Custom PC Media Benchmarks

Download: www.custompc.co.uk/benchmarks

Custom PC, bit-tech's sister magazine, has developed its own Media Benchmarks to simulate the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC's performance.

You can download the suite from the link above, and submit your score to the benchmark leaderboard to see how your PC compares with those of others.

The scores are normalised against a reference PC that includes a stock-speed Core 2 Duo E6700, 2GB of DDR2 memory and a fast P45 motherboard, as you can see below. This PC scores 1,000 points, so if your PC scores 1,300, it's 30 per cent faster than the reference system, and if it scores less than 1,000 points, it's slower.

GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

Our GIMP image editing test simulates how well a PC can manipulate a collection of large digital photos, and to achieve a low time requires a PC with a powerful CPU, plenty of quick memory and efficient hard disk drive access.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake

Our test uses Handbrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows - to encode a high resolution MPEG-2 video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.

Multitasking Performance

Website: MPC-HC
Website: 7Zip

To run multiple applications well you need a powerful (ideally multi-core) CPU and plenty of RAM. Our multitasking test performs a massive file backup (with encryption) using 7-Zip, while simultaneously playing back a HD movie file using Media Player Classic, making it a seriously demanding test for any PC.

Overall Score

The overall score is an unweighted mean average of the scores of the three individual tests.


Even though the Opteron 2435s run at the same frequency as the Opteron 2382s and had faster RAM, they turned in a lower overall score: 1,047 compared to 1,084. This is a hard result to explain, as the Opteron 2435s should be at least as fast, or faster than the Opteron 2383s, but it may be caused by the motherboard having an early BIOS. In contrast, the Xeon W5580s turned in a breathtaking overall score of 1,743.