Bench Mark Day! 

Prize drawing held at 2:00

No more entries accepted for the prizes.

Do you think you have the fastest computer in town?  

If so, you need to enter our Benchmark contest.

Come to Computer & Software Outlet's CPU shoot out! 

The event was held May 5th, 2001.

A representative from Intel attended.

We had a live remote broadcast from WSJS radio station.

There was food and prizes during the Saturday event.

 

This is a copy of the original advertising and results as held in 2001.

Come by computer & software outlet for "Benchmark Day" it will be held Saturday May 5th from 10:00 to 4:00. 2000

Computer & Software Outlet will be holding a contest to see who has the fastest computer in town.

 If you think you have a fast computer or just want to compare it to the rest of the computers in town you need to enter the areas first ever computer benchmark contest.

There will be free food during lunch and you may win one of the many prizes awarded that day.

 Even if yours is not the fastest computer in town you will be eligible for one of the many prizes awarded that day.

Computer & Software Outlet will hold random drawings from all local entries for some of the prizes. 

Other prizes will be awarded for the fastest and slowest computer.

 Computer & Software Outlet is one of the few companies able to call themselves an Intel Premier Provider.

We have on staff an Intel Certified Integration specialist and an Intel Certified networking specialist.

 To help show support Intel will have a factory representative on site during the contest to answer some of your questions about computers.

If your computer is not as fast as you like it you can check it in at the service department and let them upgrade it for you.

We specialize in upgrades for your system .

Our most popular items are hard drive upgrades and RAM upgrades.

Our Hard Drive Price Page 

Our RAM Memory Price Page 

 

 Customers are always telling us that we have the lowest RAM prices around.

 

Computer & Software Outlet, located beside Salem Salvage & Surplus One block behind the McDonald's at the corner of Jonestown Road and Highway 421 North in Winston-Salem.

Or call 336-765-1830.

A benchmark program is available on our web site.

Click below to try the benchmark. Read the next paragraph before you start.

http://www.compoutlet.com/cso/benchmark/final/speedy.exe Try running this one first.

If you run it more than once the results of the later tests may be wrong.  You may have to close the browser and run the test again.

Try not to have other programs running to get the best results. 

 It will ask you if you want to run it from its current location.  Say yes. (Actually click yes unless you have a voice interface to your computer)

It will say that we are not a known source but that is OK since you know who we are.

It will ask you to email the result to us. 

If you get error messages saying you don't have the required DLL files we have an installable version of the program at the bottom of this page.

You can download the benchmark program and run it on your computer at home and then email the results to computer & software outlet.

We will need the following:

Your name:

System type:

Speedy results:

And email address: 

You will then send the result back to us by email.

Example:

Your Name:  Speedy Gonzalez

System type:  Pentium III 700 256 megs of RAM

Speedy Results.  1232

And email address in case you win a prize.

To email us the results use the email address provided in the benchmark program.

Type in the results that you obtained from the speed test program.  The answer is encoded so we will know if you changed your results when we enter the speed into our decode program.  (So be honest.)  Anyway prizes will be awarded randomly, so don't cheat.

Then click send.

You may have to go into your email program and click send receive email to make sure it is sent.

 


Contest ends May 5th 2001.  We will post the results as soon as possible.

Please read the complete details on the website.

Read all of the instructions before you load this 2 meg file.

http://www.compoutlet.com/cso/benchmark/final/speedtest.exe   This is the full install version. 

Don't run this one if the one above works, they are the same program this one just gives you the dll files if you don't have them.

This is the full install version.  It unzips itself into a temporary directory called C:\SPEEDTEST You can run the program by right clicking on the start Icon at the bottom left of your computer and choose explore.

Browse to the c:\speedtest directory and click on speedy.exe  the program should then run for you.

If you choose to install the program we are assuming you have enough computer knowledge to complete this task.

If you uninstall the program I would keep the shared Dll files because many other programs use them.  Do not run the full install package if the limited package runs OK.  They are the same program and will give the same results.

Prizes will be given out on a random basis.  You don't have to be the fastest to win. 

If you run it more than once the results of the later tests may be wrong.  You may have to close the browser and run the test again.


About the benchmark,   this is a C language program that does the following: 

It does one 128-bit wide floating point addition. 

It then Does one 128-bit wide floating point subtraction. 

Then it does one 128-bit wide multiply. 

It will do this for 5 seconds keeping track of the number of times it completes this function.

The number you get is how many times your machine can do approximately 10,000 of these calculations.  Of course we encode the result that you see to verify the results you submit are official.

This benchmark does not measure Video Speed, Hard Drive Speed, or anything else not mentioned in the paragraph above.


The limiting factor on the speed of a computer is called the bottleneck.  This is the point of the computer that all other processes have to wait.  

A bottleneck is usually one of the following areas.

1.  The speed that the hard drive can move data in and out of the computer. 

2.  The speed that the computer can move data across the System Bus. I.E. Video or RAM.

3.  The speed that the computer moves data over the network, or modem on the internet.

These are usually what cause slow performance. 

It is not usually the CPU that causes the bottleneck.

Since we wanted a CPU benchmark we chose instructions that did not rely on these areas.


Intel® Pentium® 4 Processors have 144 new instructions in the CPU This enables them to perform the calculations mentioned above in one instruction per calculation as compared to the Pentium® 3 which took many instructions for each step.  The results will be shown in the comparison table below.

The Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor in the 423-pin Package socket with Intel Netburst™ micro-architecture, it still maintains the tradition of compatibility with IA-32 software. The Intel NetBurst micro-architecture features include hyper-pipelined technology, a rapid execution engine, a 400 MHz system bus, and an execution trace cache.

The hyper-pipelined technology doubles the pipeline depth in the Pentium 4 processor, allowing the processor to reach much higher core frequencies.

The rapid execution engine allows the two integer ALUs in the processor to run at twice the core frequency, which allows many integer instructions to execute in 1/2 clock tick.

The 400 MHz system bus is a quad-pumped bus running off a 100 MHz system clock making 3.2 GB/sec data transfer rates possible.

The execution trace cache is a level 1 cache that stores approximately 12k decoded micro-operations, which removes the decoder from the main execution path, thereby increasing performance.


 

Results as they come in are posted here.   

Speed System Type Name
351 486 DX/2 66Mhz 8MB RAM Eric Scarlett
2970 AMD K6-2 350 Andy Goodman
3420 K6-2 450 64 MG James Roberts
3483 Pentium II/300Mhz Laptop John Flack
4554 K6-2 500 Mhz, 384 Mb Jerry W. Cox
6651 Pentium III 450 512 megs of RAM Dan Dugan
7452 PIII 450 Andy Goodman
7848 Pentium III 500 PC800 RDRAM Keith R Howard
8019 Pentium III 500 128 megs of Rdram Gary Darr
8613 Amptron mother board w/ Intel III 555 / 128 Douglas Lee
8703 Pentium III 550 - 128 megs Bill Linthicum
9018 Dual Intel Xeon 500 MHz Siteserver
9099 Pentium III 550 MHz George Kam
9630 Pentium III 600Mhz, VC820 MB, 256M Ram Jeffrey K. Rogers
9756 Custom Athlon 700 Mike Nelson   
10269 Celeron 633 Kathy Goodman
11007 Notebook 750 MHz IBM Thinkpad Patrick Regan
11547 Dual Pentium III 733 Mhz Mark Church
11691 Dual Pentium Xeon 700Mhz 2G RAM Eric Scarlett
12312 AMD Athlon 900, 192Megs  Windows ME Mike Grogan
12474 AMD/750 256ram Mike Scarlett
12573 AMD750 256Ram Epox Board Mike Scarlett
12735 800 intel p3 Mark McNabb
12987 PIII 800 256 Rammbus Cliff Durham
13122 AMD 900Mhz 256MB RAM Tony Scarlett
13158 Thunderbird 900/ 384MB PC100 RAM Wasiq Ahmed
14094 Machine: Home build Athlon 800 / 1000 Chad Culbertson
14139 Intel Pentium 833 MZ Barbara Crouse
14292 Celeron 566@875 256mb ram Tom LaPlant
14319 1GHz Thunderbird/ Asus A7V133 512MB Matt Melvin
15561 Dual Pentium III, 933 MHz Rob Hampson
16497 Pentium III 1Ghz 256 megs Andy Goodman
16578 Dual Pentium III 1.0Ghz Eric Scarlett
17208 AMD K7 1.2GHz w/256mb ram Jon Vickers
19539 AMD Athlon 1333 mHz, Windows 2000 Tom Talbert
19719 AMD 1200 @ 1400  256meg SDRAM Mike Schiltz
21357 Athlon 1.5Ghz Stephen Vickory
42489 Pentium 4, 1.4 GHz, Windows 2K, self-built Rob Hampson
44568 Pentium 4 / 1.4Ghz 128 megs of RAM Dan Dugan
47925 Intel Pentium 4  w/98se  1.7 GHz Dan Zerbs
60363 P4 1.9GHz with 1GB PC800RDRAM Kevin Hamill