Gadgetory

life used to be so simple then we wanted to know how computer a compared to computer be all we had to do was look at the little tag under it and if you know number a was 20% more than number B we knew that give or take computer a was gonna be 20% faster than computer B but then as architectural designs of different processors diverged and a CPU that ran at two gigahertz could suddenly be as fast at performing a given real-world task as another one that ran it three gigahertz we needed a new way to measure performance benchmarks no I'm not talking about those kinds of benchmarks I'm talking about software programs designed to evaluate the performance of PC components or complete systems they fall into two main categories the first main type is synthetic benchmarks examples of these include I 264 S cache and memory speed testing module and SuperPi a small lightweight program that tests how quickly a processor can calculate pi to a predetermined number of decimal places now synthetic benchmarks are great for certain things because their creators are focused on obtaining results with maximum repeatability a key characteristic of any test that is to be used for scientific style comparisons and minimal potential bottlenecks elsewhere in the system to simplify comparisons across different test benches and prevent a situation where say you're trying to I don't know test the speed of your shiny new lightning fast SSD by copying data from a hard drive a much slower device in the first place which would make all SSDs appear to perform identically to each other the same speed as a hard drive the problems with synthetic benchmarks are several though first up is that because they work to ignore system bottlenecks they often deliver results that don't reflect the end-users experience because just because one component is getting twice as fast doesn't mean that the rest of the system improved in any tangible way and second because benchmarks run highly specialized workloads they are notoriously misused by hardware manufacturers who might manipulate their hardware or drivers to perform better in industry standard benchmarks even if this comes with no date they benefit or even with reduced performance in real-world tasks which leads us to the other mean type of benchmarks real-world benchmarks simple versions of these like Cinebench or the benchmark drop down built into 7-zip take a predetermined but otherwise totally real workload in these cases 3d rendering or a file compression and decompression and have the computer process it as fast as possible then spit out a number to tell you how well it went while more complicated real-world benchmarks often need to be custom developed by PC hardware publications like anon Tech with their storage benchmark suite that was created by recording the actions of the user performing everyday tasks on a computer then running that IO trace on every new drive that enters the lab but some benchmarks don't really fall cleanly into either of these two categories future marks PC mark and 3d mark series are great examples here they feature components that are purely synthetic like measurements of in-game physics performance on a CPU components that are real-world based like web page loading times and then they spit out a score that in theory quantifies the performance of the machine alright Linus then so which one should I believe synthetic or real world or like the hybrid model the answer is we'll kind of all three if a real-world benchmark is available for your exact given workload let's say a 4k video editing then go with that first but if it's not available or you're planning for a future hypothetical workload a hybrid or synthetic benchmark may be your only choice so just make sure that you educate yourself about what the numbers you're looking at mean before making a purchasing decision and speaking of educating yourself about numbers before making a purchasing decision dollarshaveclub.com you got to educate yourself about the numbers in this case price tags before you make a purchasing decision in this case raisers Dollar Shave Club delivers high-quality razors straight to your door for much less and it's amazing because they're actually like it includes shipping in the fact that they cost less than the ones that you actually have to get off your butt go to the store get them to unlock the stupid and by in person I mean this is more work for you and you're spending more money great little program there save money and save time actually I think their slogan is shave time shave money which is very funny they're funny guys and those funny guys also have other products they've got their dr. 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