For a while I’ve thought that my PC at work (which I acquired in February 2008) was flagging a little. An upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 certainly helped but subjectively I felt that compared with my home PC and my laptop it wasn’t running particularly quickly, as I was waiting quite a while for files to open or applications to start.
So I used the AusLogics BenchTown benchmarking application to put all three computers to the test:
- Work (Dell Precision 690, Xeon 5120 @ 1.86 GHz, 4GB RAM, 64-bit OS)
- Home (Cube 24/7, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 32-bit OS)
- Laptop (Acer Aspire 5630, Intel Core 2 T5500 @ 1.67 GHz, 2GB RAM, 32-bit OS)
Now, I’m not particularly familiar with the various benchmarking applications available, or which one is better than the next but I felt it important simply to use the same application on all three computers so that it gave me a fair comparison.
These were the results, and compared with fastest results submitted to the BenchTown website, from some seriously overclocked, high-spec machines:
| Work | Home | Laptop | Fastest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 840 | 2179 | 786 | 10073 |
| Memory | 346 | 494 | 551 | 2130 |
| HDD | 365 | 625 | 311 | 5161 |
| Graphics 2D | 168 | 272 | 131 | 804 |
| Graphics 3D | 202 | 1253 | 98 | 4504 |
| Overall | 325 | 645 | 255 | 2619 |
As you can see my suspicions were justified: my work PC isn’t that much faster than my laptop.
I got a phone call on Thursday to say that I’m getting a new PC ordered for me at work.