What exactly is benchmarking?

[Anonymous]

I have just downloaded a diagnostic utility and it has benchmarking. What exactly does benchmarking do? My comp has not been running up to par and I would like to tweak it to get the best performance I can. Can you help? Thank you

[ferg]

A benchmark is a test or set of tests designed to test the performance of a certain component or piece of hardware in a computer. Benchmarking is the process of carrying out these tests and analysing the results.

Benchmarks are particularly useful when comparing the performance of several different computers and/or their hardware. Results do not always make much sense on their own. For example, a CPU test may tell me that my CPU is capable of 315.6 MegaFLOPS. Great, but what does this actually mean? The result is most helpful when compared to the results of the same test run on other computers. In this fashion I can see how well my computer is performing compared to the 'average' system.

The hardware components most often benchmarked are CPUs, Disk drives and graphics adapters, but even within each area, it is possible to have many different types of benchmark test.

If you think your computer isn't up to scratch you've first got to find out where the bottleneck is. What's responsible for slowing your system down? Is it your disk, processor? Using PerformanceTest 4.0 you can benchmark most of the hardware components of your computer and save the results. We call the saved results of a benchmark a 'baseline'. You can then compare your results with other computers baselines to see how your computer is performing. PerformanceTest 4.0 evaluation version comes with about 7 baselines. The full version allows you access to over 600 baselines ( and growing every day ).