Useful benchmarks!
Seeing Bristol_Jonesey's thread about comparing two CPU's gave me the idea to post the website below. While I'm sure it's not perfect (what is unless both items are compared doing what YOU want to do?), I've found it to be really helpful in learning just how much better (or worse) one item is compared to another.
The main website is
www.passmark.com but the benchmark result pages that you can go to from there that are of the most interest. For example, the aforementioned thread wanted a comparison between the i7 2600K and the i7 3930K. Ok, going to the CPU Benchmarks page (
See here) and then selecting the Highend CPU Chart, you'll see that the i7 3930K has an overall "PassMark" number of 13,495 and a "last seen" price of $684.95 while the i7 2600K has an overall PassMark number of 9,109 with a $294.99 price tag. Naturally, these are both non-overclocked but, just using these figures you can derive that the 3930K is about 48% faster for an additional cost of $389.96 (CPU only - obviously the MB might cost more as well). Note that the "PassMark" number is actually an overall benchmark taken from many separate tests.
The comparisons aren't perfect of course, and input from Jim and Scott is always going to be a huge help, but I've found these charts to be extremely useful in learning what's generally better than something else (you can no longer really tell by the name or speed).
I'm thinking of springing for the software itself (only $24) since you can run it against your system, try something new (including overclocking when applicable) and see if the result really makes your system better - and by how much. Oh, and you only need one copy which you can keep on a fob and run it against multiple systems.
To make everyone else feel better about their systems, I'm currently having to get by with a box-of-rocks where the CPU rates as 588 (if working correctly, mine isn't) and my video card rates as 643... That means an upgrade to just the i7 2600K would give me a CPU that's 15.5 times faster than what I have now! (Can't wait...)
Anyway, I thought people might find the benchmarks useful. It's especially good if you just want a general idea of what's better when you can't tell from the name or specs (like comparing an AMD FX-6100 Six-Core to an Intel Core i7 860 running @ 2.80GHz - which are roughly equivalent BTW).