Mike said:
SiSoft Sandra Pro can give you a lot of information about your PCs
performance. There are literally hundreds of other programs out there that
will do the same.
Sandra has absolutely no value in assessing the performance
of anything. The benchmarks numbers it generates bear no
relation whatsoever to actual application performance.
Good Sandra results do not mean that the system will perform
well in actual applications, and bad Sandra results do not
mean the system will perform poorly in actual applications.
The only reason so many review sites include Sandra benchmarks
is to appease idiots who would whine if they were omitted.
As far as bottlenecks, it's pretty much standard that your tape, ZIP, floppy
drive and optical drives (CD, DVD) are the slowest component of the system.
External components are also usually very slow as compared to internal ones.
Hard Drives are next. The reason for this is all the moving parts in your
drives. Obviously, a device that has to physically move to transfer data
will not do it as fast as a device that sends data electronically.
What is or is not a bottleneck is very application dependent.
Even for one particular application, the bottleneck can
depend on how you use that application.
The OP didn't even say whether the systems in question
are servers, workstations, or ordinary clients. If the
are servers, what do they "serve" ? If they are workstations,
what kind of work do they do - video ? stats ? CAD/CAM ?
If they are neither, do you want them optimized for
business apps or for games or for something else ?
Even if it is a gaming rig, optimizing it for one game
by choosing a specific processor, chipset, video card,
etc., can incur penalties in other games.
