The open-source program COSBI
OpenSourceMark attempts to replicate
real-world benchmark scripts, similar to
SysMark’s and PCMark’s. We’ve found
that OpenSourceMark, which uses a
number of real-world operations, is one
of the better ways to analyze your com-
puter. Install the program and click the
“official run” button to start the tests—
which include file compression, audio
encoding, spreadsheet calculations, and
image-editing activities. The program
detects multiple cores and automatically
reconfigures the benchmarks to take fulladvantage of your rig’s hardware. And if
you just want to test a particular subset
of performance—say, file encoding—just
select the “custom run” option and
handpick your benchmark suites.
OpenSourceMark is a great way to
test whether your computer tweaking
is actually having a measurable effect
on your system’s performance. Do you
really need to defragment your drive 12
times a week? How much does your
antispyware program actually slow
down your PC? What’s the hard benefit
of all that extra overclocking?Whether you’ve been overclocking an old
rig to wring out more performance or you
just purchased a new overclocked machine,
stress testing your computer’s stability
should be high on your priority list. (Stock-
clock users can join in the fun too, but it’s
not as critical. You can test whether a beta
driver you downloaded mucks up your sys-
tem in some capacity, but for the most part,
a stock-clock machine should be inherently
stable hardware-wise.)
An overclock can push a rig past safe (or
stable) operation. You might not notice this
instability or Windows might crash once an
hour. Either way, one sure way to determine
whether you’ve gone too far is to run your
computer like a madman, and if it survives
the rite of passage, you’re golden.
We use Prime95 for stress testing in theLab. In a nutshell, the program calculates
new Mersenne prime numbers and taxes
the heck out of your processor and RAM in
doing so. If you’re on a single-core machine,
all you have to do is fire up Prime95 and
select the Torture Test from the options
menu. Run the test for 10 hours on small
FFTs, which nails your CPU, before switch-
ing to large FFTs for the RAM.
Owners of multicore machines will want
to download the .zip version of Prime95
and extract its contents to a new folder for
each core of your machine. Run the program
out of each folder, which will open up one
instance of Prime95 per core. Click “Affinity”
on the program’s advanced menu and set
each instance to run on a different CPU core.
Dual-core owners should run a small FFT
on one core and a large FFT on the other;
just double that equation if you’re rocking a
quad-core PC.Measure Your Overall System Performance
Test Your Rig’s Stability
OpenSourceMark lets you save information
about your CPU utilization to a text file.64 MAXIMUMPC december 2007
how (^2) ImprovIng your pc experIence, one step at a tIme
Prime95 runs your PC at full loads
until one of two things happen:
You’re content with your testing
or your rig shuts down.
If you’re looking for the source of
slowdowns in your system’s storage
performance, the free HD Tach bench-
marking utility is a must-have. With
one click of a button, the application
tests burst speeds, CPU utilization,
random access speeds, and sequen-
tial read speeds.
The program gives you a ton of
numbers once it’s finished. The most
important of these is the average read
speed of your drive—it takes less time
to pull data from the inside layer of a
platter than the outer, hence the “aver-
age” in the calculation. On the whole,
this number is a good measure of your
drive’s general performance.
HD Tach’s burst speed measurement
represents your drive’s ability to trans-
fer data from its onboard cache to your
CPU. Higher numbers indicate faster
file transfers. The random access mea-
surement indicates the time it takes
the drive to access a random sampling
of data from all over the drive. In this
case, a lower number is better.
There’s not much you can do to
improve the performance of a subpar
drive. Check your BIOS to make sure
you’re running at the fastest interface
speed possible—SATA 3.0 instead of
SATA 1.5, for example. Defragmenting
the drive might help, but performance
degradation over the life of a drive
might indicate hardware failure.
Benchmark Your Hard Drive
If you have two identical hard drives in your
PC, a large disparity in benchmark results
could indicate a faulty drive. Back up now!