Make sure before playing games only is setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have setup your monitor improper. How do we know this ? Because we receive a couple of email every now and then telling that a reader can't distinguish the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

SiSoftware DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

The DhryStone test pure CPU test that runs completely in the CPU itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core.

Now please get it out of your head ... we are not looking for top-notch performance today. We are looking at a  product that is capable of doing the regular basic stuff.

ZLib CPU test

This integer benchmark measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library Version 1.2.2

CPU ZLib test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware. A very good test to measure multi-core performance among platforms.

Actually Zlib performance for a product of this caliber is pretty strong here.

Memory test

Lavasys Everest has an excellent tool to measure memory bandwidth. We take dual-channel mode for granted these days. The downside from being forced to use only one DIMM slot, is that you'll revert back to single channel mode and loose half the bandwidth.