Courtesy of Softpedia.com

Benchmarking your pc is a really expensive things to do and it was usually perform by a reviewer for them to determine the minute differences between systems without repeatable standard of comparison and to give a valuable insight into status of your system. But you dont have to be a reviewer to run a benchmark, here are the free stuff to start your own benchmark to test your rig in the comfort of your own home.

What you need:
- Of course, PC
- CINEBENCH
- 3DMARK05
- HD TACH
- COSBI OPENSOURCEMARK
- PRIME95
- Mostly needed, PATIENCE

1. Score Your CPU – With Cinebench runs on everything from single core to 16 core machines. It’s a future-proof little benchmark that gives yo an overall performance score based on yuor computer’s ability to render a 3D image in as little time as possible. It has also a built-in database, a helpful way to keep track of all your scores when modifying your rig.
2. Test Your Video card DirectX 9 Performance – One of the best way to test your videocard is to fire up a graphics-heavy game that includes a benchmark mode like FEAR and Quake 4. But if you dont have an acceptable games to test your rig’s performance, Futuremark 3DMARK05 is the next best thing to grab. Since the programs a demo, you won’t get to edit any settings. However, 3DMARK05 will scale depending on the power of your graphics card.
3. Test Your Hard Drive – The free HD Tach Benchmarking utility with one click of a button, the application tests burst speeds, CPU utilization, random access speeds, and sequential read speeds.. The most important of these is the average read speed of your drive. HD Tach’s burst speed measurement represents your drive ability to transfers data from its inboard cache to your CPU. Higher numbers indicates the time it takes the drive to access a random sampling of data from all over the drive. In this case, a lower number is better. Defragmenting the drive might help to improve performance, but performance degradation over the life of a drive might indicate hardware failure.
4. Measure Your Overall System Performance – The open-source program COSBI OpenSourceMark is a great way to test whether your computer tweaking is actually having a measurable effect on your system’s performance. It can also detects multiple cores and automatically reconfigures the benchmark to take full advantage of your rig’s hardware.
5. Test Your Rig’s Stability – An overclock can push a rig past safe operation. You might not notice this instability or window might crash once an hour. Either way, one sure way to determine whether you’ve gone too far is to run your computer like a madman, and if its survives the rite of passage, you’re good. To do this grab Prime95. It runs your PC at full loads until one of two things happen: You’re content with your testing or your rig shuts down.