Question about benchmarking for slow computer

phuschnickensphuschnickens Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
edited September 2010 in Science & Tech
I'm working on a sluggish computer for a customer. The computer is about two years old and should be a lot faster according to specs. I have a number of ideas of how to improve all of that but I'm wondering if I can actually get an actually percentage of improvement that I can tell the customer (and myself) when I'm done with the job. It would be great to say "the computer is 50% faster at startup than it was before and 4 times as fast while using firefox with outlook open once the programs have been running for 5 minutes"... Can anybody help me figure out how to benchmark this stuff. As far as benchmarking goes I'm 100% noob.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

  • mertesnmertesn I am Bobby Miller Yukon, OK Icrontian
    edited September 2010
    These are some of the tools we use for reviewing parts:

    SiSoft Sandra (loads of tests for CPU, RAM, GPU, etc)
    3DMark Vantage (CPU/GPU)
    PCMark Vantage (Full system performance)
    wPriime (CPU)
    DirectCompute (CPU/GPU)
    Atto (Hard drive)

    Everything above but 3DMark and PCMark are free applications. I believe these two may have some limited free functionality, but I'm not 100% sure. If you plan on doing these tests for a number of clients for proof of improvement, I'd recommend purchasing them.

    Meaningful things to gauge improvements:
    Boot time (From power on to a useable state)
    Application startup times (i.e. start menu selection to a useable state)
    If it's a gaming system, see if the games have built-in benchmarks. If they do, run them at various resolutions/quality settings.

    This should get you a pretty good start.
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