NovaBench

How fast is your computer? Where are the performance bottlenecks? And how does it compare to other users’ systems? NovaBench can answer those questions and more. This free benchmarking utility tests your CPU, RAM, graphics, disk speed, and other system parameters, creating a detailed report of its findings that you can upload to the NovaBench site with an optional free account. NovaBench is so easy to use that anyone can benchmark their system with it, but the information it gathers is useful even to pros.

NovaBench has an extremely simple interface with a field displaying system info and one button, Start Benchmark Tests. We pressed it. A pop-up advised us to close Word, Chrome, and any other programs we might have running. We did, and the test proceeded with a series of pop-ups showing green progress bars. NovaBench started with our CPU, testing floating point operations, integer operations, and MD5 hash generation, and moving on to RAM, 3D graphics, hard drive read and write, and other tests. The graphics test opened a video window on our desktop. When the testing finished, NovaBench displayed the results in a tab. It displayed the test date and time, our OS, CPU, and GPU information, and test results with scores. Clicking Compare These Results Online opened a Web page displaying our test data with the ability to create a free account for posting and sharing our results in the user community. We could save our results locally, of course. Rerunning the test opened each new set of unsaved results in a new tab, or we could open saved results for comparison. The Tests menu let us run individual tests, run the system tests without the graphics test, and other options, including a link to an Internet bandwidth speed tool and a basic but effective system information tree view.

NovaBench’s tests complete quickly. Its tests are the same for every system since it’s a benchmarking tool that collects data that can be compared to other users’ systems. It’s not a stress and stability tester like Prime95 or OCCT, and it can’t hurt your system since you can’t misuse it. You can run it as many times as you like.