AIDA64 Cache and Memory Performance

In this first test we're looking at the performance offered by the memory subsystem and the processor's L1, L2 and L3 caches. AIDA64 comes with a great benchmark that provides a nice overview of all these performance characteristics.

Web Browsing — JetStream 2

The JetStream 2 browser benchmark combines multiple JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmarks with several advanced workloads to determine how quickly a browser can complete specific tasks. It not only rewards high overall performance, but also fast startup and consistent operation.

Web Browsing — Speedometer 3.1

Speedometer 3.1 tests a "to-do list" web application that's implemented using a huge number of popular frameworks. Among the benchmarks are versions built with React, Ember.js, AngularJS, vue.js, jQuery and others—frameworks that are used by the most popular sites in the world.

Y-Cruncher

Y-Cruncher is a highly optimized piece of software that can calculate Pi and other constants to a huge number of digits. It is fully multithreaded, uses a modern code design and is optimized for all major processor architectures. This ability has made it a popular application, used by the enthusiast community to determine and compare how powerful their overclocked systems are.

Rendering — Cinebench

Cinebench is one of the most popular modern CPU benchmarks because it is built around the renderer of Maxon's Cinema 4D software. Both AMD and Intel show this performance test at various public events, making it almost an industry standard. Using Cinebench 2024, we test both single-threaded and multithreaded performance.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft's Office suite needs no introduction as it's the most widely used PC software on the planet, installed on almost every office computer, or at most a click away through the browser, no matter the industry. Our tests cover a wide range of editing and creation tasks in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook.

Media Encoding — H.265 / HEVC

Our video-encoding test uses the H.265 codec, which is also known as HEVC. Compared to H.264 it provides superior compression efficiency, reducing file sizes and bandwidth usage while maintaining high video quality. We compress a 4K video using the latest version of the x265 encoder with 8-bit color depth, preset "slow," and a quality setting of crf 20.

Media Encoding — MP3

MP3 revolutionized the music industry like no other technology. Introduced in the 90s, it enabled a massive reduction in audio-file sizes, without noticeable impact on sound quality. This made music downloads, and ultimately streaming, a feasible method for content delivery over the Internet. Our benchmark converts a 2.5 hour-long 44.1 kHz Stereo recording to a variable bitrate MP3 file. MP3 encoding is a single-threaded process.

Chemistry Simulation

NAMD is developed by the University of Illinois and helps researchers simulate the dynamic interactions between molecules and atoms. It is an established means of molecular dynamics simulation that scales from individual clusters of molecules to full-on chemical interaction in different phases. Parallel simulation modes help differentiate NAMD from its peers, allowing efficient problem-solving of larger systems using the Charm++ parallel programming model as the base.

Compression — 7-Zip

Another popular compression software is 7-Zip, which includes a benchmark that measures the integer instruction rate (MIPS) using the ZIP algorithm. It makes good use of multiple threads, when available.