If you overclock your system, or if you just like to play around with different graphics settings, running benchmarks can give you some idea of the impact of a tweak. If you want to use benchmarks as problem-solving tools, first you need to run some tests while your system is healthy, so that you have a baseline for comparison. That resulted in high enough heat levels that both components throttled back significantly. It turned out that my system’s cooling fans, including the GPU and CPU coolers, had become clogged with dust. If your cooler gets clogged with dust, it could cause your PC to underclock itself.Once, my PC’s game performance suddenly slowed to a crawl. Whether the game frame rates seem to be slower than before, or the hard-drive performance appears to be declining, or you just get the feeling that the PC has become less responsive, running performance tests can possibly help you spot significant problems. If your system starts to feel sluggish, try running a few performance tests. If you’ve built your own system, though, you’ll probably want to run a few stress tests to confirm that it’s stable at a high performance level before you get started with any serious gaming or other taxing tasks. Today, components are generally more reliable. One of the reasons to burn in a system was to check for early component failure: If all the components survived the burn-in process, they’d likely run for years without issues. It’s my belief that system burn-in isn’t as necessary today as it once was. Whenever I burned in a system this way, I ran both applications simultaneously for 2 to 4 hours. To heat things up a bit, I’d also run the multicore version of Mersenne Prime95 simultaneously, using the benchmark mode of Prime95 that consumes lots of memory bandwidth. In the past I’ve run 3DMark 2006, which allowed you to loop the test ad infinitum. You can use software designed to test a system, but those programs don’t always do a good job of verifying system performance. It’s just the way their brains work–I should know.ģDMark 11When you build a system, you naturally want to test it, to make sure everything works well. PC-performance geeks are obsessed with knowing just how much slower their current drives are in comparison with new models. Most people don’t care if the primary hard drive is a little slower than a newer model.

At the same time, if you use a pro graphics card, game performance will likely decrease a bit.Īlso, it’s true that a great gaming system will run office applications very well, but if you’re using office apps exclusively, you probably don’t need a high-performance graphics card–and certainly not two of them.įinally, keep in mind a general exception to Loyd’s Golden Rule of Benchmarking: If you’re a PC-performance geek, you’ll be driven to dissect the performance of every aspect of your PC. For example, if you want to use an architectural CAD application, a system that runs games smoothly will likely do fairly well with that CAD app–but it would probably perform even better with a professional graphics card. You’ll find some narrow exceptions to that rule.

My computer benchmark