By Matt Elliott
(May 18, 2005)

Wondering how your PC measures up to your friend's down the street? Or how much faster your new PC is compared to your old dust bucket? If you have a burning desire to know whether you have the fastest PC on the block, you're a candidate for running your own benchmarks.

Testing the strength of your system before and after making a hardware upgrade can help determine whether the funds you put toward a new hard drive or graphics card was money well spent. We run benchmarks every day in the CNET Labs to test the strength of each PC we review. The tests we run are expensive, complicated, and probably not the best way to spend your precious weekend hours. But for a rainy weekend day, we have some cheap and easy tests you can perform to get a sense of your PC's capabilities.