Recomend Free CPU Benchmark Suite?

Im just curious as to what peoples experiences are with benchmarking software, and if they have one that they can recomend?

I work for a non profit organization so... free is good.

One of the users I support is having performance issues and I question if his hardware specs are up to snuff. He is running a Xeon 5110. I think the people who spec'd out the hardware heard the word "Xeon" and thought everything would be grand , but this thing only runs @ 1.6 Ghz.

I did some quick informal benchmarks of this CPU vs my ancient laptop cpu (t2600) and my laptop pulled better benchmakrs so far. Considering the age of my laptop, that either means the benchmarking software is not very accurate, or the xeon 5110 is a really weak cpu.

So again, im looking for decent cpu benchmarking software that has no cost and will run on a domain.

If anyone can help that would be great. Thanks.

 

You can look around in here for benching programs, many are free: http://majorgeeks.com/downloads4.html

A pretty good one for just general testing is SuperPi

 

One thing to keep in mind is the fact most benchmarking software factor in the GPU as well as everything else to get a reading. Since your laptop has a video card and your server doesn't, that alone could skew results. Everest is the first one that pops into mind that might be good for you.

Hope that helps!

 

Actually, it probably doesn't, but instead, has an on-board graphics solution - never the best performers because (1) on-board GPUs tend to have very conservative specifications, and (2) on-board graphics solutions snag a big chunk of system RAM and dedicates it to graphics processing. So as PapaDuke correctly notes, less powerful graphics will adversely impact the results seen with many benchmark programs, where graphics processing is part of the test.

That depends on the target of the benchmarking test. Some measure total throughput, others measure specific tasks, independent of graphics or other systems.

That said, what do you hope to prove or resolve by benchmarking? Unless you have a baseline to reference, the information is not that useful.

If this system is running slow, your first concern should be malware. Have you scanned for malware? If clean, and you have sufficient free disk space, then you need to look at RAM. If there is less than 1Gb installed, that will be your biggest bottleneck.

For the record, a 1.6Gb CPU with on-board graphics, and adequate RAM is more than enough horsepower for reading and creating email, Word and Excel documents, surfing the Internet, or watching an occasional DVD movie. It will not do so well with today's 3D animated games at high resolutions - but then notebooks are not gaming machines - but rather business machines designed for road warriors who give briefings.