whats a good program to use to test the speed of my new system (specs inside)?

[TaylorD]

just bought a beast, twin 2.4ghz xeons, 2gb rdram, twin scsi 15krpm drives... 22" monitor, etc.
its an alienware MJ-12, and its the loudest machine i've every heard. I feel like my desk is going to take off.

I want to test it out. (before I sell off many of the parts to make it affordable to me)

also, does anyone know, is winxp pro supposed to only report the speed of one of the processors when you access system in the control panel?

(whoops, thanks for moving this to the right forums mods)

 

[TaylorD]

i seem to remember one that gave a HD score, graphics score, and processor score, but I can't recall...

 

[dakels]

Sisoft Sandra
Its one of the best out there for testing overall computer performance.

There is also PCMark and 3DMark but Sandra tests everything, and pretty accurately. It will also give you recommendations on where to improve certain areas (Although the recommendations are pretty unintelligent). It also has a nice burn in feature that works your computer intensley for hours to make sure everything is in working order. I always do an 8 hour burn in with my new computers or any time I do major hardware changes.

 

[TaylorD]

strangely enough, both sandra and pcmark fail to complete tests.... hmmm, could it be the dual processors?

 

[dakels]

thats odd, I know at least Sandra is supposed to handle Dual Processors. I have never used it on a Dual p4 XEON board but I know it's supposed to be compatible up to 64 CPU's... maybe you need the pro license but I don't think so.