▷ Main hardware benchmarks for pc?

Among the owners of a piecewise PC, it is very common to want to pass several benchmarks to see if it is performing well or to compare it with other users. In this article, we will take a look at those that are most interesting to evaluate the performance of the different components of a team.

Index of contents

What is a benchmark

The answer to this question is in our other article “Benchmarks: What is it? What is it for? History, types and advice ”, full of very relevant information. Basically, it is a program that performs a series of tests in order to evaluate the performance of a piece of equipment, being able to obtain a numerical measure of its performance in this task that allows us, among other things, to compare the result with others equipment with the same or different components. Let's see the most interesting ones, their functions and peculiarities.

FurMark

Furmark is the flagship graphics card stress testing software. Its main use is not in benchmarking specifically, but rather in stability tests of graphics cards. However, when starting a test with FurMark we can see the average, minimum and maximum FPS data, with which to measure its performance.

We can also set a lot of options to configure the tests to our liking. This is a problem since not being 'closed' makes it difficult to reliably compare FurMark data across multiple computers.

The program is 100% free.

CineBench

This is the official benchmark of CINEMA 4D, one of the best known and used 3D design programs. Its main function is to evaluate the performance of the CPU, for this it performs a moderately complex rendering test that is always the same, so the test results are easily comparable.

The program makes use of all the cores and threads of the CPU, reason why with it the multicore raw power is obtained. Single-core performance can also be obtained by testing with a single thread. It is partially influenced by the latencies of access to RAM, as it happens in many other benchmarks.

The program is 100% free. It is worth mentioning that it has a version for macOS.

Blender

As an alternative to Cinebench, we have Blender. This is not a benchmark as such but a full-fledged 3D modeling suite, a widely used alternative to Cinema 4D as it is open source. In any case, many people use it for benchmarks by measuring the time it takes to render a specific model.

To benchmark, you need to open a 3D Blender model and press F12 to start rendering. AMD popularized benchmarks with Blender by using it for their first demo of Ryzen's performance, as they later released the file they used for testing. You can download it here, and in this post on our forum we have published several comparisons between users;). Another well-known is the "robot" that can be downloaded here, and it usually takes several minutes to render.

The program is 100% free and open source.

UserBenchmark

Userbenchmark is really interesting for home users who want an easy, fast and yet complete way to check that everything works as it should on their PC. It seems to us of the best options that exist, since the program is responsible for automatically testing CPU, GPU, hard drives and RAM. Subsequently, it generates a web link where you can see all the results, perfectly organized, explained and best of all: compared to thousands of other PCs with the same specifications. Thus, you can know if our team performs as it should.

We leave you here an example of a UserBenchmark result that we have made.

You can also consult a tool on the web to compare the performance of different PC components, based on all these thousands of tests.

The program is 100% free.

3DMark

3DMark is one of the benchmarking solutions that come closest to reality to measure performance in games, with the influence of CPU and GPU (in addition to memory), and is very widely used for its quality, and for the completeness of its test, with an immense variety:

• Time Spy. Benchmark DirectX 12 for gaming PCs. The Extreme version reaches 4K UDH. Night Raid. Intended for computers with integrated graphics cards of lower capacities, and highlights its compatibility with Windows 10 ARM. Port Royal. New option with Ray tracing tests. Fire Strike. The most used in conjunction with Time Spy. It works with DirectX 11 and has Extreme versions (up to 2K WQHD) and Ultra (up to 4K UHD) And many others: Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, Ice Storm…

There is a free basic version that features Time Spy, Night Raid, Fire Strike, Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, Ice Storm, while the advanced version costs $ 30 and includes more tests.

Unigine Superposition, Valley and Heaven

These two benchmarks are quite similar to 3DMark and have a fairly advanced free version, although to compete in the best results lists, do VR tests, obtain output data in CSV or make commercial use, you have to spend either $ 20 for the advanced version, or $ 1000 for the professional version, the latter for commercial use. This for the Superposition, Valley and Heaven prices are somewhat different.

In any case, the biggest differences are its age, the Heaven is from 2009 (last updated in 2013) and uses DirectX 9 and 11, the Valley is from 2013 (last update in 2013), while the Superposition is the most again so we mention it as main.

The load is mainly on the GPU, they are not very CPU intensive but they can still be used to test the overall stability of the computer.

AIDA64

This program was previously known by the name of Everest. Its main function is to obtain data and information about the equipment, but we are interested in the ability of benchmarking: it has a hard drive speed test, RAM and cache performance, and some more tests.

The most important in our opinion (and that we use a lot in our reviews) is the second, which we show you in the photo. It is used to measure, among other things, memory speeds and latencies (highly dependent on the CPU, more information here), in addition to the processor L1, L2 and L3 caches.

The program is paid and lacks free versions. An evaluation copy can be installed, but it certainly has several limitations and expires after 30 days of installation. Also licenses are very expensive.

SiSANDRA Software

Another application that serves as an alternative to Aida64, and that does include a free version, is SiSoftware SANDRA. It has a much higher number of tests, and several of them are very advanced, to analyze the performance of the CPU and other components in complex tasks. Still, it also has more basic functions. This is a list of the tests included in the free version:

• Overall PC score

Processor

• Overall CPU performance CPUM arithmetic CPU multimedia Cryptography Financial analysis Scientific analysis Processor image processing Multi-core efficiency Power management efficiency

Virtual machines

• .NET arithmetic.NET multimediaJava arithmeticJava Multimedia

General Processing (GP)

• General Processing Overall PerformanceGeneral Processing PerformanceCryptography General ProcessingFinancial Analysis (General Processing) Scientific Analysis (General Processing) General Image ProcessingMemory BandwidthMemory Latency

GPU

• Overall GPUP performance Video processing (GPU) Media transcoding Video memory bandwidth (VRAM)

Physical storage devices

• Overall disk performance Physical disks File systems I / O bandwidth File systems Optical drives Mobile disk transfer

Memory Controller Performance

• General memory performance Memory bandwidth Memory latency Cache and memory Transactional memory performance

Network performance

• Local area network (LAN) Wireless network Internet connection Internet perage

As we can see, it is a number of tests to bore and that is especially intended for advanced users and / or engineers.

CrystalDiskMark and other disk performance suites

We finish with the most used software to measure the performance of hard drives and SSDs. The most important is undoubtedly CrystalDiskMark. In fact, there are usually screen captures and performance tests to bore for any SSD or HDD that make use of this program, in such a way that it can be verified with a simple Google search if our SSD / HDD performs as it should.

Other important utilities that we use in our reviews are ATTO Disk benchmark, Anvil's Storage Utilities or AS SSD Benchmark.

Benchmarks built into the games themselves

Many games have their own benchmark solutions integrated , as is the case with, for example, GTA V. These are the most interesting options to check performance in real game scenarios, beyond brute force tests. In other games, you can find maps and tools created by users that also serve as benchmarks.

Bonus track: HWinfo64 to check sensor data

This is not a benchmark, far from it, but we think it is important to mention this software to monitor all sensor data. One of its main peculiarities is that it allows us to make a “log” or register every second in a csv file, which we can then read.

Final words and conclusion

We have left many in the pipeline such as PCMark, PassMark, Unigine Heaven, etc., but these have been the ones that we consider the most relevant and useful for users.

Don't forget to give your opinion in the comments!