How-to: Benchmark Your New/Current PC

[Justin]

Why Should I Benchmark My PC?
You should benchmark your PC to root out any potential problems that could have occurred during the installation process of the hardware and software (such as drivers and other manufacturers software). Checking the stability of your overclocking tweaks and to check the overall performance of your PC from when it was first built and to how it runs now.

Benchmarking your PC, especially a newly built one, will prepare the parts for the prolonged use it has ahead of it. This is important because some of the parts that you could have purchased, may have been sitting on the shelf for a long period of time and will need to tested to see if they still work to their specifications. This also holds true to second hand parts, and those should always be benchmarked.

What Can I Benchmark?
You can pretty much benchmark all of your hardware components in this day and age as there are a multitude of tools available to test each individual hardware component. You can usually test these components inside of your PC:

- Graphics/Video Cards (Including Intergrated Graphics Processors)
- SSDs and other Storage drives (HDDs, USBs, Ext HDDs)
- CPUs
- Power Supplies
- RAM

Tools of The Trade
GPU-Z & CPU-Z: These tools simply run through everything about your CPU and GPU and provide basic information such as Clock Speeds, Voltages and Memory usage if available. This is great software to have you are constantly overclocking or just need to check if your CPU or GPU are running up to specification.

Prime95: Whilst Prime95 is mainly used to slaughter CPUs and push them to the edge, it can also be used to test your RAM as well, but I recommend using it only to test your CPU as there are specific RAM testing tools out there.

Furmark: A great GPU Stress tester that will push your Graphics/Video card to it's limit, and best of all, it's FREE! This is a great tool to help test out your graphics cards stability after overclocking it, or just to perform a burn-in test to get it ready for prolonged use.

Memtest86+: This is one of, if not the most powerful and reliable memory (RAM) testers, and can normally yield failure-or-success rates with outstanding accuracy and rapidity.

CPUID's HWMonitor: This tool is an all-in-one monitoring software that will read out the system's general health status, voltages, temperatures, RPMs, and performance in a single, easy-to-use interface.

BlueScreenView: This is a great tool to have if you suffer a fatal crash during testing and witness the dreaded blue screen of death. This tool will allow you to view the dump file that windows has made and let you see exactly what cause the crash.

Tool Shop
CPU-Z: https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
GPU-Z: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
Prime95: https://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/
Furmark: https://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/
Memtest86+: https://www.memtest.org/
CPUID's HWMonitor: https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
BlueScreenView: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

Before You Begin
Before you begin bechmarking your system, I recommend that your Operating System, BIOS, Graphics/Video Card and CPU all have their latest updates installed on your system. This will aid in keeping your system stable under benchmarking conditions and may will eliminate any potential problems from occurring during the subsequent tests that will be undertaken.

Lets Benchmark Your PC

 

FurMark is one of the best burn-in testers out there for GPUs, and while Heaven is fantastic, FurMark is spec'd a bit more heavily toward the stress-testing side. FurMark is for serious benchmarking - we highly recommend running it to abuse any new or used GPU you pick up.

Be careful with this tool - it can be deadly to GPUs if handled carelessly.

Launch FurMark once it's downloaded. Enable the Xtreme burn-in option and Burn-in option; click "Settings" and enabled the GPU Temperature Alarm. Set your max GPU temperature to something reasonable. If you want to be safe, set it to something around 80C. More experienced users should be able to deduce the maximum temperature if it is higher than this.



Set the benchmark duration as necessary. I always recommend running a short benchmark first (you can abort at any time) and manually monitoring temperatures for a few minutes before deciding on extended test settings. Check the "Log GPU temperature" option while you're in here.

Let's start simple: Run the preset 1080 benchmark (this is one of the least abusive ones) and personally monitor it until completion or boredom sets in. If things are looking good and the temperatures aren't crazy, go for the burn-in benchmark, get some food, and return in fifteen minutes. Overnight tests can be run with either manual settings or the "BURN-IN test" button. Just don't overdo it. Always ask us in the comments for recommended settings if you're unsure.

If no catastrophic failures have occurred after all of this synthetic testing, we can hope that the product is stable and will not fail any time in the near future. The hope is, to re-iterate, that we initiate failures in the first 24-72 hours, rather than 31 days from purchase. A reliable GPU will not be damaged by this testing - it's just like playing graphics-intensive games (again, just don't overdo the settings - if the FPS is low and temperatures are high, that's a sign to stop and lower the settings).

 

Prime95

This program has been around for a number of years and has certainly seen its share of use in enterprise and corporate environments, but as hardware becomes more widely accessible by the general gaming public, it's found its place in gaming analysis and benchmarking, too.

Prime95 tests the CPU and memory exhaustively and installs with three presets for testing -- for CPU stressing, we'll use Small FFTs (Fast Fourier Transformation, a complex mathematical approach to computationally pressuring the CPU) and Large FFTs for now. The blend test is great to throw in if time permits - and it's also a good way to check up on the RAM.

Large FFTs should stress the CPU the most, you should see a screen that looks like this when P95 is launched:



The Large FFTs test will take a bit longer to run, but should give the best stability results.

Initiating the test will introduce a screen that looks something like this:



Let the test run through - if any anomalies are spotted or crashing occurs, you may have a problem with instability or unstable cores. Try running the test on fewer cores to see if that helps (additionally, unlocked cores may cause this problem - try disabling the unlocked core temporarily).

Conclusion
If everything has passed with no errors or crashing, then your PC has been setup and configured properly and is ready for everyday use.

If your PC has errors or has crashed during one of these tests, then you may leave a comment below asking for help, and we will see to it that we try and resolve your problem. It would also help if you used this format when asking for help:

CPU:
RAM:
GFX CARD:
Operating System:
Fault Description:
ScreenShots: