Looking to maximize your PC's performance or troubleshoot a problem?

How to Benchmark Your PC

Looking to maximize your PC's performance or troubleshoot a problem? First, you'll need to master the art of benchmarking.

Whenever you read a PC review or a component review, benchmark results typically accompany it. Such results are most often in the form of numbers, such as a score or a frames-per-second total. Sometimes they're relative, in that the result is posted as a multiple of some reference system or number.

Because benchmark scores mostly appear in product reviews, that's how people frequently view them--simply as a way of comparing products. But benchmarking is useful for more than just figuring out what graphics card to buy.

• Benchmark software can help to stress-test new systems (particularly important for PCs you assemble yourself).
• Benchmarks can test for sudden performance issues. If your system has apparently slowed down in some way, you can use before-and-after benchmarks to confirm your suspicions.
• You can run some benchmarks to check whether certain tweaks you've implemented on a system actually speed things up or not.

There's more to benchmarking than simply installing the benchmark software, firing it up, and running it at whatever default settings exist. I'll walk through the reasons you may want to benchmark in more detail, and then I'll discuss how to properly run a benchmark.
Before diving into the whys and wherefores of benchmarking, let's start with my Golden Rule.

Loyd's Golden Rule of Benchmarking

It's a simple rule, and it applies to most users who aren't professional product reviewers: Run benchmarks that give you information about what you want to do with your PC. Anything else is irrelevant.

 

If you want to see how well your system does with games, run game benchmarks.If you're primarily a PC game player, you probably care about how well games run on your system. Secondarily, you might care about 3DMark scores. In contrast, a Cinebench score or a Photoshop-filter performance test won't be as important to you.

 

Cinebench should tell you how well your system runs Maxon's Cinema 4D.Of course, most people use PCs for more than one purpose. Even so, you probably use your PC for one purpose more than you do for others, so it's worthwhile to focus on how well your system performs in that arena.

By the way, there is a corollary to Loyd's Rule: If your PC runs games very well, it will run just about anything well.

You'll find some narrow exceptions to that rule. For example, if you want to use an architectural CAD application, a system that runs games smoothly will likely do fairly well with that CAD app--but it would probably perform even better with a professional graphics card. At the same time, if you use a pro graphics card, game performance will likely decrease a bit.       More