How to benchmark like a pro There’s a joke in the hardware community that the only thing a performance computer is good for is running benchmarks. This dis at benchmarking suggests that such performance measures are pointless. We disagree. We honestly think that benchmarks keep the hardware world honest. They give you a real metric with which to measure one piece of hardware against another, or one system against another. Yes, there are times when politics get injected into benchmarks and they can be misapplied, cooked, or even cheated on. But think of what the world would be like without benchmarks. A vendor could make claims that his gadget is faster than the competitor’s. An Internet declaration claiming a PowerPC Mac was 10 times faster than a Pentium II would stand as truth. A good benchmark run well and analyzed correctly can tell you more about a piece of hardware than any marketing flyer. Since Maximum PC’s system benchmarks haven’t been updated since the last decade, we’re rolling out newer, more punishing tests that push today’s hardware. We’re also using real-world workloads such as gigapixel imaging and multiple 1080p streams to closely match what people are doing today. With new benchmarks also comes a new zero-point system to give you a reference point for how today’s fastest PCs perform. And after we’ve given you a tour of our official system tests, we’ll point you to some benchmarks you can run at home on your own rig. Introducing Our New
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