Hey people, As some of you may know, I recently upgraded my entire pc. I went from having a Core2Duo @ 3.0Ghz, 2GB RAM, and an 8800 GTS, to this monster: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4Ghz RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600Mhz Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3 GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 SSD: 128GB Crucial M4 HDD: 2TB Seagate Barracuda Sound: Asus Xonar DX Well, I'd quite like to experiment with overclocking and such. But would also like to benchmark my pc as I go along, so that I can see whether I get any real performance boost. How do I go about benchmarking? I've seen an array of different software around. But what is considered "standard"? Thanks for any advice. Matt
3d mark 11 will test your entire system, unigine heaven is mostly testing your gfx and geekbench specifically tests your cpu and ram. It's best to find the max stable overclock for each component seperately while the others are at stock, then when combining, taake them down a few notches first to make sure they'll work together. Once your hole system is overclocked at a reasonable level, adjust the speeds of the various components then bench to see what gives the biggest improvement in scores.
Oh and for proper 'real world' testing, some games have their own benchmarks. F1 2011 has one in the graphics settings menu that's fairly quick and gives min and avg fps. Then you go back to the settings so you can see how different AA settings affect performance to.
I tried out 3d mark 11, thanks for the recommendation. But it didn't actually give me any results other than telling me that my system isn't running as fast as it could be... However I then tried Unigine's Heaven Benchmark and got the following results. No overclocking, all components at stock settings.
There is another thread here in Hardware that deals with the Geekbench benchmark. It tests the CPU, memory and chipset of your computer. An added bonus is that you can see where it fits in relation to other systems by the use of the graphs kindly maintained by Pookey.
yeah go and check out the geekbench thread trouble is you need to pay for the 64bit version. i did. its not too expensive, and it allows you to see higher numbers!! mmm...black pixels representing a bigger e peen.....mmm and then get something like unigine or 3dmark 11 for gfx then use something like ibt set at max for 10 runs for stability