What is benchmarking? where do i start

i have just bought new pc parts from newegg and assembled ..has been running well for nearly 2 weeks...i have never o"cd but want to begin ...should i benchmark first i havent a clue all the stickies way over my head.....i have 165 denmark opteron asus a8n32 sli deluxe ocz mod psu ocz gold ram 2(2x512) 1 geforce xfx 7900gt
full sizewd thermaltake armor case and viewsonic vx922 mon...thanks for any help clownshoes420

nice pc.

benchmarks are a way of quantifying the power of your computer. there are lots of different kinds of benchmarks which test your computer for different things and generated a numerical value for how well your system performed.

some of the above stickied are benchmarks for 3dmark, which runs video game demos and measures the frames per second rendered by your cpu/video card, and your cpu alone. depending on how well your system was able to render the images (ie, higher frames = better performance,) it gives you a point score.

in the case of 3dmark and pcmark, you can find the lastest and older versions of this software at futuremark.com for free versions with limited capability.

even a brand new system will not score far beyond 10k points for example in the latest 3dmark06, but run 3dmark03 on the same computer and you should do much better. the reason for this is that older versions use less modern pixel shading, less textures, no/less antialiasing, etc.

once you have this score, you can compare it to other people's scores. kind of a pissing contest for geeks, hah.

(also, there are tons more benchmarks then just 3dmark, each of them has its own particular way of ranking you. pcmark, made by the same company, tests your computers ability to do things like compress files, render websites, run office, encode/play music and video, etc.)

thanks for takin time bro basic but helps me i guess id only use if for a refernce when i begin to oc

yeah, its useful for setting a baseline when overclocking. you do a benchmark of your system, say, getting a score of 12000 for some benchmark.

then you overclock and benchmark again. lets say now you score 16000. well, that's a 33% increase in your score, so you've (roughly) increased the power of your system in that field by 33%

Another great benchmark tool is Sandra Lite. It has several different benchmarks, each one testing different aspects of your computer.

A great tool for anyone to have is Everest. This link takes you to the Ultimate edition (which costs money), but there is a free edition on the same site.

To do some memory benchmarking, I recommend Super Pi. Another free but invaluable program.

There are tons of others, but these three are a great place to start.

super pi isn't really a memory benchmark though.