SOMBRERO Comprehensively benchmark your PC

You’ve probably seen benchmark statistics reported about all manner of popular devices, but what exactly is a benchmark, and how can you run one on your own systems?

A benchmark originally referred to a testing process for rifles, where the gun was mounted to a bench, rather than being held by a human marksperson: the bench was acting as the mark, hence benchmark. With several test firings, the spread of shots could be measured – the smaller the spread, the better the gun. Nowadays however it refers to any process that allows different methods, devices or processes to be compared with each other directly, based upon a standard reference.

In computing, this is done by taking a set of reference tasks which reliably take exactly the same amount of effort each time, and measuring how a system performs when completing them. These tasks might be designed to stress one specific component – for example, hard disk write speed; the machine, to see what the absolute limits of the system are (synthetic benchmarks); or they might be representative of the kinds of work that a system will be used for (application benchmarks). A gaming benchmark might run a set portion of game over a fixed route and measure the frame rate, while a 3D rendering benchmark may choose a complex 3D scene and measure the time the computer takes to render it. Benchmarks are frequently distributed as benchmark suites; since it’s rare for a computer to only be used for