Custom PC Media Benchmarks

Download: CustomPC Media 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 see how your PC or laptop compares to those we test.

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 sub-system performance.

Multi-tasking Performance

Website: MPC-HC
Website: 7Zip

To run multiple applications well you need a powerful (ideally multi-core) CPU and plenty of RAM. Our multi-tasking 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.


See the Results Analysis page for our take on what these numbers mean.