So you read our articles, looking to find out which video card or CPU or drive or whatever is fastest, right? But how do you then compare our scores to your own system's performance? Many of you, no doubt, benchmark your stuff so much you could teach us a thing or two. But enough of you send us emails or post in our forums, asking how to go about doing it. So we've decided to create a series of articles/guides, this being the first, which let you know what you can do to benchmark your systems, yourselves.

This guide will offer info on benchmarking your video cards, with future editions coming that will guide you through benchmarking CD-ROM's, CDRW's, hard drives, and of course CPU's. We'll make mention of some of the 'professional' suites, of course; but our focus will be on what the average home user can do to test his/her system without having to sign over a pint of blood and a first born child (or, less facetiously, pay a lot of money or prove your press credentials and sign an NDA) to use the 'professional' suites.

Publisher Web Site: www.madonion.com
3Dmark 2001 Web Site: http://gamershq.madonion.com/products/3DMark2001/
Cost: $0 to $49.99

Let's start with one of the most common benchmarks you'll see as part of video card reviews, MadOnion's 3DMark2001. Available through their web site, 3DMark2001 is the latest version of MadOnion's popular video benchmarking software package. While this guide is meant to introduce you to various means of benchmarking, not to review them, it should be noted that this latest version came without the CPUMark feature that enabled reviewers to also use 3Dmark2000 to benchmark CPU performance.

While many professional reviewers will opt to buy a copy of 3DMark2001 Pro on a CD for $49.99 or download that version for $39.99, those who just want the scores and don't need or want the Batch Run Wizard, ResultBrowser2001, reference images to help automate testing and compare the performance and quality of cards can certainly make do with the downloadable free version of the software. Those with slow analog modems and faint hearts, however, need not apply, as it is a 40 meg download.

Using the software is actually quite straightforward, and you will be able to test the performance of your card at various resolutions and color depths. But for those looking for a quick reference, the standard setting of 1024x768, 32-bit, will do quite nicely. And once you have downloaded the software, it's just a matter of starting the software and letting it run through its 20 tests. But make sure to follow the instructions you'll find on MadOnion.com's web site and restart your system before each test.

Also, for those of you who are going to run this on a fully loaded work system (the cleaner the system, often, the better and more accurate your results will be), make sure to disable anything you might have running in the background.