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Saturday, March 05, 2005

Van Smith Opens Up OSMark Benchmarking Program
By David Johnston
Van Smith, the programmer of OSMark (Open-Source Mark) and the person behind vanshardware.com has open-sourced his benchmarking program that used to be known as COSBI. This benchmark tests your computer's prowess in many areas including office, internet, multimedia, and scientific/mathematical applications.

Van first started work on COSBI a few years ago when he discovered that BapCo's SysMark benchmarking program was weighted heavily to favor the Pentium 4 architecture by weighting the importance of some tasks more heavily and repeating tests where the Pentium 4 excelled multiple times. Van hopes that this new benchmark will gain popularity and because it is open-source, will be developed in a non-biased manner. In its early days, COSBI was small enough to fit on a floppy so one could take it to a store like Best Buy or CompUSA to try out the performance of various computers before buying one (provided the store let you run it). I have personally been a fan of COSBI for quite some time and I highly reccomend checking it out.

Not to brag or anything, but my system has the current high score (though probably not for long once the extreme overclockers get a crack at it). You can see Van's site here. You can also find my benchmarking results as well as others (once they add them) on Van's forums here.

# Permalink Posted at 10:54 AM 3 comments Email this Link

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Oh well, my overclocked 3000+'s score got beaten today by an FX-55. I knew it wouldn't last long ;)

# posted by David 2:20 PM

Personally, I have always been somewhat turned off by the BAPCO school of benchmark testing. When I was a ZD Labs fellow, we debated the merit/need to using a "real world" test to measure the things a person actually does with their PC vs the in-dpeth component level testing that was more about calculating frame rates and transfer speeds and read/write throughput and so on.

In the end I also found the BAPCO method cumbersome and tiring to do. You had to install basically a ton of apps and then run the tests and then it would uninstall everything. A graphics card test was more up my alley even if blasting the Quick Brown Fox line again and again on a screen was not exactly a pure measurement either. Some vendors put the same lines of text in the graphics chip's BIOS as a way of cheating, and a hard drive never works in the way it is tested, so in the end, I always felt that looking at both offered a smart balance.

What I like about the OSMark being open is that you can do some real world testing to see how your system stacks up and the program that came before this version anyway was small enough to take to a computer store- a much better test than installing a suite of apps just to see how fast the machine scrolls etc. In the end open = good and real world + system level testing means a bigger lens into your system. No one method is perfect, so why not try a little bit of them all?

# posted by Alice 7:07 PM

I know I couldn't live without SiSoft Sandra and 3DMark installed on my computer.

Also, while OSMark may not fit on a floppy, it's still very "lean" for a benchmark (at least compared to behemoths like 3DMark). You could easily put it on a USB drive to take to the store with you.

# posted by David 9:35 PM

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