Here's the bottom line: I upgraded from a PIII 550 to an Athlon 2100+ and I'm getting frustrated. So far there are a few noticeably faster things. My bootup sequence, if I didn't have to go through the SCSI check, would be about 1 minute total. That beats about 5 minutes for my old PC. Aside from that, I don't see much difference, and I'm concerned that I threw a lot of money away.

Encoding video (avi, mpeg, etc) into wmv, a major reason for upgrading, is not all that much faster. The system is more steady during the process, but the actual operation hasn't sped up much.

Encoding MP3's hasn't gotten much faster. Perhaps it's because I'm using EAC now instead of Audiocatalyst, and it's simply atempting to be more accurate, but while I can understand that in the ripping process, the encoding process I imagine should not take that very long.

So is there a program I can get that will only do benchmarks to tell me what kind of performance I'm getting? I downloaded Prime95 for testing purposes, but I don't know how to get benchmarks out of it.

Thanks for any help you can give me.