Instead, you should run CPU benchmarks (primarily games, which are most likely to benefit from faster RAM) and see if there's any performance uplift. PugetBench for Adobe applications, Da Vince Resolve, and Lightroom Classic are also good options, but CPU performance can have a significant impact on the results.Īlthough there are some RAM benchmarks like the one included in AIDA64 that show you read/write speeds and latency for your RAM, it doesn't tell you much about the real world performance of your PC. V-Ray is also another rendering benchmark that can also test ray tracing performance (though this is currently limited to Nvidia GPUs). Blender's official benchmark is a good one to test since it's both realistic and demonstrates performance in a kind of workload that people often perform on the GPU. DX12, different resolutions, and so on.There are also benchmarks for testing a GPU's performance in creative and professional software. You might also want to try messing around with different settings like ray tracing, DLSS/FSR/XeSS, DX11 vs. Testing a GPU within an actual game is also quite simple just run a fairly modern 3D game with your desired settings and see how fast the GPU is. 3DMark benchmarks like Time Spy and Firestrike are a simple and easy way of testing a GPU and getting an easy-to-understand score, though it doesn't necessarily reflect realistic gaming performance. With GPUs we mainly care about performance in games and performance in creative applications. For some things like power consumption and voltage, you pretty much have to use an app like HWMonitor or MSI Afterburner, as benchmarking software itself rarely ever records that info. If you're doing casual benchmarking, it's probably not necessary to use any of these applications, but anyone who wants to record a fairly good amount of comprehensive data should use at least one of these pieces of software. If you want to run multiple, repeatable tests, just reload the save and play the game normally again for the same amount of time. The best way to test a game with OCAT is to create a save, start recording data, then play normally for a few minutes. OCAT also comes with a useful overlay that you can disable if it causes problems (which isn't infrequent). It's an open-source program that records average and 99th percentile framerates and can visualize all that on a graph. If you plan on benchmarking games without using built-in tests, then you'll need a program that records framerate data, and one of the best applications for that is OCAT. Other software-related practices include testing on a fresh operating system, closing as many background tasks as possible, and setting the power settings to maximum. This is to ensure that the GPU isn't limiting performance and to force the CPU to become the limiting factor (referred to as a bottleneck) in performance. For example, in many CPU reviews, you'll see the test system uses really low graphics settings no matter what CPU is being tested. Scientifically benchmarking a component is all about isolating other components and making sure they're influencing the results of a benchmark as little as possible. The former case is scientific benchmarking and the latter is realistic or practical benchmarking, and this is generally where the benchmarking practices of a reviewer and a user will diverge. This makes the app a fitting candidate for our list of the best and free benchmark tools for Windows.Before you even download any software, the first question you ought to ask yourself is why you're benchmarking, and there are two basic answers: you're either benchmarking to find the theoretically highest performance of a component, or to find how a component performs in typical day-to-day use. For example, it offers full-system tests for CPU single & multi-core, GPU graphics, Memory, etc.Īnd if you grow a liking for the tool, you can then move on to the paid version, which comes with scheduled and automatic tests, temperature & battery history, a portable USB version of the app, etc., that make the app even handier. The free version itself packs an impressive set of features.

The app is available for free as well as in paid version. Moreover, you can optimize & repair your PC by tuning, repairing, and upgrading your tool. What stood out about the tool was its feature to compare your results against a massive online dataset from Novabench and then compare where your PC stands.

Luckily, it's also a cross-platform software available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Novabench is a free benchmark software designed to test your PC’s performance.

Benchmark computer test