What's holding your PC back, measured before you buy.
Headroom watches your computer doing real work and tells you which part it was waiting on, what the next upgrade would actually buy you, and when the honest answer is don't buy anything.
COMING SOON The first public release is being signed and packaged. This page will have the download as soon as it's ready.
What it does
Watch a program
Pick the program you use, work as normal, and see whether the CPU, RAM, disk or graphics card held it back, or the software itself.
Score this machine
The same fixed work on every PC, with the time yours should get. A part that comes in slow is flagged, with the likely cause.
Test this rig
Gaming, creator and workstation work, each pushing several parts at once. It names what gives out first and the next part that helps.
Honest before it's helpful
- Free fixes first. Memory running below its rated speed, one stick where two belong: it tells you before it suggests spending anything.
- Fix the box first. Unexpected restarts or a failing drive come before any upgrade, because no part fixes those.
- Don't buy is a real answer. If the program only uses one core, a bigger CPU won't help, and it says so.
- Every estimate shows where it came from. Store buttons are plain searches, not paid links.
Nothing leaves your computer
Headroom reads Windows' own performance counters, its event log and your hardware list, and keeps what it finds on your PC. It has no account, no tracking and no upload. Its window is a page served only to your own computer.
Before you run the tests
Score this machine and Test this rig push the whole computer hard for about a minute. Save your work first. A machine with a power or cooling problem can shut off under a load like this, and Headroom will say so in its report if it finds signs of one.
Needs
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No administrator rights to install or run.
- A graphics card with Vulkan or DirectX 12 for the graphics tests (almost every card from the last ten years).