Ive got tons of old hardware lying around, and I would like to know which components have the best performance. I want to benchmark the overall performance of several CD drives and old video cards.

So far, I think I know what to do with the CD drives. Only a few of them are writers, so I will only be benchmarking read speed. I have used AIDA32 (my favorite system info program) to find the average read speed:

This seems like a good test, so I will run it for each of my cd drives. Is this the correct way to do this type of thing?

As for the video card benchmarking, I do not know what program to use. In the Display>GPU section of Aida it has "Pixel/Texel Fillrate" reading:


Is this a good way to benchmark the overall performance of a video card? My other cards I want to benchmark are really old/weak ones - I know one is a 32mb voodoo 3, another one is a 32mb matrox dual display - so I dont think something like 3dmark 03 will work. So, how should I go about doing this? Thanks in advance

Just go with 3DMark 2001se for your "Older" vid cards .
I know there's even older stuff, but why bother 2001se works well.
Used with riva tuner, you can benchmark and tweak for optimal performance.

Thanks a bunch, I thought 03 was their oldest version. I'll be using that and ill tell if it works with my cards or not.

Another question - drivers. I always have to install software display drivers before hardware 3d acceleration will work at all. With taking my current card out and putting these others in, what do I do about drivers?

Basically all I need to know is, do you have to install software for 3d acceleration to work? If you've ever built a PC, you would know this - so far every PC i have built has required software for hardware acceleration to work.