As a second installment in our series of beginner's benchmarking guides, we bring you this latest one, which discusses how to benchmark your computer's memory subsystem. This system is mainly comprised of your system memory (RAM) and hard disk drives. The performance of this subsystem is just as important as the CPU and Video, especially if you're into doing heavy duty video encoding/decoding, or would like programs to launch and respond very quickly.

If you haven't taken a look at out previous Video Benchmarking Guide, which covers various ways to benchmark one's video card, we'll need to briefly explain the purpose of these guides. We are not here to review every benchmarking program; rather, we are targeting this guide to people who are perhaps not aware of the various testing methods that we use to test our hardware here at Sharky Extreme. While there are undoubtedly many benchmarking programs for each of your computers' subsystems, there are only a few popular and relatively inexpensive ones that you can perform on your computer(s) at home.

Publisher Web Site: www.sisoftware.co.uk
Sandra Web Site: www.sisoftware.demon.co.uk/sandra/
Cost: $0 to $29

Let's start with one of the most common benchmarks you'll see as part of video card reviews, MadOnion's 3DMark2001. Available through their web site, 3DMark2001 is the latest version of MadOnion's popular video benchmarking software package. While this guide is meant to introduce you to various means of benchmarking, not to review them, it should be noted that this latest version came without the CPUMark feature that enabled reviewers to also use 3Dmark2000 to benchmark CPU performance.

While many professional reviewers will opt to buy a copy of 3DMark2001 Pro on a CD for $49.99 or download that version for $39.99, those who just want the scores and don't need or want the Batch Run Wizard, ResultBrowser2001, reference images to help automate testing and compare the performance and quality of cards can certainly make do with the downloadable free version of the software. Those with slow analog modems and faint hearts, however, need not apply, as it is a 40 meg download.

Sandra also includes a benchmark for drives, which we used, in the above example, to gauge performance of our hard drive. This benchmark can also be used for Zip, Jaz, floppy, and any other non optical drive you can think of. The performance is measured as an index number with comparison to a few removable media drives, the number isn't really relevant to anything other than this benchmark. HD Tach, which is discussed later in this article, is a better gauge for hard drive performance and bandwidth.