A 'Magic Wand' for Hardware Detection and Analysis

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Since 1996 the online X86 resource portal CPUID has offered its community a superb freeware hardware detection and analysis utility called PC Wizard. With the release of the most recent version, PC Wizard 2005, it's high time that system builders take a serious look at this veritable "magic wand" of a utility. In fact, after extensive testing, I liked PC Wizard so much, I recommend that you include it as part of your standard toolkit. You can use it for checking new systems to make sure they're working up-to-par, and to check your work while maintaining or upgrading existing systems.

System builders who maintain and upgrade existing PCs should find PC Wizard 2005 a superbly useful and informative utility. The program not only delivers readable displays of all the system settings it finds, but also provides the ability to compare performance results with equivalent (or near-equivalent) comparison machines. And it does all this quickly and easily.

PC Wizard 2005 is updated monthly with new technologies and standards. That means the utility can identify most PC system components. It also means the program supports the vast majority of CPUs, including AMD as far back as Am386DX; Intel as far back as i386DX; and most Cyrix and VIA chips, as well as Transmeta processors and IDT Winchips and motherboards. All in all, PC Wizard 2005 does a terrific job of interrogating most PC systems to tease out and report on their contents. This makes it wonderfully handy for system builders and maintainers to have around.

PC Wizard 2005 also lets systems builders run simple benchmarks against a broad range of pre-recorded results. For this area, the program offers short, reasonably quick metrics for CPU performance, L1 and L2 cache performance, RAM performance, hard and optical drive performance, and video performance. That's but a few of its many abilities.

In this TechBuilder Recipe I'll take you through the download and installation process for PC Wizard 2005. Then I'll explain which parts of the program are most informative for system builders, including its benchmarking capabilities. Finally, I'll walk you through real-world situations for which the utility can identify potential areas for system improvements.

One caveat: PC Wizard sometimes errs in its reporting of temperature and voltage readings. Since most PCs and motherboards ship with diagnostic tools that handily do that job—I've included them as illustrations below—I urge you to consult their readings as reality checks before you take PC Wizard's temperature and voltage readings for gospel.

Ingredients

Here's all you'll need on hand for this Recipe:

• Any Windows PC.

• An Internet connection. PC Wizard 2005 is just over 2 MB in size, so a fast connection is best for download.

• A copy of PC Wizard 2005.

While you can pick any Windows-based system for this Recipe, I chose a system I had recently finished building. My goal was to test the utility against some fairly new PC components. Specifically, the system I used was built around a Gigabyte K8NF-9 motherboard with an nVidia NForce4 Ultra chipset and an Athlon 64x2 3800+ CPU.

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