System Stability Tester is a free open source software for Windows, Linux and Mac systems that can stress test and benchmark a computer system. It does so by calculating up to 128 million digits of Pi which is extremely taxing for the processor.

When you first start the program you have the choice to run a benchmark or system stress test. A benchmark can be used to compare the results of a system to another system, the stress test to verify that there are no calculation errors.

You can also select the amount of Pi digits you want to compute, the turns, and the number of threads the computer should use for that task.

The stress testing application supports two pi computation algorithms: The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre with Borwein being selected by default.

Please note that you can only run a stress test if at least two threads are selected. The program then starts the calculation which can slow down the PC considerable during operation. Statistics are updated regularly that display the amount of calculated Pi digits, the state, and time it took to calculate them.

An overview at the top highlights the total amount of errors of the calculation as well as the processing time until the first error was detected.

You can optionally save a log file or a Pi file. The first saves basic information about the run, the second all Pi digits.

One of the core advantages of System Stability Tester is that it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems, which means that it can be used to compare the performance of computers running different operating systems.

Interested users can download System Stability Tester from the developer website over at Sourcerforge.

And since it is a portable application, it can also be added to a troubleshooting collection on a CD, DVD or USB drive.

The program displays a list of all connected drives in its interface on startup. This includes all optical drives like CD and DVD drives, all hard drives and all connected network drives and servers.

You can start a benchmark right away by selecting a drive under QuickAccess and optionally changing the test file size and block size before clicking on the Start button to run the benchmark. This quick benchmark is not working on optical drives considering that they cannot be written to. The program displays the write speed and read speed in the interface after the benchmark run.

Two other benchmarking options are supported and accessible with a click on the respective tabs in the main program window.. File Access uses a regular file on the system to test the read and write speed. BlockAccess on the other hand can be used to test the reading or writing of file block (artificially created) on the system.

Both FileAccess and BlockAccess have configuration options to change the benchmark parameters. It is for instance possible to select specific block sizes, disable buffering or show a real-time transfer speed graph in another window.

Read speed benchmarking of optical drives worked fine, I could not get the write speed to be tested though. The program does not write a log or history of past benchmark runs which is a problem for many users who want to test their devices over time.

Windows users can download Parkdale from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system. Some users may need to run the program with elevated rights.

Selecting the right third party DNS provider should require at least some research on the user’s part to find the best suitable server. A user in the US for instance would not necessarily want to pick a European DNS provider and vice versa. Another aspect that plays a role besides speed is the legal situation if a DNS provider in a foreign country or by a foreign company is selected. Plus, you may get extras like options to filter out spam or specific types of sites automatically.

DNS Benchmark is a free portable software for the Windows operating system that can be used to test the speed of multiple DNS servers. The program ships with dozens of pre-added servers that include Google DNS and Open DNS among others. The program comes with options to add or remove particular domain name servers from the listing.

A click on run benchmark runs a series of tests that include name and owner look-ups, status messages and the response time. The latter is further divided into cached and uncached response times.

You can switch to a tabular data view which offers minimum, average and maximum values as well as a providers reliability in percentage.

The program works best for users who have found a few prospective DNS providers on the Internet. These users would add the server IPs of all prospective domain name servers to the DNS Benchmark software to test their speed and reliability.

Speed is of course only one of the variables that computer users need to look at. Interested Windows users can download DNS Benchmark from the official developer website. The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. An alternative is the previously reviewed Namebench.

Benchmark software is used to make those comparisons. These programs usually run a series of taxing tests to calculate the performance of specific PC components. This includes components like the processor, RAM, hard drive or video card.

Auslogics Benchtown is a new benchmark for the Windows operating system that is currently available as a beta release. It is not clear at this point in time whether it will remain free after its final release.

The program has been designed to rate the following PC components:

• 2D Desktop Graphics
• 3D Game Graphics
• HDD Performance
• Memory Speed
• CPU Calculations

It is possible to customize the tests in the program settings. Here it is possible to remove subsystems from the test and to swap the hard drive that is used during tests. The selected hard drive needs to have at least 100 Megabytes of space.

You can run a test with a click on the Rate Now button under Benchmark. Tests take less than five minutes to complete and display progress information on screen all the time.

More important than the direct feedback during tests is the benchmark results page at the end. Auslogics Benchtown displays separate values for each subsystem that has been tested as well as an overall score on screen.

A compare with friends button is displayed, but that did not work on our test system. A short message about uploading data was displayed but nothing else happened afterwards.

Several of the menus at the top did not work as well. The all my benchmarks link for instance did not do anything after activation. This could be a beta issue or an incompatibility with our test system.

Auslogics Benchtown can be used to display detailed system information. A click on the menu opens environment and hardware information after a short scan.

The program is easy to use and to handle. That’s a big plus. As is the less than five minute benchmarking process. Windows users who are looking for a new benchmarking program should take a closer look at Auslogics Benchtown. Cautious users and those in productive environments should wait until the final version of the program gets released by the company. The application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer website.

The real beta of Firefox 5 is expected to be released on May 17th. You can read more information about the decision on Bugzilla. John mentions there that the release, which he refers to as fake beta, is “not beta quality code” but “an early copy of aurora quality code”.

So, if you are waiting for Firefox 5 Beta 1 you need to wait a tad longer. Aurora users on the other hand need to make sure to switch back to Aurora in case they switch to that fake beta release.

Google Software Engineer Mike Belshe yesterday announced the release of a modified version of the SunSpider benchmark. This modified version runs each test of the SunSpider benchmark 50 times instead of just once, which according to Google should return preciser results. A quick test by Conceivable Tech has shown that Google, who comes last in the standard test, is leading when their modified version of the benchmark is used for testing.

Back to Mozilla. Edward Lee, the guy behind the AwesomeBar HD extension has updated the add-on. The update addresses one of my main points of criticism: Lack of space for the website address. Edward has removed the “go to a website” link in the address bar, the protocol and configured the extension to only show up when a user “starts navigating”. While that is a step in the right direction, it still proves to be inflexible. Options to configure your own set of search actions would resolve that issue, but that is still not possible.

Opera Software has released Opera Dragonfly 1.0, a built-in web development and debugging tool. Opera users find a feature overview and documentation on the Opera web page. Oh, and yeah, there is video as well.

And that’s it for today’s browser round-up.

Time for a now Internet browser benchmark comparison. All benchmarks are run on a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional PC with an Intel Core i7 860 Ghz cpu, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 display adapter.

The following browsers have been included in the benchmark comparison:

• Firefox 3.6.15
• Firefox 4 RC
• Google Chrome 11.0.696.12 Dev
• Google Chrome 12.0.705.0 Canary
• Opera 11.01
• Opera 11.10 Beta
• Internet Explorer 9
• Safari 5.0.4

The following benchmarks have been utilized:

• HTML5 Test
• Acid 3 Test
• Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark
• Fish IE Tank

Results

Both Google Chrome versions are leading the HTML5 test. They are the only browser that reach a score higher than 300 on the test. Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 3.6.15 bring up the rear with scores below 200 points.

The three browsers Safari, Google Chrome 12 and Opera 11.10 Beta manage to score 100 out of 100 points in the Acid 3 test. The remaining browsers all score more than 90 points, with Firefox 3.6.15 bringing up the rear with 94 points. It is a little surprising that the current Dev version of Google Chrome scores 96 points.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 scores the best result in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. It took the browser 196.9 ms to complete the benchmark. Firefox 4 RC, Google Chrome and the Opera browsers all completed the benchmark in less than 235 milliseconds. Only Apple’s Safari with more than 300ms and Firefox 3.6.15 with more than 650ms scored considerably worse in the benchmark.

The last benchmark, Microsoft’s IE Fishtank, benefits highly from hardware acceleration. All browsers with hardware acceleration ran the demonstration in 35 fps or more, with Internet Explorer 9 reaching the maximum of 60 fps.

Firefox 3, Opera 11 and Safari do not utilize hardware acceleration yet which explains the mediocre score of 2 respectively 3 fps in the benchmark. Opera Software did however release a special build of the browser not long ago that supports hardware acceleration. The test ran in 60fps in that version of the Opera web browser (see Opera Hardware Acceleration Demo Is Blazingly Fast).

And here are all results in one chart. Red values indicate the lowest test result, green the highest.

Click on the screenshot to see it in its original size.

Closing Words

Benchmarks are not everything, especially since all companies and developers have improved the speed and web standards support of their browsers significantly. Some of the benchmarks may increase in importance over time, the HTML5 benchmark for instance or the Fish Tank demo that benefits from hardware acceleration. They become more relevant when websites start implementing technologies on their websites that make use of those features.

Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome have the best scores in two of the four different benchmarks. The browser with the worst scoring is Firefox 3.6.15 which will soon be replaced on many systems with the upcoming Firefox 4 which scored significantly better in most benchmarks.

All browsers have improved significantly when looking back at the test results of the benchmarking test in 2008. Both Google Chrome and Firefox were the two only browsers that completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in less than 1000ms. That’s almost five times as much as today’s browsers need.

Peacekeeper is a new Internet browser benchmark by Futuremark which are probably best known for their video graphics benchmarks 3DMark and PCMark. The benchmark is compatible will all web browsers that support Java and JavaScript. It will extract general information from the computer system including its cpu, computer memory and operating system before starting the benchmark.

The benchmark itself is a series of tests that are conducted in the same browser window. The result is displayed in the end which would not make that much sense unless there would be some sort of comparison available. Probably the most interesting aspect of the Internet browser benchmark is the chart in the end that is displaying the performance of several web browsers when run on four different computer systems.

The chart displays the performance of ten web browsers, including both final versions like Internet Explorer 8 or Safari 4 and beta versions like Opera 10 or Firefox 3.1b3, on four different computer systems. Two Intel computer systems running the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 and Intel Core i7 Processor 920 plus two AMD systems running the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and AMD Phenom II X4 940. It is therefor possible to analyse the performance of a web browser running on a local computer system with those run by other users who took the benchmark.

One interesting aspect of winsat.exe is that it can also be launched under Windows XP. It provides the same functionality on that operating system with the exception of the Windows Experience Engine. What you basically get is a benchmarking tool for your computer system developed by Microsoft.

The tool has to be acquired before it becomes available in Windows XP. The easiest way to do that is to download the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor 1.0 and extract the installation package with the Universal Extractor or a similar tool that is capable of that. The other possibility would be to install the Upgrade Advisor and look into the program directory afterwards.

Winsat.exe can then be launched from the command line. The basic parameter that is providing details about arguments is winsat -?. The main assessments are cpu, disk, mem, dwm, d3d, media and mfmedia which somethings require additional switches.

The switches are not outlined in the help documentation. They are however available at the Technet Library page.

The winsat mem command supports 14 switches. Here are a few examples of what you can do with the Windows System Assessment Tool:

The following example assesses CPU performance using 256-bit AES cryptographic algorithms:

winsat cpu -encryption

Measuring read speed of a local drive:

winsat disk -read -ran -drive c

How can this benchmark aid the user? It could for instance help to determine the best location for a cache by comparing the write and read speed of all hard drives and external drives. It can also be used to measure the speed of old or new computer memory.

Application Startup Timer (via How To Geek) can deliver that proof by measuring the startup time of applications. The application opens and closes a a selected application and logs the startup time of the application in a log file. This provides information about the performance gains when run before and after optimizing an application.

The application’s interface requires some explanation. The first field named Application has to point to an application on the system. The second called Cmd Line is optional and can be used to execute command line parameters. Log File points to a log file on the computer’s hard drive while Window Name has to contain part of the window’s name so that the application startup timer can automatically close the window.

The first three check boxes determine how the application is detecting the window of the application that is currently tested while the last three check boxes determine how the benchmarking software should close the application window. The values shown in the screenshot should work fine for most applications.

3D Mark06

3D Mark06 comes in a limited free version and $20 upgradable version. The program does a number of tests to your PC then brings up the results in your browser compared to other slower or faster systems.

Fraps

This tool will give you a quick indication of what your graphical frame rate is by sitting in the corner of the screen and providing automatic updates. Additionally it also does screenshots and screencasts via the shortcut key.

Sandra

This program provides complete system diagnosis and documentation. It’s completely free and provides a series of tools which will benchmark your PC, show hardware and software details and configuration and a whole number of other tests. This program will take a while when running tests but it provides the most comprehensive results of the three.

CPU-Z

This program runs off a USB drive and is designed for those who are interested in overclocking their systems. By running it you can get all the hardware details of the system, useful maybe for checking the specs of someone else’s computer or for making sure you buy the correct item to upgrade.

If you already have an USB flash drive and want to know how it compares you can test the speed of it with the free version of HD Tune which can benchmark USB drives as well. The free version will only test the read speed and access time but it should give a good impression of the capabilities of the device at hand.

To make the test accurate you should set the test speed to Accurate in the benchmark options. The last two steps are to select the USB flash drive from the pulldown menu at the top and to click on start to start the benchmark.

Those speed differences are really interesting. It’s probably a good idea to research USB flash drives extensively before buying one. What’s your experience with those drives ?