PC Benchmarking

[paulrockliffe]

I have two PCs, one is a few years old but cheap as chips, the second is 11 years old, but cost a bit more at the time. The newer one is also much smaller, so it's on my desk as it tucks out of the way quite well. The bigger one is outside in my workshop, where there's more room to hide it away.

I'm moving my desk in the house somewhere else, where the size doesn't matter. On the one hand I'd like to swap the PCs over as the older one happens to have an Eyefinity Graphics card, so it'll run 6 screens much better than the cheap one (that is running two graphics cards) will run three. But on the other, if that PC is much slower, I'd probably rather stick with things as they are.

Is there a quick simple way to benchmark the PCs so I can understand which is vaguely the best?

[AlexC1981]

You can download a free trial of the benchmark software from the Passmark website. I've used it a few times.

[mmm-five]

There's also a free version of Geekbench.

[xeny]

11 years ago is Nehalem generation. Unless the newer one was literally as cheap as chips then the newer one will be significantly faster.

[nikaiyo2]

https://www.userbenchmark.com/

Works well for me.

[paulrockliffe]

xeny said:

11 years ago is Nehalem generation. Unless the newer one was literally as cheap as chips then the newer one will be significantly faster.

The newer one was £100 Dell Optiplex i5 refurb thing. I added an SSD, but otherwise about as basic as they come. The older one is completely different, it was middle of the road and has lots of RAM, but is old. So you might be right, but I've no idea. Going to test them now and will report back.....

The new one is too small to take my Eyefinity graphics card, which might have been the best solution.

[paulrockliffe]

The old PC scored this:

UserBenchmarks: Game 14%, Desk 64%, Work 12%
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 - 58.9%
GPU: AMD HD 5870 - 16%
SSD: Corsair Force 3 120GB - 37.1%
HDD: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB - 27.8%
HDD: VB0250EAVER 250GB - 54.3%
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C9 4x4GB - 54%
MBD: Asus P8Z68-V PRO GEN3

New one scored:

UserBenchmarks: Game 7%, Desk 61%, Work 6%
CPU: Intel Core i5-4590S - 65.5%
GPU: Nvidia NVS 315 - 1.4%
GPU: Intel HD 4600 (Desktop 1.25 GHz) - 2.6%
SSD: HyperX Fury 240GB - 64%
RAM: Unknown 51264V160K Samsung M378B5173EB0-YK0 8GB - 46.2%
MBD: HP ProDesk 400 G2.5 SFF

So the old one has it!

The numbers are pretty shocking, both in how poorly they both score, particularly for work, but also how in reality they're both perfectly capable of running complex data manipulations in Excel or PowerBI, both are happy to run 50 Chrome tabs, both are fine editing photos or modelling in Sketchup etc.

[mmm-five]

The only thing that looks oddly out of place in the newer one is the faster SSD - so you might want to flip them around and see if it improves the old one further.

For comparison/fun (to show how poor a £2500 all-in-one is for gaming), a 2 year old, mid-range iMac running W10 got these results:

• UserBenchmarks: Game 36%, Desk 96%, Work 33%
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 - 93.6%
• GPU: AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 - 31%
• SSD: 1TB - 175.3%%
• RAM: Hynix HMA81GS6CJR78N-VK 2x8GB - 81.6%
• MBD: Apple iMac19,2

...and compare that to a £500 Intel NUC that I use as a media centre:

• UserBenchmarks: Game 18%, Desk 76%, Work 17%
• CPU: Intel Core i5-8259U - 71.6%
• GPU: Intel Iris Plus 655 - 9.9%
• SSD: CT500P2SSD8 500GB - 191.8%%
• RAM: Crucial CT8G4SFS824A.C8FBD1 2 x8GB - 102.1%
• MBD: Intel NUC8BEB

Edited by mmm-five on Thursday 5th November 21:59

[paulrockliffe]

Thanks, yeah maybe but given the price of them and that they both have the OS on them, I'd probably put a new one in.

[xeny]

paulrockliffe said:

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 - 58.9%

Ahem - release date January 2011 - that's rather younger than you suggested.

[paulrockliffe]

xeny said:

paulrockliffe said:

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 - 58.9%

Ahem - release date January 2011 - that's rather younger than you suggested.

To be honest I thought that system was running an AMD processor! The Motherboard looks right based on the box I just saw while ratching around for a power supply for something else and Google says that's an intel motherboard.

My memory is that I started a job in 2009 that supplied me with an absolutely terrible PC, I had a flat upstairs, so to allow me to work properly both in my office and in my flat I bought a new PC for myself, which is the one I still have. I can't see that I would have bought a processor that came out in 2011 as I wouldn't have bought the latest tech, which puts us into 2012 when I was made redundant and had no money for anything, I sold my second PC then.

Wondering what I've misremembered, maybe one of my PCs fried itself and I bought a new motherboard, processor and RAM. No idea now, but thanks for pointing that out!