Bench Marking We all know that today’s personal computers are capable of astounding performance. If you doubt that, consider any of the current D games, such as Quake II or Monster Truck Madness. However, it is often important to quantify the performance of a system. Just saying that a PC is faster than another system is simply not enough—we must often apply a number to that performance to measure the improvements offered by an upgrade, or to objectively compare the performance of various systems. Benchmarks are used to test and report the performance of a PC by running a set of well-defined tasks on the system. A benchmark program has several different uses in the PC industry depending on what you’re needs are