Notes on measuring honestly.
Longer arguments about how hardware gets measured and where the conventions break down.
Benchmarking has a culture problem: the number that gets quoted is almost always a peak, held for a few seconds in a cool room, and the number that decides whether a machine is pleasant to use is the one it still holds several minutes later. These posts are the longer arguments behind that position, and behind the decisions in how SystemCheck measures.
They also mark the boundary honestly. A benchmark that runs inside a browser cannot read a temperature, a fan speed or a wattage, and a good deal of what is written about PC performance quietly assumes access to all three. Where we infer a cause from the shape of a curve rather than reading a sensor, these posts explain how that inference is made and how far it can be trusted.
If you want the method rather than the argument, the methodology page sets out each stage, and the guides section is the practical counterpart: what to do about throttling, how to read a result without fooling yourself, and how to tell a processor limit from a graphics one.