Building a New PC for Music - Part 4: Benchmarking

I wanted to test how fast this new MAESTRO-2 PC is. Found an interesting benchmark site: PassMark. They offer a software for benchmarking your own PC; unfortunately this is only free for 30 days, then one has to pay $24 to activate the software. I tried the free version (fortunately there is a Windows 7 64bit version available) and ran the benchmarking: the overall PC system score is not at the top: it is at 1553, out of the current best one which is currently at 6258. My CPU benchmark is at 5931, which is not bad compared to the current top at 7298, especially since I run the CPU without any tuning: no overclocking, no higher voltage. In terms of HD the ranking of my system is at 1631 - the RAID really shows off here, compared to the overall top scores of 1724 and 1639. In the web page, only scores are shown which come from a minimum number of sampled systems; since my system appears to be unique, it is not shown there - but it would be overall on #3! There is no web comparison of the memory, but one can download individual benchmark reports uploaded by other users. The memory score of MAESTRO-2 is 2533, which is close to the upper end of a few selected systems with which I compared the data. The graphics data are as expected in the mid ranges, as well as the CD date. But I do not need any of those scores to be high - important are CPU, HD, and memory.

Moldau on Amazon: Rank 209 out of 251

Just checked on Amazon: my recording of Smetana's Moldau is on rank 209, when searching for the term "Moldau" and sorting by "Bestselling". Nice - means I might have made one sale! :)

When searching Amazon for "Vltava", my recording comes even up on rank 60, out of 75. This is even better then Celibidache's version (rank 70)! Good that I put both name versions in the title.

For information: "Vltava" top-selling is the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and "Moldau" top-selling is Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.