need a crash course!

hey guys iv been out of the benching world for a couple years now and i wanted to get back into it as soon as devils canyon is released....so what benchmarks should i download? the last thing i used was 3dmark vantage lmao....

Well, what sort of benching are you looking to do?
Test your system?
Check OC stability?
HWBot type benching?
Competition?
Joining the OCF benching team?

If it's the first one, CatZilla is fun, and 3DMark (no version numbers or anything, bloody Futuremark) is a solid choice.
If it's the second one, pretty much the same choices.
Third one, the answer is: Anything with points from this list.
Fourth and fifth, the answer is: Almost everything with points from this list.


I'd start by downloading CatZilla and 3DMark, and maybe Cinebench Rsomething to abuse your CPU.

i wanted to do hwbot for the ocf benching team get some points for us ty for the list

In that case, download everything!

I like to spend the time and effort (too much and too much) downloading &*#% everything and unzipping/unraring/unwhatevering it onto a flash drive (or two). That way I have it all on-hand.

Then I typically have a few windows installs, XP, Vista and 7, on a hard drive, with the flash drive copied in its entirety onto the desktop.
Then I typically have a second hard drive done exactly the same way, but with the other manufacturer's GPU drivers. That way I can bench both AMD and Nvidia without having the drivers start fighting.
I tend towards overkill.

To start off with, make yourself a benching HDD with an install of something and install the benches and run with it.
If you're benching competitively doing it on your 24/7 OS is a bad idea. For one because it's slower, and for two because your benching OS will die eventually.

Though a bit outdated, the front page article should still help.

Whoa Bobnova,

Very informative.

More so than usual outside the lounge, really

It's been carefully purged of any meaningfully score boosting secrets though

If you're benching competitively doing it on your 24/7 OS is a bad idea. For one because it's slower, and for two because your benching OS will die eventually.

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Very good point here Bob, if you push hard enough and have Bluescreens a lot, a borked OS is inevitable.

I've lost count of the dead OSes. My record is seven minutes from install-complete to dead-OS.
I was a bit miffed.

Bobnova said:

I've lost count of the dead OSes. My record is seven minutes from install-complete to dead-OS.
I was a bit miffed.

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Memory OCing is usually what does it for me I find it does a pretty good job on borking the BIOS also.

7 minutes is pretty darn quick! Good times! I've learned to keep my benching OS's on SSD's it makes it less painful to re load them on.

thanks for all the great info will definitely make a benching hdd and a image in case it dies in 7 min

Memory OCing via windows app is what did that one in. I was fairly annoyed.

Mandrake4565 said:

Memory OCing is usually what does it for me I find it does a pretty good job on borking the BIOS also.

7 minutes is pretty darn quick! Good times! I've learned to keep my benching OS's on SSD's it makes it less painful to re load them on.

Click to expand...

xtkxhom3r said:

thanks for all the great info will definitely make a benching hdd and a image in case it dies in 7 min

Click to expand...

Bobnova said:

Memory OCing via windows app is what did that one in. I was fairly annoyed.

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That's definately a good idea XTK, I would also suggest keeping notes of settings as you make adjustment. As Mandrake has said I have totally blown out my bios more than once to where it was inaccessible and required a direct flash so any settings I had were lost and no way to see them after the fact.

That's definately a good idea XTK, I would also suggest keeping notes of settings as you make adjustment.

Click to expand...

Cheers to that Johan, my notes have saved my rear end a bunch of times, they also help when switching components around when you have a lot of stuff to bench.