Is Your PC Up to Date? Benchmark it with These Programs!

These are primarily intended for benchmarking your SSDs, but they can be used to benchmark any storage subsystem such as conventional HDDs and USB drives/sticks.

AS-SSD will test your system with a massive chunk of incompressible data.

Note that you won't want to run this utility a lot on your SSD if it has a SandForce controller, as it hammers the write tables pretty good which can/will decrease the performance. You can read about it in various forums.

Then there's ATTO Disk Benchmark which will let throw a set of compressible data on your storage subsystem. This is typically more in line with what most people see in daily usage.
and a link to download (since you need to get it from a 3rd party host) such as MajorGeeks

ATTO is good for determining if you're actually getting full SATA2 or 3 speeds, and if you are running a RAID, if the system is using it properly.

For whatever reasons, the links didn't get included in my last post.

AS-SSD discussion and download link at the bottom of this page: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?58059-AS-SSD-Benchmark

ATTO download: http://majorgeeks.com/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_d6359.html

Also meant to state that ATTO is also good for checking USB speeds since USB2 and USB3 devices can vary considerably.

A good cross-platform benchmarking system with on-line data uploading (for comparison with other people's systems) is Phoronix Test Suite: http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com

Evolution2001= Note that you won't want to run this utility a lot on your SSD if it has a SandForce controller, as it hammers the write tables pretty good which can/will decrease the performance. You can read about it in various forums.

==> Why is Toms floating this pcmark (among others) download link like everyone should try it right away? Thanks for pointing this out evo. Toms I love you but what's the deal here please with benchmark software and system stress/degradation?

Also be a little careful about your Power Supply when stress testing...

My Q6600 @ 3.2GHz and 5850 @ stock
normally pull about 275watts at the wall while gaming

When running prime95 and Furmark simultaneously it pulled 525watts from my poor 500 watt Seasonic - made it OK though  

I have had the freebies and several of the paid for ones but my most used benchmarking tool the last 2 years has been OCCT. CPU tests, GPU test, PSU test, graphed results, timed or looped testing, voltage, temp monitoring, alarms, auto shutdown at set points. Find it most useful when building, tweaking, benchmarking 2 or 3 machines at a time.

http://www.ocbase.com/