Hardware Reviews

[Monkey muppet]

I know that some reviewers include both, but wouldn't it make more sence to make benchmarking more realistic for every day use.

For example: Every evening I tax my computer with various tasks all running at the same time:

Dr. Divx recoding a DVD into 2x 700mb files
Nero creating an Audio cd from MP3's
Winamp v5 streaming radio of a DSL line
Azureus with double figure active torrent links
Firefox - always open with around a dozen plug-in's
EverQuest 2 running in the background
Constant use of Explorer - moving files around bewtween the file server and this machine.
+ all the various background applications (zonealarm, Sykpe ViP, etc,etc)

Now for around 8hrs a day my comp gets a 100% CPU usage.

If I could see reviewers carrying out similar task to the above then I could see a 'real-world' use of Hardware.

I don't care about a figure which mean nothing to me 3dMark2005, etc

edit:

*I forgot to add that this is running dual 19CRT's (horizontal) and a composite out to TV cloned off the no:1 display which means the graphics gets a full workout as well*

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I agree synthetics aren't very useful and Sisuck, Futuremock, and the like do little for me either. They have their uses, but I always skip them when reading reviews since they tell me very little that I find to be of value.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Everyone's set of everyday tasks is different, your set is nothing like mine.

Benchmarks like the office suites and content creation let you compare one CPU to another, which is about as good as it gets for non-gaming benchmarks.

 

[Monkey muppet]

I know there are some clever minds out there:

I could ask for a customizable benchmark where you can run a multimedia encoding test (choice of programs) while adding in other programs (again selected from various .exe's. and background tasks.

Put that into a side-by-side comparison (similar to SIS Sandra) or an on-line, so it makes far more sence when deciding the performance per pound or cycles per cents