There's probably a lot that I could say about hardware here, and maybe one day I will. To summarise though, I'd say it's incredibly important to have reliable and consistent metrics when testing hardware. A lot of products claim to be aimed at professionals, and charge 2-3 times the consumer rate for the highfalutin pomp of the 'pro' moniker, but do not perform any faster in professional benchmarks. A true professional knows their tools well enough to know marketing hype from sincerity, and does not get deceived by meretricious branding exercises
Having said that, it can be very hard to 'cut through the crap' when it comes to building or buying your systems.
This tool will prove an invaluable resource when comparing the real world metrics of these components most critical to performance. It's important to note that, as always, it strongly depends on what you are doing. But if lighting and rendering is your bread and butter, this will give you cold hard numbers once a great deal of real world variables have been removed.
Happy benchmarking, keep it real.