We recently stumbled onto this great little tool called Kribi bench. It is a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the people at Adept Development. Kribi bench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. Now the great thing is, it therefore bypasses the GPU... so everything is in direct relation to your memory and CPU.

This software is a 100% multi-threaded application, which loves SMP, HT and everything you can throw at it. We always see the multiple cores kick in very well with this test. We use the "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million rendered polygons. The outcome is the actual number of frames rendered by the CPU per second, higher is better.

AES data encryption

For this test we encrypt some precious data. Data encryption has become a sad necessity for responsible data managers. Cryptography is the science of secret codes, enabling the confidentiality of communication through an insecure channel. The AES algorithm uses one of three cipher key strengths: a 128-, 192-, or 256-bit encryption key (password). Each encryption key size causes the algorithm to behave slightly differently, so the increasing key sizes not only offer a larger number of bits with which you can scramble the data, but also increase the complexity of the cipher algorithm. AES encryption is applied in a lot of compressing software like WinZIP.