Benchmarking

Hi I'm new to benchmarking and I've read toms site and forms for over 10 years now. I've been given a project to benchmark and select components for an embedded system I'm building. The components are going to consist of motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD(harddrive), serveral USB peripherals, onboard video, gps, wireless(LAN), and such. I'm looking for a good benchmarking tool that I can bench these devices with such as performance and capabilities. We can get some data from the vendors but much has to be verified because we've found vendors are overstating performance. I'd like to know what kind of benchmark utilities the community here uses? So far I've looked at the following two:

http://www.sisoftware.net

http://www.passmark.com

Thanks,
Alex