We present a time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) benchmarking of recently constructed basis set, namely exc-ETDZ (Guevara et al. in J Chem Phys 131: 064104, 2009) for predicting the atomic spectra of the first-row atoms. A systematic testing with 31 density functional methods has been performed to see whether convincing performance of this basis set carries over the TD-DFT formalism. The efficiency of exc-ETDZ basis set for reproducing atomic spectra has been compared with Pople- and Dunning-style basis sets. We focused on the atomic low-lying valence excited states with single excitation character for our benchmarking, and the calculated excitation energies were compared to experimental data. On average, the functionals providing the best match with exc-ETDZ basis are BMK, BH&HLYP and ωB97. Moreover, on the basis of comparison between the results of these superior functionals with CIS(D) estimates, it turned out that TD-DFT and CIS(D) errors are of the same order of magnitude, once the exc-ETDZ basis set is used. Finally, the results of present study indicate that different functionals show results that are highly dependent on the atomic configuration as well as the basis set.
