6 Great Benchmark Tools for Windows

You’ve spent quite a bit money getting yourself a new computer, and you are quite excited about it. You feel it’s running quite smoothly and lightening fast. But have you ever wondered how faster your beloved new toy is, comparing to other computers on the market? Or if you feel it’s not quite as fast as you expected, do you know why and what’s going on under the cover?
That’s when you need a benchmark tool to help you better understand your machine. Here, we’ve compiled a list of 6 of them for you to check out, most of them are free or have a free version with limited features.

Geekbench

Geenbench, developed by Primate Labs, is a cross-platform benchmark tool that provides a comprehensive set of benchmarks engineered to quickly and accurately measure process (CPU) and memory performance. It provides a very simple user interface with one-click benchmark feature that starts benchmarking process with the same way, same tests, and same parameters as every other people using the same tool.
The test result will be saved as a html file stored on Geekbench server.

Geekbench is a very powerful benchmark tool but unfortunately the free version only benchmarks the machine with 32-bit parameters. 64-bit benchmarking is included in the full version, which costs $12.99 at least.

BootRacer

BootRacer is a handy tool specifically measuring the Windows system boot time, which includes the time it takes to get to the logon screen and the time to boot to the desktop. Once BootRacer is installed, by default, it will benchmark your system boot time every time when the machine reboots.

BootRacer is free for non-commercial use, but costs
$19.95USD when used in business environment.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 is a powerful PC performance analysis tool specifically designed to cover the wide range of form factors, including Netbooks, Laptops, Tablets, and Desktop PCs. It provides a complete PC performance tests combining more than 25 workloads tests that covers storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing, and gaming.
The Basic Edition is free of charge, with the core PCMark test included. But it also provides Advanced and Professional edition that offers much more features with a price tag at $39.95 and $995US, respectively.

Cinebench

Cinebench, developed by Maxon, is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s CPU and GPU performance capabilities. It’s a perfect tool if you are only interested in how your CPU and GPU perform in your computer. And it’s completely free.

Sandra Lite

SiSoftware’s Sandra suite is another powerful Windows system performance analysis that provides a full range of testing tool. It includes benchmarking, testing, and listing modules. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, GPU, ports, printers, sound cards, memory, network, etc. What’s interesting is that it even supports Windows Phone and Android platform. The Lite version is completely free with a limitation that you can only run the tool in a workgroup environment, which is good enough for most of the home users.

PerformanceTest

PassMark’s PerformanceTest is a fast and easy-to-use PC speed testing and benchmarking utility with a vivid user interface. Unfortunately, it’s a paid utility that only offers 30-day free evaluation. After 30 days, you will have to buy the license to remove the license clause in order to continually using the tool.