The benchmark set is proposed, which comprises 126 principal elements of chemical shielding tensors, and the respective isotropic chemical shielding values, of all 42 C-13 nuclei in crystalline Tyr-D-Ala-Phe and Tyr-Ala-Phe tripeptides with known, but highly dissimilar structures. These data are obtained by both the NMR measurements and the density functional theory in the pseudopotential plane-wave scheme. Using the CASTEP program, several computational strategies are employed, for which the level of agreement between calculations and experiment is established. This set is mainly intended for the validation of methods capable of predicting the C-13 NMR parameters in solid-state systems. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.