Benchmarks have earned both love and hate from millions around the world. While their value for defining a computer's performance isn't absolute, we always need their references, mainly to compare similar configurations. The market is full of tools, and one we'd like to highlight today is NovaBench, whose strength lies in matching your results against those reported by other users online.
The benchmark is like a political statement. Manufacturers don't hesitate to publish results when it suits them, but if their latest hardware generation produces disappointing numbers, they come out to undermine the value of benchmarks as a whole. Unfortunately, that's a typical industry reaction. Add to this the lack of standards that would allow us to evaluate all hardware with a universal set of tools... but we shouldn't forget the users. The desire to communicate results, combined with the magic of the web, enables two users at opposite ends of the planet to check if the hardware they chose for their computers is working as it should.
Of course, to do this they need a common program, and that's where NovaBench comes in. Its latest build hasn't been updated in four years, yet the series of tests it performs is broad and stable enough to deliver logical results even on the most modern platforms. NovaBench runs three assessments on the main processor (arithmetic-logic, floating point, and MD5 hash), RAM, hard drive, and graphics card. From these values, NovaBench calculates a final score and then offers the option to compare it with other users' systems. This can be done anonymously or by creating an account on the Novabench site.
NovaBench is available for Windows (from XP with .NET Framework 2.0 installed) and for OS X (version 10.5 and later). The highest scores are above 6,818 points and involve very high-end hardware, such as AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core processors and graphics cards at the level of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER.
