Can Passmark let me know where my bottlenecks are?

[JamesCG]

Good afternoon all,

I hope everybody's holidays are going well. I'm a 3D artist who is looking towards streamlining my hardware for rendering out animations and stills. While I've put together my own systems for many years, I'm looking for a benchmark software that can (reasonably) give me an idea where my hardware is bottlenecking. Thus, after a benchmark is run, the software will let me know that my RAM is holding things up, or my HD is too slow, or that my video card is well behind the curve, etc. I'm not interesting in comparing my system to others as I am in finding out where my internal bottlenecks are.

I'll be downloading Passmark's benchmark later today when I get home, but I thought I'd pop in here in case anyone has suggestions or comments about the kind of benchmarks I'm looking for.

Cheers to all,

~ JamesCG

[David (PassMark)]

Different software places different load on systems. For example: For database software, the disk might be the bottleneck. For rendering it might be the CPU. Or if you are doing large images, then it might be lack of RAM. If you are interested in optimizing your hardware for a single application, (3Ds Max for example) then it makes sense to use that application as the benchmark.