good freeware benchmark?

[paganboy]

i'm about to oc, but im looking for a good benchmark program first. preferably a free (or very inexpensive) one, since my new build has left me penniless.

thanks

[DrZaius]

Definately SiSoft Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.demon.co.uk/sandra/).

[audiyoda]

I'll second SiSoft Sandra. best all around benchmark program.

-Craig

[hollywood]

OK i hear alot about benchmark test's.
Can someone inform me as to what it does? and what the benefit's are please!

Thank's "learning something new day by day"

[paganboy]

Its a program that that logs perforance readings on your system. Used alot by people who overclock to tell whether or not their system is running stable at a given cpu clock. The benefits are you can tell if you're system is stable or not without having to wait for it to tell you with crash. A good benchmark will also tell you what the errors are. I might be oversimplifying, but hopefully this explanation clears things up for you.

[Rancher]

This page has them all http://tucows.arctic.net/system/diag95.html:)

[hollywood]

I have compaq diagnostic's along with norton sys wrk's 2002 Now will that give me the same info as sandra. Just wondering

[paganboy]

now that i've downloaded sandra basic, how do i use this? i'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the options it's giving me. any help would be appreciated.

[DrZaius]

It's faily easy to use. Run Sandra, and double click on any of the icons for more info. To find out what's in your system, double click on the System Summary icon. Run the CPU Arithmetic Benchmark and Memory Bandwidth Benchmark to find out how your motherboard and CPU compare to others. It's almost like the regular Windows Control Panel, just click on each icon and you'll find more info.