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The only benchmarks I have found is from SiSoftware. http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/?d=qa&f=mem_hsw

But how is this going to effect Firefox, Photoshop, or video conversion?

Does it have an effect on battery life?

integrated graphics, who needs a video card?

Video cards - all the rage in the '90s. Modern GPU's are used by gamers, 3D vfx artists, anyone doing serious image / video processing and on servers they're fairly useful too!

Well there might not be a magic utility that will tell you what's the bottleneck in your system....SiSoft's (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.html?dir=dload& location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=) program can be a big help. If offers free benchmarking (which from expirence I can tell you is very well done) of most major parts of your system and it offers some tips to make you computer run faster and smoother. It can also generate report files. Also the best bang for you buck will proablly come from getting more ram (just a guess no knowing what hardware you have now) and a good/better graphics card if you don't have one already. Honestly cleaning up your software will proablly help too. Defragging your hard drive and turning off background programs will also offer some boost.

Well there might not be a magic utility that will tell you what's the bottleneck in your system....SiSoft's (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.html?dir=dload& location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=) program can be a big help. If offers free benchmarking (which from expirence I can tell you is very well done) of most major parts of your system and it offers some tips to make you computer run faster and smoother. It can also generate report files. Also the best bang for you buck will proablly come from getting more ram (just a guess no knowing what hardware you have now) and a good/better graphics card if you don't have one already. Honestly cleaning up your software will proablly help too. Defragging your hard drive and turning off background programs will also offer some boost.

This will let you work out which pieces of hardware are not up to scratch. Then you just have to work out whether they're responsible for whatever 'bottleneck' you're trying to get around.

This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that SiSoft Sandra can do it. Get the Standard version or pay for the Pro. Last time I checked the "Advanced" version was adware.

Russ

As of now, it's simply expensive to make very high RPM hard drives. Cost is the reason I didn't opt for SCSI, and I'm glad I didn't. The higher rotational speeds offered in SCSI drives offer only marginal speed increases, and they usually only come in small sizes (18 GB). RAID is the answer to higher performance with hard drives.

My experiment with IDE RAID-0 turned out wonderfully. For $160 I got what amounts to a 160-gig drive that was 2mb/sec slower than a 15k RPM SCSI drive (according to SiSoft SANDRA) That was from two plain old 7200 RPM 80-gig IDE's. When Serial ATA get's big, setups like this will be even easier, since the main limitation with IDE RAID is the number of drives you can attatch to the board.