I never liked the benchmark utilities. Yeah sure Valley and Heaven from Unigine is cool, rather pretty, and thermark and AIDA, or..... whatever tests, are great. But I don't like the synthetic tests. They pull out a generic number and say "BAM, there ya go, 80 bajillion and 4!!!! WOOHOOSWEGSWEG air-air-airhorn".
I test with real world stuff. Distributed computing, how long it will take to unzip an actual file (normally an OSX iso but I have done bruteforce packs for password crackers varying from 500 MB to 15 GB as tests) and measure time and heat for that. For the GPU I'll put together a video from a stream and tell my editor to use the GPU to render instead, or test every graphics mode in skyrim, put a timer down for different image resolutions.
Sure these take longer but at the same time this is also when I'm actually doing something. I don't know if anyone else does it that way seeing as how @Logan and other none-such people are Unigine and AIDA fanboys/girls or just obnoxious about it.
Yea, I'm really not a fan of synthetic benchmarks either. Some large number on the screen is not very useful, plus some of them can be skewed. Only time I use graphical benchmarks is usually for temperature testing. Other than that, I prefer using games to see how well it performs.
Star citizen multiplayer or swarm with OCCT running in the background will crash any instability anywhere in your system within 10 minutes guaranteed every time.
I like using Witcher 3 to check graphics performance when overclocking
Using Star Citizen is nice to see result from a cpu overclock.
I use the Phoronix Test Suite. It runs both Synthetic and Realistic tests. It runs tests of things you might actually do. There are over 100+ test suites with over 450+ individual tests that can be run. It also gets VERY in depth with the testing and results.
Phoronix Test Suite can be run on Windows as well simply by downloading and unpacking the Generic Package and running the Batch file in the folder assuming you have PHP5 installed.