[Daveskater]

Originally Posted by Rik

With the scsi's in, I had it fully booted in 15 seconds. It was almost insanely fast.

Now that IS insanely fast And I thought my PC was fairly quick Well, compared to my old one it is That thing used to take about 5 minutes before I could use it, this is done in 70-90 seconds.

One thing that is definitely good to remember, is the cache of the hard drive. The more there is, the faster it will perform. Quite a few WD drives have 16MB cache now, including the ones I have, and I have a feeling I've seen 32MB ones somewhere as well. Probably on massive drives.

[Joshuashawharvey]

Originally Posted by Albert Lionheart

OK - so what would you use as a benchmarking tool?

Personally, I don't use any benchmarking tools anymore. If a friend has ran a, say for example, 3DMark06 benchmark and has asked me to do one so he can compare, then I will run one.

I used to take a lot of notice to the Vista E.I and wanted 5.9 across the board. I also used 3DMark 2001-06, Everest, and a few others. I would overclock to the hilt just for those few extra points, not because I needed the speed. I still overclock now, but that's just for fun, I don't do it just for a few extra points on 3DMark.
I've found the Vista benchmarking tool quite unreliable to be honest. I've seen many cases, including my own computer, where it has rated DDR2-800 and 1066 RAM, regardless of their latencies, as 5.6, where it should be a definite 5.9. Eventually it changes to 5.9.

The only thing I want from my computer is if it is quick enough for my own needs, so if the computer feels speedy then that's good enough for me.