Measure system performance across a group of laptops

Question

I'm working with members of our IT staff to help upgrade a lot of our laptops for web developers. We all do the same type of work but have slightly different laptops. Most of us have Lenovo T61-series but some have some older Dells. Our internal goal was originally to get everyone on Windows 7 x64 and have 4 gigs of RAM. For the most part, we're there. Now we're noticing other factors that are causing some systems to be better than others. We had each person take a screenshot of System (right-click Computer > Properties). We've been reviewing the screenshots and paying particular attention to:

• RAM
• Processor
• OS version
• Rating / Windows Experience Index

We all seem to have different ratings but some much better than others. For many of us, our rating is low because of our graphics capabilities. One developer has a really slow system even though it was recently reformatted. The index is low because of the graphics but does that actually cause the machine to run slower? Is there a free tool out there to measure the performance of a system by running tests so we can find the real reason his machine performs sub-par? We'd certainly be willing to upgrade the display stuff if it has a big impact but I feel like there might be something else we can upgrade instead.

Answer 1

NovaBench is a free tool for checking general pc performance. You can compare components and results to others.

These are the main tests:

• Floating Point Test - Tests CPU's floating point arithmetic speed
• Integer Test - Tests CPU's integer arithmetic speed
• MD5 Hashing Speed - General CPU test
• 3D Graphics Test - Tests GPU with a heavily shader dependent 3D scene
• RAM Speed - Tests RAM read and write speed
• Disk Write Speed - Test write speed of primary or selected storage device

PassMark Performance Test (easy pc bench marking software) is a paid software which seems to have more comprehensive benchmarking tests, it does have a 30 evaluation version.

Please also take a look at this article, it catalogs 5 free benchmarking softwares, you could see if any of these suit you better.