benchmarking - Given enough detail about a PC is it possible to calculate an accurate benchmark?

If I know enough about a specific computer build is it practically possible to generate a benchmark based on the specification of the components?

For example, I'll know the GPU & CPU speeds, chipset (plus all IO speeds), memory speed / channels etc and I'd like to build benchmarks based on formulas (not software tests).

This seems possible as all of the components should work at the manufacturers stated speed.
The downside is that it would be a theoretical benchmark dependent on the build quality of the motherboard and components which can sometimes be variable.

My question is, is this approach feasible and if not, what are the factors preventing an accurate benchmark formula?

Has anyone seen any algorithmic approaches to benchmarking?

Note:
This is related to my original post (Given a processor specification how can I figure out what RAM it can use?). Now I have more understanding of the importance of the chipset I am restating the question.

Thanks in advance,

Ryan

Answer

How much accuracy for a benchmark do you expect and what type of benchmark do you want to estimate? If 5-10% accuracy will suite you, then you can try. You will have to collect benchmark results from different PC magazines and sites and update your database frequently in order to be able to benchmark different configurations.

In any case you will also have to approximate some results because you will not be able to find tests for any configuration available on the market. For example you found benchmark results for chipsets X and Y for Intel processor 2GHz. Also you have benchmarks for 2.0Ghz and 2.33Ghz processors but for chipset Z. If 2.33Ghz is faster then 2.0Ghz say in 10% on chipset Z, could you expect that it will be faster in 10% on chipsets X and Y, so you can multiply you previous benchmarks on 1.1 ??? This is reasonable, but this will be only an approximate result.

Also please take into account that there is no benchmark that suite all users and each benchmark can depend more on some computer components and less on another. For example if we want to measure floating point operations, we will have better results on more powerful processor. If we will run benchmark test for an Access database, we will see that results depend on HDD performance much more then on processor's and so on.

Theoretical benchmarks are at some point become useless for end users, because what end users want to know is on what PC Vista will start faster or FireFox will open web site faster and it where it will take less time to save huge 20Mb Office document... End users rarely care about numbers of floating point operations.