I think there are thousands of benchmarks around nowadays, but not all of them are a real help. I admit that every benchmark is of some kind of help in case you want to tweak your own system. They show you which configuration is slower and which is faster, as long as you only change one variable. However, in case you want to compare your system performance to others, the number of useful benchmarks is shrinking down a lot. It doesn't help if your system reaches a higher 3DBench score than that of your neighbour, but your games or your Excel runs much slower than his. What you need is a benchmark that gives you real world performance in numbers. There are certainly some areas, where you want to have the performance of only one or a little number of system components, but here you also should be careful what you use. I still think it's best to know how a 'one component' benchmark is working, before I'm shouting 'Halleluja' about high scores, which may be entirely meaningless.

Real World Performance Benchmarks

• Windows 32 Bit Business Applications
• • BAPCo SYSmark/32 for Windows 95 and Windows NT
  • Winstone 97
• Windows 16 Bit Business Applications
• • Winstone 96, which is not officially available anymore
• DOS Games
• • Quake Timedemo Benchmark
• Direct3D Windows 95 Games
• • Tom's Monster Truck Madness Benchmark

Component Performance Benchmarks

• Memory Performance
• • Wintune 95
  • ctcm Motherboard Benchmark
• Video Card 2D Performance
• • Winbench 97
• Video Card DOS Performance
• • profile.exe coming with SDD
• Harddisk Performance
• • chkhd
  • h2bench.zip
  • cthdben.zip
  • Winbench 97
• Harddisk Interface Performance
• • Coretest
• CDROM Performance
• • cdbench
  • Winbench 97

There are quite a few benchmarks, which I disapprove . These are Landmark , Norton System Information , the HDD benchmark of WinTune 95 and also the completely abstract 'busperf ', which btw is 11 years old. There are more useless benchmarks around, but I'm tired of naming all of them. There is one other popular benchmark which is fairly questionable, CPU16 and CPU32 coming with Winbench97 . What are the results of these benchmarks telling us? Well, a number - that's about it!