multicore machine. (Single-core users have a bit more leeway with their CPU benchmark choices, as anything that taxes the CPU is going to hit your one, lonely core.) The surest way to test a benchmark’s effectiveness is to pull up the Windows task manager while running a given CPU analyzer. A true CPU test will completely maximize the usage of all your cores.

Cinebench’s built-in database keeps track of all of your benchmark runs. Label everything correctly so you don’t forget what changes you’re testing!

Grab Cinebench and you’ll be pleasantly delighted by its absurd ease of use and applicable testing environment. The program runs on everything from single-core to 16-core machines. It’s a wonderfully future-proof little benchmark that gives you an overall performance score based on your computer’s ability to render a 3D image in as little time as possible. You can even record your results to a built-in database, a helpful way to keep track of your scores when modifying your rig. If you’re suffering any CPU performance loss as a result of your tweaking, Cinebench will let you know.

Test Your DirectX 9 Performance

One of the surest ways to test your videocard’s DirectX 9 performance is to—you guessed it—fire up a graphics-heavy game that includes a benchmark mode (like the FEAR benchmark we use in our Lab) and let ’er rip. But not every game tests your graphics card’s performance. There’s a reason we use Quake 4 and FEAR for our official benchmark runs: The former is an OpenGL-based game that’s far more dependent on your CPU than your videocard, whereas the latter is a better demonstration of GPU-based prowess.

If you have no acceptable games to test your rig’s performance, the next best thing is a free solution from Futuremark. Head over to the site and grab yourself the demo of 3DMark05. You might be tempted to download a later version for upgradeability’s sake—don’t. We’ve found that 3DMark05 pushes your graphics card more than later versions, which test the CPU a bit more.

The 3DMark05 official score throws your CPU into the mix, but you can get adequate FPS results from the app’s graphics-only tests.

Since the program’s a demo, you won’t get to edit any settings—you can’t adjust antialiasing, the resolution, or anything else. However, 3DMark05 will scale depending on the power of your graphics card, and there are numerous websites and forums you can visit to compare your demo score to the scores other rigs achieve!

Test Your DirectX 10 Performance

So you’ve plunked down big bucks for that fancy DirectX 10 card and you’re curious whether all the different drivers, tweaks, and overclocks have had any effect. The best free benchmark we’ve found is a DirectX 10 demo from Call of Juarez. It runs through a series of in-engine settings that test everything from particle effects to HDR antialiasing to shadows.

To squeeze more frames out of your DX10 card, reduce antialiasing. Your images will get a little jaggier, but you’ll see frame rates rise.

As with any benchmark, you’ll want to run multiple iterations of the graphical test to account for any errors or extraneous factors during the run. That said, the scores should be consistent, if not identical, across all three runs. If they aren’t, double-check to see if there’s anything eating up your computer’s resources in the background!

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.