The Custom PC Benchmarks Suite is an essential tool that has been designed to performance test your PC’s real-world performance and accurately measure gains from overclocking. In order to get the most from these benchmarks we suggest you read through this concise manual.
All of the applications used in the Benchmarks Suite are freely available open source programs, which means that the performance improvements you see in our benchmarks should be reflected in these and other similar applications.
As the individual tests within the Benchmarks Suite 2007 analyse different aspects of your PC’s performance, the benchmark results can help to identify poor performing components and therefore help you to better plan future upgrades.
This version of the Benchmarks Suite 2007 is identical to that used by the editorial staff at Custom PC, the leading enthusiast magazine in the UK. This means that the results you obtain from your PC are directly comparable to those you see in the magazine and on the website at www.custompc.co.uk. This allows you to judge which components reviewed in the magazine will boost the performance of your PC.
By running the Custom PC Benchmarks Suite 2007 and obtaining a performance result for your PC, you’ll also have the opportunity to take part in our online Benchmarks Leaderboard, which ranks PCs in order of performance. If you think your PC is fast then submit your PC’s scores to the Benchmarks Leaderboard and find out for sure!
The Benchmarks Suite 2007 is comprised of three tests...
Image Editing
The Image Editing test uses GIMP, which is a highly respected, open source image editing application. The test consists of opening a series of high-resolution photos and then applying a number of filters (including adding a CPC watermark) before saving each image as a separate file. In the final part of the test, a number of smaller images are stitched together to create a large, panoramic image. This test requires a plenty of memory and a fast hard disk drive, in addition to a powerful processor in order to apply the filters.
H.264 Video Encoding
The H.264 Video Encoding test uses handbrake, which is essentially x264 with the added ability to read DVDs. We use this to upscale and encode a DVD source to an HD H.264 MPEG4 file, with AAC audio. H.264 encoding is an extremely processor-intensive task and this test takes advantage of multi-core CPUs.
Multitasking
Running multiple applications at the same time is tough test of real-world system performance, which is why our final test is a multitasking benchmark. In this test we play the HD movie file used in the H.264 Video Encoding test in the foreground while simultaneously compressing a selection of large and small files using 7-Zip. This test obviously benefits from multi-core CPUs, but fast memory and a quick hard disk drive also helps.