When you bought a new hardware (or upgrade the whole computer), you want to know if there is any performance gained over the old system and whether your money is well spent. The best way to find out is to do a benchmarking: Run your old hardware/system through a series of test and record down the score. Replace with the new hardware and run through the same series of test again. Record down the score and compare it with base score. If there is no (or minimal) improvement, you know that you are not getting the best deal for the new hardware.

In addition, hardware performance deteriorates over time. Frequent benchmarking can inform you about the health of your system (or hardware) and whether it is time to upgrade your hardware.

Benchmarking your CPU

Cinebench is the benchmarking software that we recommend for testing and evaluating CPU performance. What it does is to use a 3D scene file to render a photo-realistic image. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. In the first run, the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core), to ascertain a reference value. On computers that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores and on those who simulate multiple CPUs, Cinebench will run a second test using all available CPU power.

Benchmarking your Graphics Card

There are two ways to benchmark your graphics card - via actual game play or using synthetic benchmark. Whenever possible, I would strongly recommend using a 3D game to do the benchmarking. Games such as F.E.A.R, FarCry, Crysis, Doom 3 and Call of Juarez provide a benchmarking function for their demo, which you can use it free of charge.

For some reasons that you can’t run a game demo, you can download 3DMark 05 from Futuremark. This synthetic benchmarking software can stress your graphics card with numerous tests and generates a test score. You can compare the score in numerous websites and forums to see how your graphics card scores against the others.

Benchmarking your system as a whole

If you got a new PC and wish to find out its performance, you can use COSBI OpenSourceMark to generate a benchmark score. This open-source program runs a series of applications (such as file compression, audio encoding, spreadsheet calculation and image editing) and generates score according to your hardware performance. You won’t get a very nice user interface, but it is simple enough for anyone to use it.The program detects multiple cores and automatically reconfigures the benchmarks to take full advantage of your hardware.

Conclusion

With all the software (both free and paid) around that make benchmarking task a breeze, there is no reason why you haven’t done it yet. If you have not done any benchmarking for your system, after reading this article, I would advise you to start right away.