Modern benchmarking tools and utilities
These are what you should be using if you want to test and compare the performance of your modern PC:
- Anything from FutureMark
- Seriously, these guys have been doing this for over a decade and they work with Intel, AMD, nVidia, and others to ensure everyone is getting a fair shake. Plus, they’re usually fun and interesting to watch. Best of all, your score can be uploaded to their website and compared against machines that, inevitably, are much much better than yours 🙂
- MAXON Cinebench
- MAXON has been making Cinema4D for almost two decades, and they have a lot of experience writing photorealistic renders that use every spare cycle in your multi-core CPU.
- SpeedSys
- An excellent DOS-based tool for any 386 or higher that performs a system benchmark (CPU, memory, extended features such as MMX, etc.)
Classic DOS benchmarking tools and utilities
If you’re curious to run more inferior tools than TOPBENCH 😉 then you can find download links for them here:
- C&T MIPS
- Good: Comparative metrics. Bad: Number of MIPS not really MIPS.
- Norton SI
- How to build on an afterthought. Versions 4.5, 6.0, and 8.0 included.
- Landmark
- Landmark System Speed Test, versions 2.0 and 6.0. The most well-known DOS benchmark with the worst metric label (“AT MHZ”).
Other classic benchmarking pages
They do exist!
- Phil’s Computer Lab has a DOS Benchmark Pack that includes very many benchmarking programs suitable for testing 386+ systems and 3-D gaming.
- Mastodonic Computers has a really extensive page with results from several benchmarks across dozens of computers in his collection. He also documents his thoughts gathered from so much benchmarking, and also notes how inconsistent they can be. That last link has more downloads, btw.
- DcsabaS’ HardWare Guide also has a sub-page dedicated to benchmarking with older tools, but ventures more into the 486-and-higher territory with 3DBench and Quake.
- An extremely comprehensive benchmark across several systems and benchmarks was performed to answer the question: “What is the fastest 486?“
- Roy Longbottom’s PC Benchmark Collection has a section dedicated to older DOS benchmarks
- There are very many DOS-era benchmark and diagnostic downloads at mbarrons.net.
#1 by Sascha on November 1, 2012 - 6:06 am
Thank you for providing NO SI.
I got from ebay an ATARI PC3 and just wanted to look how it performs. Ok its an 8088, however not to baad for the time of release …. 1987
#2 by Trixter on November 1, 2012 - 2:09 pm
I don’t have that machine in the database, so if you run TOPBENCH on it, send me the database.ini file and I’ll import it into the main database.