When you buy a computer, you can read the specifications for each piece of hardware inside your machine, whether it's the hard drive, RAM or graphics card, but most operations require each of these elements to work together. Pair the best CPU on the market with hardly any RAM, and your computer will slow to a crawl.
Benchmarking tests will show you how quickly your machine works by providing it with various tasks to complete.
3-D Graphics
Generating 3-D graphics is a difficult task, so difficult that serious gamers have a dedicated graphics card that reduces the load on the computer's CPU. 3DMark 03 provides a battery of tasks that test a computer's ability to render 3-D graphics in real-time under conditions that are similar to video games. It also tests the computer's CPU, image quality and sound, but it does not include the results from tests in the computer's overall score.
Processing
Like much of modern computing, benchmarking algorithms were first used by scientists and mathematicians. Processing speed was tested by determining either the number of integer operations or floating-point operations (usually called FLOPs) that a processor could compute every second. Now that high-end computing is a necessity in many fields, these same algorithms are used to benchmark home computer's CPUs. AMD's N-Bench tests both types of operations to determine your computers processing speed.
Storage
You can see how much room you have left on your hard drive, but it is hard to determine how fast your computer reads and writes files to and from the hard drive. Programs such as ATTO Disk Benchmark will write files of various sizes, write multiple files at the same time, write to multiple locations and set up read/write queues of various lengths to test your drive under any realistic condition.
Internet Connection
When Internet service providers advertise high-speed Internet, they are often citing the highest possible connection speed, which you may or may not experience. Upload speeds are sometimes slower than download speeds, and there could be lag when you are trying to connect to a server on the other side of the world. To check for any of these problems, Internet sites such as dslreports.com can tell you what connection speed you actually have.
Tags: hard drive, connection speed, graphics card, tests computer, write multiple, your computer, your machine