Realbench Benchmarking & Stress Test Insights

What is Realbench?

Realbench is a benchmark that uses open source applications and simple scripting to simulate real-world performance of a PC system. It's designed for to show the difference:

• Before and after a PC upgrade
• To gauge the real effect of an overclock
• To gauge the real effect of BIOS tweaks

Who can use it?

Anyone! As long as you're running a 64-bit version of Windows, any PC or laptop can run the benchmark to get a score!

Who can upload scores?

• PCs with ASUS motherboards
• G series laptops

Both can upload scores to the leaderboard and compared directly with other, similar systems to show you how to improve your performance. Achievement badges can be won as well!

The Tests

Realbench features several open source software's with the latest CPU extensions, which each test a different part of the system:

• GIMP Image Editing

This focuses on single threaded CPU and memory performance, therefore CPU clock speed and memory efficiency (timings + frequency) are the keys to a good score. It uses up to SSE4.2 CPU extensions.

• Handbrake h.264 video compression.

This focuses on multi-threaded CPU and cache performance, therefore the more CPU threads, cache and clock speed you have the better the score. It uses up to AVX CPU extensions.

• LuxMark rendering

This focuses entirely on OpenCL performance. It will check for GPU accelerated OpenCL first, before defaulting to CPU if it isn't present. It is also compatible with AMD's upcoming hUMA between APU and GPU. It scales perfectly across all available resources, so the more OpenCL capable GPUs installed the better the score. OpenCL driver efficiency is also key to this test, with some components performing better than others. The test runs for a fixed period and is calculated on the sustained KSample/sec the system can generate.

• Heavy Multitasking.

Test uses a combination of the above tests to simulate a heavy multitasking scenario that loads the entire system.

Note: All the tests need to be selected in order to get a final score!

 

 

Uploading Your Score

 

 

Once you have a score, click the Upload button in the menu bar. Firstly login using your ASUS VIP email address and password (the same you use for ROG forums) and then select the Upload menu again and hit upload! The red text along the bottom of the app will tell you the status.

 

 

Note: Uploading a result can only be done straight after the benchmark has been performed. The 'save for later' option is currently under development.

General Benchmarking Notes

When benchmarking there are some common practices that will help maximize your score. These include:

• Running Realbench after a fresh system boot-up or restart.
• Close as many background applications and taskbar services as possible as these take up resources.
• Run Realbench from the fastest storage possible. Try the ROG RAMDisk software if you have this, or simply an SSD is better than HDD for performance.
• Make sure your drivers are up-to-date.
• Serious benchmarkers will want to use a fresh Windows/driver install.

Stress Test

Like the benchmark, the stress test is designed to push every part of the system - CPU, cache, memory, GPU and storage with the real-world apps - to find any element of instability or weakness in your PC build.

It's system load is even higher than that of the heavy multitasking. The benchmarks run in the background and loop asynchronously, providing both a very high sustained load and momentarily load change challenges for your system. This is better than an synthetic apps that provide sustained, iterative heavy loading like MemTest or Prime95.

The stress test can be set to test 4-16GB of system memory and can be set to run for 15 minutes to 8 hours. Unlike the Realbench benchmarks, the PC system can still be used while the stress test is running. Instead it is stopped by the stop button within the app.