How To Benchmark Your Windows 10 PC

Hi this is Phil from Make Tech Easier
and welcome to How to Benchmark your Windows 10 PC. In order to fully
understand your PC's performance you need to understand benchmarking and
benchmarking software. Today we're going to help you do that and hopefully
provide you some great options in the process.
What are benchmarks? In this context a benchmark is a measure of performance,
whether for your entire PC or of individual components. This measure of
performance can be lined up to and compared with other PCs that have taken the
same benchmark, allowing you to see how your performance lines up and compared
to everyone else's.

Is one of your components underperforming in comparison
to what other people are scoring? A. Benchmark may reveal that discrepancy.
Before benchmarking your PC. Before you start benchmarking your PC it's
important to ensure that you have all the other programs closed. Having other
applications open will bog down your results, sometimes significantly,
especially in the case of games and web browsers.

You're also advised to close as
many background applications as you can, but those shouldn't matter too much. How
to Benchmark your PC. As far as the actual benchmarking process itself goes
well that's pretty simple. All you need to do is download, install and run the
benchmarking software, typically with the program's default settings.

In the case of
graphically intensive applications like Unigine Heaven and 3DMark you may feel
encouraged to adjust settings. We really only recommend doing this after you've
first run on default settings and then adjusting settings to see how your PC
can handle different levels of visual fidelity. If you want to learn how
to benchmark your PC the how isn't really the question you should be asking.
The question you should be asking is what software should you use and we'll
provide some recommendations now. Userbenchmark.

Userbenchmark is among
our favorite full PC benchmarking tools for a multitude of reasons. First and
foremost using the application is exceedingly simple. It doesn't need to
be installed and after you launch the application you can benchmark your
entire PC in one click. Once the benchmark finishes you'll see your
results opened in your default web browser in a page like this one.
Geekbench.

Geekbench is another full PC. Benchmarking tool but with a catch;
this one is cross-platform. With the cross platform Geekbench benchmarks you
can do things like compare the performance of your PC to the latest
flagship smartphones. For example we have an i54690 in a PC and a Google Pixel
XL as a smartphone.

The cumulative multi-core performance of the Pixel adds
up to the power of just one of the desktop PC cores, at least on paper. Now
obviously these CPUs won't have much crossover in terms of applications and
usages, however being able to compare their raw performance in any capacity is
in our opinion quite educational. Unigine Heaven. Unigine Heaven isn't the
latest Unigine graphical benchmark but it is our favorite.

There's a few reasons
for this but chief among them is that Unigine Heaven is a great benchmarking
tool for today's mid-range GPUs. The latest graphical benchmarks out there
are designed to bring 1080TIs to their knees but the Unigine Heaven
benchmark is a few generations old and more closely in line with what you may
expect out of modern visuals in today's video games. If you have a newer, higher
end GPU and want to push it to its limits, you're welcome to grab one of Unigine's
newer benchmarks. Otherwise this one should do the job for most people with
mid-range gaming PC's or lower 3DMark.

3DMark is one of the premier
graphical benchmarking solutions on the market right now and like Geekbench
it also supports multi-platform. It supports all kinds of different
platforms and graphic APIs and has a multitude of tests you can run to push
your PC to its limits, even with the free basic addition. While 3dmark does lock
some of its features behind a paywall the basic benchmarks will all be
available to you for free with their basic package.
We highly recommend even the basic package though if you want to see what
your system is capable of. Which benchmarking software is right for you?
Ultimately which benchmarking software you opt for is dependent entirely on your
preferences.

For a basic rundown of what your system is capable of and how it
compares to other systems out there Userbenchmark and Geekbench will more than
do the job. In fact Userbenchmark's database of performance results is very
helpful to us as hardware enthusiasts, especially for say comparing GPUs. Unigine Heaven and 3DMark will have larger file sizes and boast more intensive
graphical benchmarks. Scores for these are also fun to compare but in our
experience are generally less useful than Userbenchmarks and are better for
testing the capabilities of your own system not necessarily how it compares
to others.

Of course you can just download all of these if you want to. Let
us know what you decide to go with. Ok as always thanks for watching and please
subscribe and add your comments below. See you next time!.