Benchmark Software For Windows 7 Rollout?

tdisalvo writes "We are doing a Windows 7 rollout and I will have to compare major PC vendors. I am looking for vendor-neutral tests that will give me the data I need to present an educated opinion to my CIO. Clear, pretty charts are nice since it is for C level execs, and we need to make it understandable for nontechnical as well as technical people. More specifically, I am looking for something that will clearly show how the same processor performs (better or worse) with a particular build, motherboard, RAM, power supply, etc. My plan is to get very similar machines from major vendors and see which one's build has the highest independent benchmarks. Something with which I could test multiple computers and report on the differences in score would be ideal." As usual, free is an advantage.

Comments

Corporate America Strikes Again

[sexconker]

Here's what you do.
You go to techbargains.com slickdeals.net techdealdigger.com techdeals.net etc.

CTRL+F DELL

Note specs and prices.
Do this for a week.

Then next week, jump on the first deal that meets or beats the best deal from last week.

Then order up a bunch of machines.

If the number you're ordering is an issue, just call Dell, ask for the supervisor, and then get X machines at the quoted price after agreeing to upgrade them all to the 3-year, NBD warranty.

Corporate will love the price.
Whoever manages the machines (you?) will love the NBD warranty for when a PSU fails, or a fan starts getting noisy. (When, not if.)
You won't have had to do any real work.

Everyone wins.

Real Simple with Our Revit Application

[njhunter]

This is specialized for architects but we went from a five minute "save to central" time cost with Windows XP 64Bit to two seconds on Windows 7. Our cost to deploy ROI was achieved in one week's work. "Save to Central" is an Autodesk feature for writing to a SQL Server database on a server. Talk about low hanging fruit. Management surely understands that when people are no longer standing around yapping, more money is being made; not to mention happier workers as well! Your results may vary. Of course with Windows, any new deployment is faster on the machine than a stale DLL hell one.

Re:Gawd.

[Jaime2]

The "may see an advantage" you mentioned is exactly what I was asking for detail on. My empirical testing showed that 64-bit isn't a magic bullet, unless your apps have outgrown the memory limitations of the 32-bit world. There are a few natural disadvantages of 64-bit. For example, pointers are bigger, causing more cache misses. I've met way to many people that think that it is a foregone conclusion that 64-bit is faster than 32-bit all the time. I actually had someone respond "How can that be?" to a benchmark result showing 32-bit XP 15% faster than 64-bit XP for one specific workload. For those who may fall into this category, there are many reasons, from immature 64-bit drivers to hand-tweaked 32-bit app code whose 64-bit equivalent hasn't had the same number of years of care and tweaking.

Re:Multiple software produces the best result

[hairyfeet]

Well I use PCWizard from the guys at CPUID. While it isn't fancy, and you'll have to take the data and make your own pretty charts, but to stress the basics (CPU,RAM,GPU,HDD,etc) and give you straight data it is pretty good. Then if that doesn't give him enough raw data to use he can always run separate tests.

But unlike some of the others I have tried data doesn't seem to skew towards one CPU or another. Maybe it is because it is from a little bunch and they aren't being used for big reviewers benchmarks, who knows, all I can tell you is the results seemed to be pretty accurate, at least for me.

So why not give it a try? It's free, they have a portable version so you don't even have to install it on the PC you're testing, just launch, pick which test you want to run, and let her go. At the end it'll give you the raw numbers as well as show how the PC matches up to various other builds. Not a bad little tool to have on your flash stick if you need to know how a machine runs or get a full list of what hardware it has.