Rated: 60% (2 votes)
Loading ...New benchmarks inbound
James Gorbold
For the last few months Spode and I have been working on getting the new version of our Media Benchmarks up and running. Spode has done all the programming, but every member of the Custom PC team has been busy testing each of the three new tests. This slow and painful process has led to more rebuilds than I care to remember and many late nights, but its critical we crush every bug before the benchmarks are released.
As before, the new version of the benchmarks comprises three separate tests, each of which measures the performance of your PC at completing a specific task. These range from editing digital photos, encoding a video and multitasking between several applications.
However, the applications themselves have changed from the last version of the benchmarks. One particular highlight is that the benchmark now uses GPL software so not only is nothing installed in the Windows registry, but it also means there are no more annoying “please register after 30 days” type notices. Another improvement is the ability to install and run from any drive, so if your fastest hard disk isn’t “c:” you can simply install the benchmarks onto it without having to re-format.
We’ve also carefully chosen applications that make extensive use of multithreaded programming techniques, so they will run much faster on multi-core/SMP PCs. Finally we’ve also improved the anti-cheating code so its much harder to cheat the benchmarks than before can get an unfairly high place on the leaderboard. The new benchmarks also run happily on Windows XP or Vista, allowing you to see how of a difference Microsoft’s latest OS sucks up system resources.
Other great new features include the ability to set the benchmarks run a certain a number of times or run in an infinite loop if you want to stress test how stable your new PC is.
Assuming the latest two bugs (discovered over the weekend) can be crushed there’s no reason why we won’t start using the new benchmarks in Issue 49 and make them available to download in the next few weeks.
“so its much harder to cheat the benchmarks than before can get an unfairly high place on the leaderboard.”
Ive never seen a cheat score, only a few that were mis-labelled… e.g….Quad core chips marked as Duals, and duals marked as singles.
Will the CPU ID field be filled in automatically, and not user changeable?
K
Hopefully you haven’t seen any cheat scores in the old benchmarks/leaderboard because the anti-cheat mechanisms were working. They are even tougher in the new version as we anticipate more people will be using them.
As for the submission of results I haven’t been involved in that personally. But from what I remember from the early meetings the system spec will be entered by hand, so users can make notes about how the system is overclocked.
Looking forward to it, always enjoyed playing with the other benchmarks, had many happy hours tweaking, it was CPC Benchmarks that started my overclocking interest, so I have a strong interest in the new one.
Keep up the good work.
love the mag,just gone quad core and cant wait,do we have an eta?
Well, the benchmarks will first be used in Issue 49 (which is being finished off now and will hit the streets the 23rd August).
We do have a final build now for internal use but the web guys need to program the online results submission code and make the leaderboard, but that “shouldn’t” take too long.
So hopefully we’ll be able to do a web launch within a few weeks.
thanks for the reply-is there any chance of you doing a hints and tips to better benchmarking type of thing?
thanks
Yeah I’m sure we may do a benchmarking optimisation type feature in the near future. Having said that, we already cover how to tweak your PC for optimum performance in the regular overclocking features we already do. This time round we’ve also written a lot more documentation for the benchmarks, which is easily accessible in an html file (a menu links to it in the benchmark front end) rather than a clunky PDF file that accompanied the old benchmarks that I doubt many people ever read.
Hi there,
Well, nice touch and new approach however the other thing is that currant CPC Benchmark cannot run on a system with different language than English (some error massage appears) and I just wonder how are you going to go about this issue. I have lots of friends that use e.g. Deutsch or Swedish version and are not able to test their computers…
Hi Peter
To be honest we haven’t done any testing on other language versions other than English as that’s all we had access to, and Custom PC is an English language publication. I’ll flag it up as a concern to the programmer and see what he thinks though. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Hi James,
That would be great and although this is “an English language publication” I think that, overseas subscribers or just readers may be considered as a non English users in regards to their operating systems. Therefore, this would be, in my humble opinion, a nice touch.
All the best.
Ah, great news. Especially the use of GPL software, nice touch. I look forwarded to killing my aged 3700+ with them, unless it refuses me like Colin McCree DIRT did for having such an old CPU!!
So, when will we likely see the new benchmark? I’ve uninstalled the old version inpreparation, but I can’t see the new one on the site.
OK, I’ve just spotted the download after looking at ‘MY Custom PC’ near the top of the page. I hang my head in shame, it was right there all along!