Modern computer system has so much performance that even a three year old system would satisfy most people's daily needs, including browsing internet, email, office work, and even photo management. You won't type faster by getting a faster system. Thus, the regular benchmarks which measures general system performance don't matter anymore.
Certainly, there are exceptions, including gaming, anti-virus scan, and video-related work. For the best gaming performance, a powerful video card is often more important than CPU. Anti-virus scanning is time-consuming. However, scanning speed is mostly determined by the hard drive speed, not CPU. The CPU usage often stays under 30% during a scan.Thus, the only time consuming task which is still CPU intensive is video compression. It affects people everyday - encode video for iPod, PMC, Zen; burn DVD; encode video for websites etc.
Many system testers already do some kind of video compression benchmark. They use a variety of software for measuring the speed. However, those software are expensive and impossible for normal user to obtain. Thus, the benchmarking is limited in scope and you cannot benchmark your system to compare to a published result. ViMark is free. You don't need to buy expensive software just to see if your system is performing well. ViMark is easy. It does require QuickTime and DirectX. Other than those two standard video related system components, there is no extra codec download. Run ViMark and you will get your result in minutes.ViMark is a uniformed benchmark. Want to compare your result with other people? Submit to ViMark website and you can easily compare to reuslts running the same CPU or same OS.ViMark helps you to tune your performance. If you see your own result is substantially lower than others who use the same CPU and OS, you know there is a problem. Discuss with others in our discussion forum. It helps you to tune your system for the best performance.
Compatible with Windows Vista.
) "ViMark - Click to enlarge screenshot")