WEI and Balance - A Better Overall Gauge Available than WEI?

[RoadWarrior57]

The Windows Experience Index is a built-in gauge for those of us who build machines for specific functions. My use for it is to quickly spot points of "imbalance" in components. Then I can determine where best to make an improvement in hardware if I am experiencing less-than-desired performance.
The WEI is a simple and quick view. I am looking for more of an expanded view that, like WEI, shows my components on a relative scale so I can see bottleneck spots easily. SiSoft's SANDRA is a bit too much for my needs and really doesn't show a relative "balance" between components.
Many factors play a role in gaming performance including sound card speed. WEI has no score for that one. Does such a component evaluation/comparison/balance program exist? Thanks to all.

 

[wanderer11]

WEI is very unaccurate. My WEI score when down when I added my second gpu for crossfire. The best thing you could do is watch cpu usage/gpu usage/ram usage while you run your program/benchmark. There's no program I know of to do it for you.

 

[RoadWarrior57]

WEI is very unaccurate. My WEI score when down when I added my second gpu for crossfire. The best thing you could do is watch cpu usage/gpu usage/ram usage while you run your program/benchmark. There's no program I know of to do it for you.

Thanks wanderer11. If I wanted to see how well my sound card was or was not being a bottleneck, how would I go about that? Do you or does anyone know of a relative performance test for a sound card? Thanks.

 

[wanderer11]

A sound card is not going to be a "bottleneck". As long as your sound card has the features you want it's not going to affect anything else. I don't know anything about testing sound cards so someone else will have to do that. If you are interested in looking for a cpu/gpu/ram bottleneck you will run the most demanding program you have. Or several of them. Watch cpu core usage by opening task manager>performance, watch gpu usage with MSI Afterburner, RAM usage will also be shown in task manager>performance. Which one of those three things are maxed out? That's your bottleneck.

 

[CaedenV]

WEI is a great idea which is horribly executed and cannot be taken seriously.

WEI is based more upon the idea of a tech tree rather than raw performance. If a processor supports more features then it will often score better (much better) as a low end part than a previous generation high end part that frankly blows the new slower part out of the water.

Also, it depends on what you are doing with your computer. My machine in the office, which is a very simple, cheap, slow computer, scores a 5.0 due to the graphics card... but every single other part in it scores at 6.5+ even though they are still low-end parts! That is ridiculous! A crappy duel core G2020 should not be getting a 7 of 9 score. DDR1333 should be a little bit above a 6 of 9. The SSD in the system gets a transfer rate score of 8 of 9... even though the rest of the system is completely incapable of processing even half of what the SSD spits out. The hilarious thing is that my big monster game rig at home which is several times more powerful than my office PC scores roughly the same (except for the graphics). The entire system is simply broken.

What's more is that it depends on what you are doing with your computer. If you are just gaming then you could have a very nice system capable of 4K gaming, but if you use a HDD for your system drive then it is going to say that the system is unbalanced even though the HDD has little to no performance effect on your gaming experience. Or for my office PC which needs little to no graphics is technically out of balance because everything scores good except for the GPU. Or a video editing rig really only needs good scores on the CPU, ram, and HDD, and the rest of the system doesn't matter.

I guess my point is this: Don't get caught up in bench-marking. It is mostly placebo effect, and there are TONS of other factors not taken into account by bench-marking that may affect your performance, or your perception of the performance. For example a GPU may be pushing plenty of frames to the monitor, but they may not be perfectly timed, or cause screen tearing which detracts from the experience of that performance (this is what gsync is aimed to fix). You may have an amazing computer, but the wireless keys and mice have a bit of lag due to lots of wireless interface in the area making it very difficult to compensate for. Or you might have a perfect rig, but the speakers/headphones you use are not great, or there is lots of background noise in your environment, causing you to miss out on the nuance of the sound effects, or positional audio, or music score. You really need to come at it from the perspective of experience rather than stats and numbers. Computers are living, breathing, growing objects. When the next new GPU comes out then you might upgrade, and a few months later you may get better Ram, and a few months later a better HDD/SSD, etc. etc. etc.

The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a balanced machine, or a computer without bottlenecks. If you look hard enough then you will find a problem. All of the benchmarks in the world will tell you very little about actual real world performance (which is why I prefer real world tests rather than raw benchmarks). The trick to building a 'well balanced' machine is to find the major components for your workload which meet or barely beat your output devices (ie, if your monitor only shows 60fps at 720p then you don't need a GPU that can push 200fps at 720p), and then install support devices which support those important devices, but not necessarily much faster than them.

But at the end of the day just don't trust the WEI. If it is ever fixed then it could be a really neat and cool thing... but as it stands now it is just something that manufacturers can use to advertise their computers. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[RoadWarrior57]

A sound card is not going to be a "bottleneck". As long as your sound card has the features you want it's not going to affect anything else. I don't know anything about testing sound cards so someone else will have to do that. If you are interested in looking for a cpu/gpu/ram bottleneck you will run the most demanding program you have. Or several of them. Watch cpu core usage by opening task manager>performance, watch gpu usage with MSI Afterburner, RAM usage will also be shown in task manager>performance. Which one of those three things are maxed out? That's your bottleneck.

Thanks very much.

 

[CaedenV]

WEI is very unaccurate. My WEI score when down when I added my second gpu for crossfire. The best thing you could do is watch cpu usage/gpu usage/ram usage while you run your program/benchmark. There's no program I know of to do it for you.

Thanks wanderer11. If I wanted to see how well my sound card was or was not being a bottleneck, how would I go about that? Do you or does anyone know of a relative performance test for a sound card? Thanks.

Sound cards are an absolute waste of money. Use onboard audio for processing and a digital interface (spdif or USB) to your amp/dac. It is typically going to be much cleaner and more accurate audio than a sound card can provide. The only (and I truly mean only) reason to get a sound card is if you are doing multi-input recording, or if you want gimmicky features like the ability to change your voice over chat clients.

What makes a sound card sound 'good' (which is a horribly subjective and unscientific thing) is the EQ that they apply to the output, which you can do manually. Or, if you want most of the software features that come with a good high end sound card without wasting all of the money and space of one then buy something like the xfi MB2 software suite for $20-30 which will bring your onboard audio right up to the same level as most $200 sound cards at the cost of a few CPU cycles.

But don't let all of the silly numbers fool you. Unless you are running extremely high end 600ohm headphones then there is only subjective differences between onboard and dedicated audio... and again, if you are running 600ohm headphones then you will be much better served with a digital output to a DAC or an amp.

 

[CaedenV]

A sound card is not going to be a "bottleneck". As long as your sound card has the features you want it's not going to affect anything else. I don't know anything about testing sound cards so someone else will have to do that. If you are interested in looking for a cpu/gpu/ram bottleneck you will run the most demanding program you have. Or several of them. Watch cpu core usage by opening task manager>performance, watch gpu usage with MSI Afterburner, RAM usage will also be shown in task manager>performance. Which one of those three things are maxed out? That's your bottleneck.

One of the most useful tools I found for monitoring performance was using a gaming keyboard with a display on it (I think it was a corsair, but I can't remember as I only used it for a short while for other reasons). What was nice about it was that instead of showing game stats and information on the keyboard I got it to show me CPU, GPU, RAM, and vRAM usage while in game. This helped me track down the fact that my issues with modded Skyrim were because I was literally using up all of the vRAM available and the system was struggling to purge and load resources fast enough which caused all sorts of issues.

Sadly, my setup is not very good for wired devices, so I ended up returning the keyboard. But it was probably the single most useful thing I ever came across for diagnosing in-game problems in real time.

 

[RoadWarrior57]

WEI is a great idea which is horribly executed and cannot be taken seriously.

WEI is based more upon the idea of a tech tree rather than raw performance. If a processor supports more features then it will often score better (much better) as a low end part than a previous generation high end part that frankly blows the new slower part out of the water.

Also, it depends on what you are doing with your computer. My machine in the office, which is a very simple, cheap, slow computer, scores a 5.0 due to the graphics card... but every single other part in it scores at 6.5+ even though they are still low-end parts! That is ridiculous! A crappy duel core G2020 should not be getting a 7 of 9 score. DDR1333 should be a little bit above a 6 of 9. The SSD in the system gets a transfer rate score of 8 of 9... even though the rest of the system is completely incapable of processing even half of what the SSD spits out. The hilarious thing is that my big monster game rig at home which is several times more powerful than my office PC scores roughly the same (except for the graphics). The entire system is simply broken.

What's more is that it depends on what you are doing with your computer. If you are just gaming then you could have a very nice system capable of 4K gaming, but if you use a HDD for your system drive then it is going to say that the system is unbalanced even though the HDD has little to no performance effect on your gaming experience. Or for my office PC which needs little to no graphics is technically out of balance because everything scores good except for the GPU. Or a video editing rig really only needs good scores on the CPU, ram, and HDD, and the rest of the system doesn't matter.

I guess my point is this: Don't get caught up in bench-marking. It is mostly placebo effect, and there are TONS of other factors not taken into account by bench-marking that may affect your performance, or your perception of the performance. For example a GPU may be pushing plenty of frames to the monitor, but they may not be perfectly timed, or cause screen tearing which detracts from the experience of that performance (this is what gsync is aimed to fix). You may have an amazing computer, but the wireless keys and mice have a bit of lag due to lots of wireless interface in the area making it very difficult to compensate for. Or you might have a perfect rig, but the speakers/headphones you use are not great, or there is lots of background noise in your environment, causing you to miss out on the nuance of the sound effects, or positional audio, or music score. You really need to come at it from the perspective of experience rather than stats and numbers. Computers are living, breathing, growing objects. When the next new GPU comes out then you might upgrade, and a few months later you may get better Ram, and a few months later a better HDD/SSD, etc. etc. etc.

The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a balanced machine, or a computer without bottlenecks. If you look hard enough then you will find a problem. All of the benchmarks in the world will tell you very little about actual real world performance (which is why I prefer real world tests rather than raw benchmarks). The trick to building a 'well balanced' machine is to find the major components for your workload which meet or barely beat your output devices (ie, if your monitor only shows 60fps at 720p then you don't need a GPU that can push 200fps at 720p), and then install support devices which support those important devices, but not necessarily much faster than them.

But at the end of the day just don't trust the WEI. If it is ever fixed then it could be a really neat and cool thing... but as it stands now it is just something that manufacturers can use to advertise their computers. Nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks for your time and input. I am just seeing if someone is aware of a diagnostic type program that gives comparative performance of a computer's components on a relative and useful scale - more detailed than WEI. If one were building a small block hot rod engine, one would want to be able to evaluate efficiency improvements, horsepower improvements etc without having overkill on one end and inadequacy on the other. This is where I am coming from here. I have been building computers since 1992 and am really just looking to see if anyone is aware of a simple, yet useful comparative diagnostic program. That, really, is the only answer I am looking for here.

 

[RoadWarrior57]

A sound card is not going to be a "bottleneck". As long as your sound card has the features you want it's not going to affect anything else. I don't know anything about testing sound cards so someone else will have to do that. If you are interested in looking for a cpu/gpu/ram bottleneck you will run the most demanding program you have. Or several of them. Watch cpu core usage by opening task manager>performance, watch gpu usage with MSI Afterburner, RAM usage will also be shown in task manager>performance. Which one of those three things are maxed out? That's your bottleneck.

One of the most useful tools I found for monitoring performance was using a gaming keyboard with a display on it (I think it was a corsair, but I can't remember as I only used it for a short while for other reasons). What was nice about it was that instead of showing game stats and information on the keyboard I got it to show me CPU, GPU, RAM, and vRAM usage while in game. This helped me track down the fact that my issues with modded Skyrim were because I was literally using up all of the vRAM available and the system was struggling to purge and load resources fast enough which caused all sorts of issues.

Sadly, my setup is not very good for wired devices, so I ended up returning the keyboard. But it was probably the single most useful thing I ever came across for diagnosing in-game problems in real time.

Nice tip about the keyboard data. Thanks!

 

[CaedenV]

Thanks for your time and input. I am just seeing if someone is aware of a diagnostic type program that gives comparative performance of a computer's components on a relative and useful scale - more detailed than WEI. If one were building a small block hot rod engine, one would want to be able to evaluate efficiency improvements, horsepower improvements etc without having overkill on one end and inadequacy on the other. This is where I am coming from here. I have been building computers since 1992 and am really just looking to see if anyone is aware of a simple, yet useful comparative diagnostic program. That, really, is the only answer I am looking for here.

That is what reviews are for. Tom's and Anandtech have pretty comprehensive reviews, and real world benchmarks so that you can get a feel for what kind of hardware support a part needs. Software simply cannot do it because it cannot predict real world performance of various hardware combinations. The only way to do it is to build a bunch of rigs, time them as they go through workloads, and then build a big beautiful spreadsheet with all of the comparison data.

 

[IRaCollegeStudent]

I have to agree with the original poster. While everyone knows WEI is not always a completely accurate representation of a system, it does allow for an at-a-glance understanding of the given computer, and the best thing is that it is a uniform bench across all windows 7 machines. No need to go installing a ton of different benchmark apps on every PC I work on. If I look at a system and it does not score a 6.8 or better WEI across the board I will know automatically it is not going to run a 3d game very well.

It also shows you how your entire platform is getting along within itself. 1333 RAM scoring low? Obviously a poor interface, mobo has it underclocked or an outdated driver. Over hundreds of machines I have been able to identify why a certain score was not hitting it's expected mark and can therefore fix it, without having to pour through scads of benchmark numbers. It is a basic tool, not a precision scalpel.

As for onboard sound...well it is way better than it used to be, however I have yet to see one that is as clean as any soundblaster addin card. Clean being the key word there; no snapping noise when unplugging speakers or headphones, no hissing or popping EVER. If your soundblaster were doing this you would know it had either gone bad or it was not playing well with your system (bad power supply, wrong driver, static building up in your environment or it needs to be put in a different slot).

Like I said, I agree with RoadWarrior57, and would like to see something a touch more comprehensive than WEI, yet retaining the at-a-glance functionality. Preferably light weight, a standalone program would be optimal.

So far I have not found one.