Benchmark your Mac

How fast (or slow) is your Mac running, and how does it compare to others?

- By DAVID CROOKES

BY BENCHMARKING YOUR Mac, you can measure how well it performs. You can test its single- and multi-core processor (CPU) performance, as well as its graphics (GPU) horsepower. You can also check its rendering performance, and how effectively it reads and writes to disk.

Doing so lets you pinpoint problems, check the effectiveness of upgrades, and even determine if a potential purchase will be an improvement. Regular benchmarking lets you track your Mac's performance over time, but different apps do different things.

Geekbench tests your Mac's CPU and GPU. It scores performance relative to a baseline of 1,000, so a score of 2,500 means your Mac is 2.5 times faster than the reference system. Cinebench provides raw performance scores based on how quickly your CPU can render a complex 3D scene — the higher the better — while Blackmagic Disk Speed Test lets you check read/write disk speeds in MB/sec. Here, we look at all three.

HOW TO Benchmark using Geekbench

1 Run the benchmark
In Geekbench (geekbench.com), select CPU to measure your Mac's processor performance or GPU to test its image and computer vision capabilities. For the GPU, click the GPU API menu, and choose Metal rather than OpenGL. Click Run.

2 View the result