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Home / Feature / PCs & Components Feature
Feature

THE BEST BENCHMARKING SOFTWARE FOR YOUR PC

Find the true speed of your PC.
By Thiago Trevisan
Contributor Sep 16, 2022 3:30 am PDT
Image: Thiago Trevisan/IDG

You’ve spent months planning, researching, and painstakingly putting together
every component in your beloved gaming rig. Now it’s time to see what it can do.
Much like a virtuoso pianist will practice his scales to see how fast he can do
them, you too can test your PC to see if it’s ready for Carnegie Hall-like
levels of performance. Today we’ll show you the best software for benchmarking
your PC.

What is benchmarking? It involves using specific software to test the speed of
each individual component inside your computer, such as your CPU, GPU, and SSD,
or even how everything works together. Yep, it’s a lot of science and math.
Don’t worry though! It’s usually free and very easy to do, as the benchmarking
software will do all that science and math for you. (Our guide to benchmarking
your graphics card shows how simple this process can be.)

Along with performance, benchmarking can also test for temperatures, thermal
throttling, and even overall PC stability as a side benefit. We’ll discuss more
intricate details for each of the main components in turn, but here’s a cheat
sheet for the hardware types we’ll be covering and their recommended
benchmarking software pairing. Many, many more benchmarks exist beyond what
we’re recommending here, of course. These tools will cover all the bases though.

* CPU – Cinebench R23
* GPU – Superposition, Shadow of the Tomb Raider
* Hard Drive/SSD: Crystal Disk Mark
* Whole system performance: PC Mark 10, 3DMark

BENCHMARK YOUR CPU WITH CINEBENCH R23

Let’s start with the beating heart of your computer. Several CPU benchmarks
exist but we recommend using Maxon’s free Cinebench R23 software. This widely
used tool not only gives benchmarks for both multi-threaded and single-threaded
CPU performance, it can also test the stability of your system at the same time
with a 10 minute stress test that helps you gauge your CPU temperatures when
paired with monitoring software like HWInfo or Hardware Monitor. They’re both
free and can provide deeper insights on thermals, frequencies, etc., though
they’re not necessary to successfully use Cinebench.

Cinebench R23.

After running the benchmark, Cinebench lets you compare your scores to other
users with the same CPU online —a fun way to gauge gains if you’re
overclocking. Another huge benefit of benchmarking your PC is the ability to
monitor overall system health, which can be very important to help you isolate
troublesome issues. For example, sometimes certain settings in your motherboard
BIOS (such as AMD’s “PBO” or Intel’s “MCE” automatic overclocking) can give you
varying performance and higher temperatures. By using Cinebench, you can see the
direct affect that options like those have on both raw CPU performance and CPU
thermals.

BENCHMARK YOUR GRAPHICS CARD WITH SUPERPOSITION

Ah, the graphics card. It’s the crown jewel in any gamers PC, and it’s only
fitting that your GPU is also the most rewarding item to benchmark. Scads of
different GPU benchmarks exist, but today we’ll focus on Unigine’s free
Superposition benchmark.

Unigine’s Superposition benchmark.

We recommend starting with the “1080p Extreme” benchmark. After running, it’ll
spit out a score that you can compare against other systems. If you overclock
your graphics card, or modify any of its settings, you can come back to this
benchmark and see what affect those changes had. Remember: That applies to both
the raw performance score as well as the temperatures your configuration is
achieving. Benchmarking your graphics card is an excellent way to see if changes
need to be made to your case’s airflow, or if another component is bottlenecking
your performance.

Another great way to benchmark your GPU is to use it exactly as intended—in
games. Several titles include automated built-in benchmarks that make it easy to
see what sort of performance to expect, in a repeatable situation. Check out our
guide to benchmarking your graphics card for a much deeper dive into the topic.

BENCHMARK YOUR STORAGE WITH CRYSTALDISKMARK

With ultra-fast NVMe SSDs becoming more popular (and ever-faster), benchmarking
their performance means more than ever. Benchmarking the various storage drives
in your PC also lets you know which ones run fastest and should thus house your
most-crucial software. CrystalDiskMark is the go-to storage benchmark we use in
our own SSD reviews. Better yet, it’s free.

CrystalDiskMark.

Don’t be alarmed by the various numbers and tests. For a quick gauge of your
drive’s performance, you can typically read the first line. The speeds in that
line of the benchmark typically falls close to the rated speed for your drive
(in this case, 4,993 MB/s read, 3,277.74 MB/s write). Benchmarking your SSD or
hard drive can let you know if it is performing per specifications. Compare the
numbers you get in CrystalDiskMark to what the manufacturer claims the speed
should be.

THE BEST PCIE 4.0 SSD FOR MOST PEOPLE

SK HYNIX PLATINUM P41 NVME SSD

Read our review

It’s typical for SSDs to run a bit slower in the real world than the
peak-performance numbers that vendors use, but if your numbers are wildly off,
something could be wrong with your SSD or your system configuration.
Blazing-fast NVMe SSD drives may not achieve best results in a M.2 SSD slot with
fewer PCIe lanes, for instance, while next-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs fall back to
much-slower PCIe 3.0 speeds if you aren’t using a compatible computer. Seeing
slower-than-expected benchmark numbers let you know that you might want to start
poking around your setup, or make sure SSD-related features aren’t disabled in
your motherboard BIOS.

If one of these is substantially slower than the others, something is probably
wrong.

Pro tip: If you have an SSD or NVMe drive, keep in mind that it may not maintain
peak speeds during very large file transfers due to the high-speed cache being
maxed-out. Once an SSD’s cache is tapped, speeds can drop down considerably
depending on the type of drive. That’s why some NVMe drives are so much more
expensive than others. Our SSD reviews test large file transfer performance to
identify the intricacies of each drive’s performance.

BENCHMARKING YOUR WHOLE PC FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Sure, CPU and GPU gaming benchmarks are fun for enthusiasts, but we also use our
PCs as workstations to get stuff done. With many people working from home,
evaluating your system’s overall performance is an essential test. You can
benchmark your computer with UL’s PCMark 10, which runs a variety of
productivity tests to let you know how your PC stacks up. It cycles through
various tests similar to real world scenarios, benchmarking drive speeds,
work-related tasks, video editing, video-conferencing. That makes PCMark a gread
benchmark to see how your system is likely to do in real life, not just on the
test bench.

The video conferencing portion of UL’s PCMark 10 benchmark.

If you want to benchmark your PC’s whole-system performance in more
gaming-oriented tasks, turn to UL’s 3DMark. 3DMark comes with several different
scenes designed to stress computers in different ways—Time Spy gauges DirectX 12
performance, while Port Royal tests ray tracing effectiveness, for example. Time
Spy and Firestrike are the go-to scenes for benchmarking your system as they’re
less specialized. Running those scenes will provide a benchmark score for your
total system, and individual items like GPU and CPU performance. Plus, UL also
maintains an online hall of fame scoreboard to see where you land with your PC
setup.

A FANTASTIC CPU FOR WORK AND GAMING ALIKE

INTEL CORE I5-12600K

Best Prices Today: $179.99 at Best Buy | $280 at Newegg

Both UL benchmarks cost money for the full package, but PCMark and 3DMark each
also offers a basic edition with limited tests included for free. Just select
the “Download demo” button on Steam rather than buying the software outright if
you want to take it for a test run.

CONCLUSION

There you have it—now you can benchmark the most important components in your PC
with some of the best (mostly free) software available. Use this knowledge to
catch any potential performance or stability issues in your rig, and as a base
to figure out how much upgrading will benefit you in the future.

AUTHOR: THIAGO TREVISAN, CONTRIBUTOR

Thiago Trevisan is a Mac and PC enthusiast for over 20 years, and has written
for PCWorld and Macworld since 2021. He runs the YouTube channel Classical
Technology with over 50,000 subscribers, which covers NVIDIA and AMD graphics
cards, along with Macs such as the 2019 Mac Pro, and also writes about
technology for HotHardware. Thiago has a degree in Classical Piano performance
from the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford.

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