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QwikMark offers fast, simple, portable system benchmarking
QwikMark has got it all: it's tiny (84KB), completely portable, free, and simple. But what does it do?
It tells you how fast (or slow) your computer is, with just a single click. Just get it, fire it up, and click "Run All Tests." QwikMark will then crunch some numbers and in a couple of minutes, it will show you how many gigaflops your CPU can process, your memory bandwidth, and your disk transfer speed.
While the interface is very simple, it is lacking in just one area: quick comparisons. I have a feeling that my 1MB/sec disk transfer rate is incredibly slow, but that's just a gut feeling. Maybe it's actually blazing fast and I should feel very proud of my rig, but QwikMark won't help me with figuring that out.
Still, if you need a quick and free benchmarking tool, this is a very nice option.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsLonnie McClureJun 22nd 2010 12:32PM
A 1MB/second disk transfer rate is not just slow, it is "something is either wrong with your computer, drive, or this benchmark" slow.
1MB per second was a good transfer rate back when a 100MB drive was considered large.
demoJun 22nd 2010 3:36PM
link says: 400 bad request
pinyataJun 22nd 2010 1:23PM
i ran it and got 28MB/s.
this is on my dell 700m with a 5400rpm 80gb ide drive.
kojo87Jun 22nd 2010 2:06PM
i got 160MB/s for my 2 500GB WD Caviar Black drives in RAID0 (boot drive) and 101MB/s for my solo 1TB WD Black. so i would say there is something wrong with 1MB/s.
my rig also managed to punch out 32 Gigaflops and 2GB/s memory bandwidth. not bad for a system thats over a year old :)
ErebosJun 22nd 2010 5:56PM
it doesn't have a "Copy results" button and it doesn't support multi-core CPUs.
i5-750 2.6GHz, 8GB DDR3 1033MHz, WD3200KS
48 GFLOPs (running on 1 core)
8GB/s mem bandwidth
69MB/s disk transfer
qwikmarkJun 23rd 2010 11:31AM
Hello all,
I'm the developer for QwikMark. Yes, the 1/MB a second result definitely had a problem during the run. Never saw that one before, possibly: 1) a driver/utility/etc is interfering, or 2) write privileges are not allowed on the target drive, or some related security issue. Just guesses, but anyway you might try running it again.
QwikMark was tested on a large number of sample hard drives, everything from old IDE drives running Windows 95 all the way to the latest SSD on Windows 7 x64 which saturates the SATA II bandwidth, and even on USB flash drives. In all cases, it matches Atto benchmark results. Another commenter above said "101MB/s for my solo 1TB WD Black", we have the same drive here, and got identical results for that particular drive.
But the most interesting test, at least in my humble opinion, is the FLOPS test, since it uses the industry standardized Whetstone benchmark -- the same Linux math test used for supercomputers (wikipedia has a good article about it). On my Core 7 i920 4-core, I get 72 Gigaflops. On my netbook, the result is 5 Gigaflops. On an old-school Athlon: 2 Gigaflops. I remember some rusty Windows 95 machine getting just a few hundred MEGAflops (not Giga-), if that makes anyone feel a little bit better.
And of course, remember that QwikMark is a free tool and not commercial. All the comments here are interesting and appreciated; hope this tool helps people. Thanks for the writeup; Erez Zukerman provided a fair and balanced review.
Lonnie McClureJun 23rd 2010 12:59PM
On my PC here at work, on the Seagate ST3500630AS (Barracuda 7200.10 series), I got 72 & 77MB/s on the first partition, 52 & 58MB/s on the second, based on two different test runs.
Erez ZukermanJun 24th 2010 1:04PM
Interesting. Now I ran it again and got 73MB/second. I guess maybe something was using the disk at the same time...