Minibench

Thaed

I’ve been playing with a program called Minibench all evening. It’s a series of tests for your computer that runs in a DOS prompt. The values give you insight as to what you’re computer is good at. The number of seconds that it takes to finish the test seems to be the final benchmark.

As I’ve said, I built a new AMD machine the other night and I was astonished tonight that it damn near beat my flagship machine, finishing the test in 621.13 second versus 592.89 seconds. It shouldn’t be close at all. The flagship machine is a water-cooled dual-core Intel (admittedly an early one) overclocked to 3.4 GHz. Just for kicks, I overclocked the AMD machine, stabilizing it at a 220 CPU modifier. It started out with scores 8% better, but the box shut off shortly after the test started. I had the box temperature shut off set to 60 degrees C because I don’t really have a cooling unit rated for overclocking on the machine. This is a lot of fun, but I’d rather not have a fire.

So all of you who are interested, how fast can your machines do the Minibench test?

raquor

I've been playing with this a lot myself lately. Trying to compare what I've got now to what exists in the world of laptops. I wouldnt say that the whole test boils down to the time to run but it is an interesting and at least semi-useful test. For instance I know my tests are bottlenecked by my DDR RAM. A machine with similar processing speed but DDR2 RAM performs better than mine on memory read/write. My 3 year old P4 with Hyper Threading does only slightly lower on the CPU tests than a Pentium D in a year old machine.

The Pentium D also stalls far more often. I dunno if the D is capable of multi-threading in the same way as Hyper Threading or a Core Intel but it sure doesn't seem like it.
=====================================
Total elapsed time: 623.64 s.
CLOCKS_PER_SEC: 1000

miniBench benchmark completed.

Thaed

With more tweaking on overclocking the chip and the RAM, I was able to get my $170 AMD rig to:

=====================================
Total elapsed time: 595.42 s.
CLOCKS_PER_SEC: 1000

That's less than 3 seconds off the $1500 Intel rig. Now, the AMD machine has a built in graphics card (GeForce6100) so it will never beat the Intel machine in gaming with it's 7800GTX, but still.