Check Computer Speed

Personal computers have evolved a lot since the first mass-marketed models, which had very limited processing speed. Users were happy if commands and programs were executed at all without errors. Today everything matters. The main focus seems to be on graphics speed and Internet speed.

It’s nice to have a powerful processor, but most users still play and work with dual core processors, according to recent studies. This is highly unusual, because just a few years ago the processor was the most important part of the personal computer and its speed defined the whole system’s speed.

Intel and AMD have been working hard to produce some real high-quality multi-core processors, but these found their way only into workstations and high-end gaming computers, which are only a very small part of all personal computers used today.

Processor speed has been neglected because very few applications and games can use more than 2-4 cores at once. At this moment is makes more sense to invest in a high clock rate dual or quad core processor instead of a six or eight core design, some of which offer embarrassing performance in games, for example the latest six-core Core i7 980X with each core split into two threads, thus further reducing the performance of one processing unit (core or thread).

To check computer speed even Microsoft has incorporated a benchmarking tool into Windows VISTA and 7, which rates the processor, desktop graphics, 3D gaming performance, memory speed and the primary hard drive.

The computer‘s rating will be the weakest link, the piece of hardware which performs the worst. This is a somewhat unfair way to rate a system, because the final score may not reflect the speed you experience in your most used game or application, so it’s recommended to run other benchmarking tools too when you check a computer‘s speed.

There are a lot of benchmarking applications, some of them are even free to use, but the most popular in 3DMark, which performs a thorough benchmark of graphics and other components as well. 3DMark11 is the most recently released version. It’s able to display such high quality graphics that require better graphics cards than those available at this moment in order to run with a decent frame rate.

As you can see it’s very realistic. To animate something like that in 3D on a high resolution screen (or on more screens configured in AMD’s Eyefinity mode or nVidia’s similar solution) you-ll need a professional gaming computer with 3-4 high-end graphics cards and an overclocked high-end processor, preferably an LGA1366 Core i7 which has a lot of PCI-Express lanes and three DDR3 memory channels.

AMD unfortunately is still behind with its high-end products, Phenom II X6 processors come close to Core i7 performance only in a few benchmarks, overall they are ~30% behind in terms of performance. This is true of course if you ignore the fact that AMD processors stay within their maximum TDP limit, while Intel processors tend to consume 150-200% of their official TDP while at full load.

Interestingly enough CPU-World.com kept the official TDP for the Intel Core i7-980X processor, but you may form a much more realistic picture if you look at the Core i7 920 for example. The official TDP is 130Watts, but maximum power draw is 230Watts. This isn’t really a honest approach, from this point of view AMD is leading the industry. Pricing is also in AMD’s favor, a Phenom II X6 which is about 30% slower than a Core i7-980X costs only around $250, while Intel’s solution (Core i7-980X) costs $1000.

CPUBenchMark.net is a very useful website. It contains benchmarks of basically all released processors, so you can choose the right one for you.

Sisoft SANDRA is also a very popular benchmarking tool, although it performs only synthetic benchmarks, the results of which offer a hierarchy list of processors, memory modules …etc. These benchmark results are useful when you’re trying to find the cause of the bottleneck in the computer‘s performance. This smart little piece of software also tells you which components can/should be upgraded in your system, so it may be easier for the average user to come to a conclusion.

As you can see it has a lot of history, Sisoft SANDRA has been around since the are of Pentium 2 and 3 processors, so the company had a lot of time to perfect its product. It doesn’t matter which benchmarking program you use, as long as you compare the results with others found on the Internet. It’s recommended to check computer speed whenever you buy a new computer or main hardware component (hard drive, processor, memory module, graphics card…etc). This way you’ll avoid embarrassing situations which may result from inappropriate hardware components or system settings.

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