WinSAT, short for Windows System Assessment Tool, is a Windows built-in command line tool that benchmarks various components of a Windows PC. It was first introduced in Windows Vista and is included on with any new version of Windows ever since, including Windows 10. The executable file of the tool, winsat.exe, can be found in the system32 folder of the System folder.
Remember the Windows Experience Index (WEI) in both Vista and Windows 7? It was calculated by WinSAT command to measure the computer’s hardware ratings.
Syntax
winsat <assessment name> <assessment parameters>
In which, the assessment names are:
- winsat dwm – to assess the ability of a system to display the Aero desktop effects.
- winsat d3d – to assess the ability of a system to run Direct 3D applications.
- winsat mem – to assess system memory bandwidth.
- winsat disk – to assess the performance of disk drives.
- winsat cpu – to assess the performance of CPUs.
- winsat media – to assess the performance of video encoding and decoding using the Direct Show framework.
- winsat mfmedia – to assess the performance of video decoding using the Media Foundation framework.
- winsat features – to enumerates relevant system information.
To get the help of the command, run
winsat -help
You will need to run the WinSAT command in an elevated Command Prompt window.
Examples
Now let’s take a few examples to see how it works.
To run a full assessment
winsat formal
It runs a set of pre-defined assessments and saves the data in an XML file in %systemroot%performanceWinSATdatastore folder.
If you need to rerun the assessment,
winsat formal -restart
To assess disk performance
To assess the sequential IO read performance on my C: drive:
winsat disk -seq -read -drive c
To assess the random IO write performance on C: drive:
winsat disk -ran -write -drive c
To run a full assess with default configuration:
winsat disk
To assess memory performance
To run a full RAM assessment with default configuration:
winsat mem
To run a more specific assessment, such as uns the assessment for a minimum of 4 seconds and no longer than 12 seconds, using a 32MB buffer size and saving the results in XML format to the file memtest.xml.
winsat mem -mint 4.0 -maxt 12.0 -buffersize 32MB -xml memtest.xml
To assess processors performance
To run an assessment using 256-bit AES encryption:
winsat cpu -encryption
To run an assessment using a Lempel-Zev compression:
winsat cpu -compression
