A small bead of paste about the size of a pea is all you need.

Clean the processor and cooler of old paste using a disposable alcohol pad (70% or better) and reapply fresh paste before reattaching the cooler. If you unhook the cooler from the processor and you don't see a neat, rectangular smear of thermal paste, but instead it looks like one or more corners of the cooler wasn't making proper contact with the CPU (which will look like a triangle of paste), it's not cooling the CPU properly. To fix this, you'll need to check to see if your cooler is properly seated and tightly held against the processor itself (with a layer of thermal paste in between). If HWiNFO reports that the CPU hit it's max temperature or if it indicates that the CPU core performance is being throttled while running your benchmarks, you have almost certainly found the cause of your lower scores.

This leads the processor to throttle its performance to keep heat within acceptable levels. In 99 times out of 100 cases, the problem is your how you installed the CPU cooler, in that it isn't providing sufficient cooling to bleed off the heat generated by the intense workloads used in benchmarks. If more than one score comes back wildly off from where you would expect it, you'll need to figure out what's getting in the way of your processor's true potential. Now that you know how to benchmark a CPU, you need to know what to do with all this data.įor one, if all of your scores are more or less in line with what you've seen online. Run PassMark's PerformanceTest CPU Benchmark If they're more than 500/1500 points off, respectively, there might be an issue with thermal throttling holding the performance of your chip back. If they are reasonably close (within 300 points on Single Core and within 1,000 on Multi-Core), then you're in good shape. When you find it, compare the average score and the score you have for either Single Core or Multi-Core performance. Now, navigate to Geekbench's Processor Benchmark page to see all of the aggregate scores that have been uploaded to Geekbench.Įither scroll down or use CTRL+F and enter your processor model to search for it on the list. Write these numbers down and rerun the benchmark twice more, writing down the scores each time.Īfter three runs, take the averages of the single core scores and the multicore scores as your final two scores. The tool will run for a few minutes before producing a web page with your results for both single core and multi core performance. Once you've launched Geekbench 6, click the button that says 'Run CPU benchmark'. While we test, we'll be keeping a close eye on these two sensors. Scroll down until you see your processor, and specifically the entries in the table for CPU Package and Core Temperatures. Click it to open up the Sensors Status window. There is going to be a lot of information suddenly on the screen, but the only thing we're interested in is making sure that the CPU is showing up properly in the system information panel.īefore you go any further, at the top of the main HWiNFO window, you'll see a button marked 'Sensors'. When you see the small popup window on launch, press start to open up the system information panel. Once you've downloaded and run an antivirus scan on the installer and its confirmed safe, install the tool wherever you'd like, but make sure to launch it after it finishes installing. Head over to the HWiNFO download page and grab the Windows installer for this tool, which we'll use to check the CPU temperature during testing.

Program to benchmark computer