Dacris Benchmarks: Test PC Performance

System Grade™ is a technology (and term) exclusive to Dacris Benchmarks. The problem that System Grade solves is: How do you predict performance in specific real-world scenarios, after measuring performance through largely synthetic benchmark tests?

Furthermore, how do you get easy-to-understand numbers that are actually meaningful? That is, how do you translate benchmark test scores into actionable recommendations?

These questions are answered by Dacris Software's System Grade™ technology.

You can view System Grade results and recommendations by clicking on the System Grade tab on the main screen.

Note: System Grade information is not available until you have run all benchmark tests.

The System Grade tab also displays a marking scheme that allows you to translate the numeric grades into actionable recommendations.

Also, for each usage scenario (e.g. gaming), we select a "weakest component". So if you intend on using your computer for gaming for instance, check that the weakest component for gaming does not have a score below 6. If it does, upgrade that component to improve performance.

The criteria for System Grade will change every few months as software evolves to require more and more hardware resources. Therefore, you should check the System Grade tab with each new version of Dacris Benchmarks that you install to make sure your hardware is still up to speed.

We're obviously not going to give away the formula for System Grade here. However, we will discuss what factors are taken into account by the formula.

First, the formula uses an "ideal score" for a particular scenario and benchmark test (component). For example, for 3D gaming, there is an ideal score of 40 set up for the 3D test. This means that, in order for your video card to score a perfect 10 in the 3D gaming grade, it must have a result of 40 or more in the 3D test.

Furthermore, we use a weight for each ideal score to reflect the importance of that component in the calculation. For example, for 3D gaming, the ideal score for the 3D test has a weight of 70%. This means we consider the video card's 3D performance extremely important for 3D gaming. Everything else is not as important. On the other hand, for something like web hosting, the hard drive turns out to be the most important component. So for that scenario (web hosting), we assign the greatest weight to the hard drive.

Overall, this scheme allows us to come up with some really relevant, neat, and specific recommendations. For example, if your computer is great but your video card is a little old, the video card will be singled out as the "weakest component", but only in the categories where it matters (e.g. 3D gaming). So if you don't do a lot of 3D gaming, you can simply ignore that result.

Here is a reference of system grades and most important components:

Here is a reference of grades and what they mean: