Question

What is the best free software to measure computer performance? I want to make couple of small upgrades and i'd like to see if they were worth the money/time spent.

Answer 1

SiSoft Sandra comes to mind. Prime95. Sandra has a free version. Prime95 is more for stresstesting but there are some timed procedures that you can use to compare before and after.

Answer 2

Depending on what you are benchmarking, PCMark and 3DMark have free versions.

Answer 3

Whilst a standard benchmark is useful when comparing one machine with another a better approach in your case may be to look at why you are making the upgrades.

What applications or workflows are you wanting to see improvement in? Before the upgrades run the application with sample data or perform the workflow, in either case after a reload. If these timings or other measurements (e.g. free memory) are consistent on a few tries then they should be a reasonable basis of comparison and could be repeated after the upgrade(s) to see if the upgrades were worth the cost and effort.