There’s no shortage of benchmarking tools to choose from, but it has to be said that the selection is rather more limited for anyone running Windows RT. Windows itself used to give you an idea of performance with the Windows Experience Index rating, but this is sadly no more. So now, if you want to compare the raw power of two devices, you’re going to have to turn to a third-party tool.
Over on the XDA Forums, a new home-brewed app in the form of CPU Performance Tester has sprung up; and it does very much what you would expect from the name. It’s a fairly basic affair, but it provides you with simple data that can be easily used to compare the performance of systems.
There are no complex settings to concern yourself with — this app is about as simple as they come — just click one of the five buttons to see how long it take your computer to perform “a large number of mathematical operations”. You can run a single thread, or up to eight simultaneously, and you’ll be provided with a time score which you can use for comparative purposes.
Yes, it’s very simple, but it does the job — and it work with RT!
It’s worth pointing out that when you run CPU Performance Tester, you may well find that it is initially blocked by Windows’ SmartScreen filter. But don’t worry, the app is perfectly safe to run. Just click the More Info link followed by the Run anyway button.
Post your scores below. To kick things off, my Surface Pro took 39 seconds running two concurrent threads.
