How Fast Is It?...

Before you even begin to determine how successful your assembly went, you should immediately install all the CD drivers that came included with your hardware. An important disc to install is the one included with your motherboard, which will install the specific drivers associated with the motherboard. This ensures that all of the features included with your motherboard will be activated, including FireWire (if included), USB drivers, SATA drivers, and many other minute but important features.

Also, on occasion there are newer driver updates on the Internet for your motherboard as well. I wouldn't worry about installing them until you've configured everything; they are easily downloaded from Microsoft's Update Site.

To ensure that your AGP (and several other things; we'll discuss them in a sec) are enabled, download WCPUID from the author's site. The screenshot below illustrates what the program will look like when you first run it:

This graphic details what type of processor you have (or what your computer recognizes you as having). Take note of (we'll be coming back to it soon) the 'System Clock' and the 'Multiplier', as if your processor shows up as something slower (for instance, if you bought a 2600+ but it shows up here as an 1800+), these are the main culprits; I'll explain what to do about this in a bit. But as for the AGP, push the circled 'Chipset Info' button, which will bring you to a screen like the one below:

What AGP rate your motherboard can support is illustrated under the 'Status' column. Mine supports 4x and 8x AGP. The circled 8x is what level of AGP is currently enabled on my computer.

For the next couple of pages, you'll need to download Sisoft Sandra to fully test out your system. If you're not that interested in the details (especially if your processor shows up as it should and the AGP is OK), I'd skip ahead to the Free Software section.


Next - System Benchmarks »