Recommend me "professional grade" Benchmark software.

hiya folks, the boss man asked me to come up with a benchmark suite for all incoming models, (Dell and Apple Products)

I took a look at a few on the web, (Futuremark,Sysmark,Sandra), they didn't seem quite what we are looking for. Does anyone have any suggestions on a few products?

Depends on what your systems intend to do. Are we talking database work, number crunching (floating point/integer), rendering, etc.

Like Bisk said, it really depends on what your system are intended for.

Cross-platform (Win/OS X), you're not going to find a large selection. There are individual apps that are available cross-platform like Photoshop, but you're probably going to need to get a lot more specific what you're looking for.

I went over and got a little more info of what he is looking for, its fairly basic.

-Over all hardware speed
-Office productivity (2003/2007 specifically)
-A few apps they use here on Campus (matlab,soldworks,autocad,etc)
-Gaming wouldn't hurt as a vast majority of these are going to be sold to students, and honestly, they will log more hours of WoW than actual work.

I think if I can get a package that does Office/hardware/video for 32&64 MS platforms Id be pretty happy.

PCMark Vantage is pretty much "the best" right now when it comes to overall system performance and not strictly gaming. It will run some synthetic "mock up" (that's what I call 'em) routines that simulate office productivity performance to some degree.

There really isn't much out there for serious system performance testing, unfortunately. I prefer to do a set of tasks that I've created over the past few years to gauge how well a machine works, like a directory with a few thousand mp3 files fully tagged being categorized and added to the WMP library (big differences across every version of Windows there is), etc. Real-world tasks that people do on a normal basis.

If you look around I'm sure you can find some scripts for some of the software you listed that will perform a set of instructions using the given application to get a task or sequence of tasks done. That's the most basic rudimentary type of benchmark you're going to find: how fast a machine/OS combination allows a particular application to get a specific set of tasks done (which is the nature of a benchmark definition I suppose).

And on the OSX platform the situation is far far worse. X-Bench is pretty much the defacto standard benchmarking tool for overall system performance because there's nothing as big and complex as something like PCMark Vantage on the Windows platform, nor anything even remotely similar to the massive Bapco SysMark monster benchmark (pay for play with that beast, and it's expensive).

I'd say if the person in charge wants tangible numbers to show how well given machines can do a task, set up the software and do the task with a stopwatch handy... can't hurt.

Then do it again on another machine, then another, and present the results.

Thanks for the tips.

The only bad thing about Vantage, is its only Vista. And I will have the dubious honor of doing XP 32/64 & Vista 32/64.

He also didnt like the price of sysmarks package so He bought passmark, which seems OK, I guess.

I did find some benchs for specific software packages (http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html) if anyone ever has to do this sort of thing too..

Yah, I neglected to mention the SPEC ones, they're designed for the high end graphics apps obviously.