In some situations it can be useful, even just out for mere curiosity, to know more about your computer's performance or that of a single component: to this end it is usually necessary to run a specific software program known as a "benchmark". XtremeMark is a software of this kind and it will test the speed of your PC and in particular that of your CPU (Central Processing Unit) by executing a large amount of parallel calculations and so on.

The new version of XtremeMark can put both older and newer CPUs to the test; it supports 32/64bit processors, multicore and multi-thread (max 16 cores or parallel threads) machines. The strong point of XtremeMark is in its wide range of customization options: you can set how many threads to use for the test, how many calculations to carry out (from 10 million to 100 billion) and the priority level for calculations. Once a test has been performed, XtremeMark compiles a brief report which contains precise info about the computer and test results (the results are also exportable as TXT or RTF format files, thus it'll be easier to save them or share them on the Net, in forums, websites, via mail or even in a chatroom).