MARKING BENCHES
(Posted 2004-01-27 05:15:47 by basscomm)

Benchmarking a system can give you all sorts of numbers. I've run several
of them and I think that I have quite a range to deal with here.

Let's go ahead and list all pertinant system specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton Core
Motherboard: DFI NFII Ultra-AL
RAM: 512 MB(2x256MB) Kingston HyperX PC3000
Video Card: XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra 

Now on to the fun stuff. Let's run some tests!

First up is Futuremark's 3DMark03. [ http://www.futuremark.com ]

3DMark is probably one of the most widely known and widely used benchmarks,
so, of course, it's the one I used first, yielding a score that I would put
in the range of acceptable scores

Image: 3147 3DMarks. That's good I think [ /images/benchmarks/3dMark.jpg ]

Now that's certainly a score, but I wanted more, so I went out to see my
buddy Mr. Google and took a look around to see what I could find.

Turbo95 [
http://www.lemon.com.br/collection/browser_detail.cfm?Indice=57&SubCategoria_ID=88
]

What it measures: Turbo 95 reportedly measures CPU speed, FPU speed, Cache
speed, SVGA frames per second, and hard disk throughput. The writer of the
program was nice enough to provide some sample scores so you have something
to compare your numbers to.

Image: Turbo95 now with 95% more FAST! [ /images/benchmarks/t95thumb.jpg ]
[ /images/benchmarks/t95_133.jpg ](click for a bigger shot)

As you can see, my system blows the socks off of a P133, clocking in as the
approximate P2940, and gets longer bars in every category Turbo95 could
throw at it... Except for hard disk access. That's supposedly a limitation
of the program which might be fixed sometime before the sun goes nova.

Chris' 3D Benchmark [ http://www.sysopt.com/cgi-bin/chris3d.cgi ]

Chris' Benchmark doesn't really come out and say what it's doing, but it
throws up a cube on your screen, spins it around, does some nebulous
computations and then gives you a number.

Image: Yeah, I couldn't get a shot of it running. [
/images/benchmarks/christhumb.jpg ] [ /images/benchmarks/chris.jpg ](click
for a bigger shot)

DIAG.exe

DIAG purports to be a complete system benchmark and analysis tool. Most of
the features were tantalizingly dummied out of the free version, but I was
able to run the video benchmark, which is really why we're here, right?

[ see image at /images/benchmarks/diagthumb.jpg ] [
/images/benchmarks/diag.jpg ](click for a bigger shot)

Now we begin to see some interesting results. My card scored lower than a
GeForce2 running at AGP 4X in both text _and_ graphics written to the
screen.  What does that mean exactly? 

Yeah, I don't really know either.

Landmark

Landmark is one of those utilities that tries to measure everything about a
system on one compact screen. 

[ see image at /images/benchmarks/landmarkthumb.jpg ] [
/images/benchmarks/landmark.jpg ](click for a bigger version)

Now, admittedly, I didn't shell out the $49.95 for the full version of the
software, so these results may not be as accurate as they could be, but I
think they tell a pretty good story. This program has really opened my eyes
about the speed of my processor. It turns out that I've been buying Intel
486's all these years, they just keep bumping up the speeds! 

SysChk [ http://www.syschk.com/ ]

The next three images are from a full system reporing utility called
SysChk. This program was probably the most confused out of the programs I
ran. 

[ see image at /images/benchmarks/syschk1thumb.jpg ] [
/images/benchmarks/syschk1.jpg ](click for a bigger shot)

[ see image at /images/benchmarks/syschk2thumb.jpg ] [
/images/benchmarks/syschk2.jpg ](click for a bigger shot)

[ see image at /images/benchmarks/syschk3.jpg ] [
/images/benchmarks/syschk3thumb.jpg ](click for a bigger shot)

Some things of interest that should be noted about my system that differs
from  what SysChk came up with:

My hard drive is larger than 3.77 MB
I apparently have the fastest 386 on the planet
AMD makes the Compaq 386sx Intel Pentium Pro

So there you have it. Lots of numbers to look at. What conclusions can we
draw from this? Well, I don't really know. What I _do_ know is that I
certainly have a special system on my hands here.


--------

There is 1 comment on this post:

Comment #1 by  Ray (  ray@nsacom.net ) on 2004-01-28 21:11:37
All I know is, TMPGenc keeps freezing up on me under XP...



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