Cpu Benchmark Software For Mac
To make sure the results accurately reflect the average performance of each Mac, the chart only includes Macs with at least five unique results in the Geekbench Browser. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000 (which is the score of an Intel Core i3–8100). Disk Benchmark monitors performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays, as well as connections to storage, allowing you to tune your storage system for optimal performance. Compatible with macOS®, ATTO Disk Benchmark measures your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Mar 11, 2020 There is no denying the fact that macOS is more efficient than other desktop operating systems including Windows. But, that doesn’t mean the OS is without any quirks or pain-points. If the lack of a native feature to disable Turbo Boost seems annoying, the inability to check CPU temperature on Mac feels nothing less than a classy puzzle. While Activity Monitor does offer a way to view how.
How to tell that your Mac works at its full? How to find out how fast your solid state drives (SSD) or hard drive really is? How to get a good insight into any possible failures? The answer: Mac benchmark software.
What’s benchmarking?
Benchmarking is a way to test out the performance of your Mac’s memory, hard drive, graphics card, among other things. It provides numbers for finding the weak spots within the system, comparison with other machines, and can help you understand whether to upgrade to a new laptop or desktop computer.
For example, if you’re planning to install a new video game, you can benchmark your hardware to see if it’s capable of running that game. Or you might want to test if a new SSD is actually performing as advertised.
There are several benchmarking tools available that can measure how well your Mac works. Here we’ll show you some of the best apps in the Mac world and walk you through the benchmark process. So, let’s get started!
Caution: To gather the proper data, close all running programs during the benchmark tests. To measure the performance, they all require 100% of your resources.
How to test the general Mac performance: CPU benchmark
The central processing unit (CPU) is the computer component that’s responsible for executing and interpreting most of the commands of your hardware and software. It’s like your computer’s brain that controls the essential things happening on your Mac.
CPU benchmarks can help you gather information on the main things in your system, including the processor, memory, and more. There are many benchmarking tools designed to measure the general performance of your Mac, but one of the most popular is Geekbench 4.
Geekbench measures your system’s powers and tells how strong your computer is. It uses a number of different tests to model the real-world tasks or applications to define your CPU performance. This simple, yet powerful tool is incredibly easy to use, so you won’t have any problems when benchmarking your Mac with its help.
Download the app, run the test and you’ll define how well your Mac can perform everyday tasks. Be patient, it will take from 2 to 20 minutes to complete the CPU benchmark. When the test is over, you can compare your results with other users’ on the Geekbench Browser. It will give you an idea of how well your Mac performs and whether it can work better.
How to test your graphics card: GPU benchmark
Computer Benchmark Software Mac
GPU benchmarking is a great way to see how well your graphics card can cope with a variety of visual effects and graphical demands. For instance, when a brand new game is coming out, you may want to benchmark GPU to be absolutely confident that your Mac won’t have problems with running it well.
When it comes to choosing software for GPU benchmarks, you have a great choice. There are many good tools for graphics card benchmarks, but we advise you to use the Maxon’s Cinebench. It is based on the animation software Cinema 4D, which is used by studios and various production houses around the world for 3D content creation.
Cinebench is a perfect tool for video card benchmarks, and best of all: it’s completely free. Run a test with Cinebench to see if your graphics card is getting the score you hoped for.
How to benchmark your Mac hard drive and SSD
When it comes to measuring your hard drive or SSD performance, the best utility to use is Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. It’s a simple tool that allows to quickly test your disk speed for working with high-quality videos and demanding applications.
To start using the app, simply download and open it, choose your drive (if your computer is using more than one), and click Start to run the benchmark test. Very quickly you’ll determine the hard drive read and write speeds and see if they are suitable for high-end video related operations.
Good news: Blackmagic disk speed test is free to download from the App Store. So take advantage of it once you need to know how well your MacBook’s SSD is performing.
How to optimize your Mac’s performance
Benchmarking won’t speed your computer or increase its performance. It can only show you how well your Mac works and if there are any faults within the various components. But a utility like CleanMyMac X is designed to monitor the health of your Mac and improve its efficiency with a set of optimizing goodies.
If you want to see how your Mac is performing, just go to the CleanMyMac X Menu. All you need is one glance to see your hard drive space, processor load, battery life, and memory usage. And don’t worry, if there’s a problem with your Mac, the app will let you know immediately and help you with the fix.
CleanMyMac has the Maintenance module that gives you direct access to all sorts of optimizing things: repairing disk permissions, running maintenance scripts, reindexing Spotlight, verifying startup disk, and much more. Just run a set of scripts to quickly optimize your system’s performance.
Oh, we almost forgot to tell you — CleanMyMac is incredibly easy to use and completely free to download. With its help, you’ll keep your computer optimized and speed it up at a moment’s notice. Give it a try and maintaining your Mac will become a whole lot easier.
As you see, there are many ways to test and measure your Mac performance. See how your Mac works over time and make sure to keep it in shape for years.
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This article describes some of the commonly used features of Activity Monitor, a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.
Open Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder, or use Spotlight to find it.
Overview
The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.
Add or remove columns in each of these panes by choosing View > Columns from the menu bar. The View menu also allows you to choose which processes are shown in each pane:
- All Processes
- All Processes Hierarchically: Processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.
- My Processes: Processes owned by your macOS user account.
- System Processes: Processes owned by macOS.
- Other User Processes: Processes that aren’t owned by the root user or current user.
- Active Processes: Running processes that aren’t sleeping.
- Inactive Processes: Running processes that are sleeping.
- Windowed Processes: Processes that can create a window. These are usually apps.
- Selected Processes: Processes that you selected in the Activity Monitor window.
- Applications in the last 8 hours: Apps that were running processes in the last 8 hours.
CPU
The CPU pane shows how processes are affecting CPU (processor) activity:
Click the top of the “% CPU” column to sort by the percentage of CPU capability used by each process. This information and the information in the Energy pane can help identify processes that are affecting Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity.
More information is available at the bottom of the CPU pane:
- System: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by system processes, which are processes that belong to macOS.
- User: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by apps that you opened, or by the processes those apps opened.
- Idle: The percentage of CPU capability not being used.
- CPU Load: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by all System and User processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The color blue shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by user processes. The color red shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by system processes.
- Threads: The total number of threads used by all processes combined.
- Processes: The total number of processes currently running.
You can also see CPU or GPU usage in a separate window or in the Dock:
- To open a window showing current processor activity, choose Window > CPU Usage. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU Usage.
- To open a window showing recent processor activity, choose Window > CPU History. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History.
- To open a window showing recent graphics processor (GPU) activity, choose Window > GPU History. Energy usage related to such activity is incorporated into the energy-impact measurements in the Energy tab of Activity Monitor.
Memory
The Memory pane shows information about how memory is being used:
More information is available at the bottom of the Memory pane:
- Memory Pressure: The Memory Pressure graph helps illustrate the availability of memory resources. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The current state of memory resources is indicated by the color at the right side of the graph:
- Green: Memory resources are available.
- Yellow: Memory resources are still available but are being tasked by memory-management processes, such as compression.
- Red: Memory resources are depleted, and macOS is using your startup drive for memory. To make more RAM available, you can quit one or more apps or install more RAM. This is the most important indicator that your Mac may need more RAM.
- Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed in your Mac.
- Memory Used: The total amount of memory currently used by all apps and macOS processes.
- App Memory: The total amount of memory currently used by apps and their processes.
- Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be compressed or paged out to your startup drive, so it must stay in RAM. The wired memory used by a process can’t be borrowed by other processes. The amount of wired memory used by an app is determined by the app’s programmer.
- Compressed: The amount of memory in RAM that is compressed to make more RAM memory available to other processes. Look in the Compressed Mem column to see the amount of memory compressed for each process.
- Swap Used: The space used on your startup drive by macOS memory management. It’s normal to see some activity here. As long as memory pressure is not in the red state, macOS has memory resources available.
- Cached Files: Memory that was recently used by apps and is now available for use by other apps. For example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit Mail, the RAM that Mail was using becomes part of the memory used by cached files, which then becomes available to other apps. If you open Mail again before its cached-files memory is used (overwritten) by another app, Mail opens more quickly because that memory is quickly converted back to app memory without having to load its contents from your startup drive.
For more information about memory management, refer to the Apple Developer website.
Energy
The Energy pane shows overall energy use and the energy used by each app:
- Energy Impact: A relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app. Lower numbers are better. A triangle to the left of an app’s name means that the app consists of multiple processes. Click the triangle to see details about each process.
- Avg Energy Impact: The average energy impact for the past 8 hours or since the Mac started up, whichever is shorter. Average energy impact is also shown for apps that were running during that time, but have since been quit. The names of those apps are dimmed.
- App Nap: Apps that support App Nap consume very little energy when they are open but not being used. For example, an app might nap when it’s hidden behind other windows, or when it’s open in a space that you aren’t currently viewing.
- Preventing Sleep: Indicates whether the app is preventing your Mac from going to sleep.
More information is available at the bottom of the Energy pane:
- Energy Impact: A relative measure of the total energy used by all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency.
- Graphics Card: The type of graphics card currently used. Higher–performance cards use more energy. Macs that support automatic graphics switching save power by using integrated graphics. They switch to a higher-performance graphics chip only when an app needs it. ‘Integrated’ means the Mac is currently using integrated graphics. ‘High Perf.’ means the Mac is currently using high-performance graphics. To identify apps that are using high-performance graphics, look for apps that show ‘Yes’ in the Requires High Perf GPU column.
- Remaining Charge: The percentage of charge remaining on the battery of a portable Mac.
- Time Until Full: The amount of time your portable Mac must be plugged into an AC power outlet to become fully charged.
- Time on AC: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was plugged into an AC power outlet.
- Time Remaining: The estimated amount of battery time remaining on your portable Mac.
- Time on Battery: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was unplugged from AC power.
- Battery (Last 12 hours): The battery charge level of your portable Mac over the last 12 hours. The color green shows times when the Mac was getting power from a power adapter.
As energy use increases, the length of time that a Mac can operate on battery power decreases. If the battery life of your portable Mac is shorter than usual, you can use the Avg Energy Impact column to find apps that have been using the most energy recently. Quit those apps if you don’t need them, or contact the developer of the app if you notice that the app’s energy use remains high even when the app doesn’t appear to be doing anything.
Disk
The Disk pane shows the amount of data that each process has read from your disk and written to your disk. It also shows ‘reads in’ and ‘writes out’ (IO), which is the number of times that your Mac accesses the disk to read and write data.
The information at the bottom of the Disk pane shows total disk activity across all processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing IO or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of reads per second or the amount of data read per second. The color red shows either the number of writes out per second or the amount of data written per second.
To show a graph of disk activity in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Disk Activity.
Network
The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network. Use this information to identify which processes are sending or receiving the most data.
The information at the bottom of the Network pane shows total network activity across all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing packets or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of packets received per second or the amount of data received per second. The color red shows either the number of packets sent per second or the amount of data sent per second.
To show a graph of network usage in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Network Usage.
Cache
In macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later, Activity Monitor shows the Cache pane when Content Caching is enabled in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. The Cache pane shows how much cached content that local networked devices have uploaded, downloaded, or dropped over time.
Use the Maximum Cache Pressure information to learn whether to adjust Content Caching settings to provide more disk space to the cache. Lower cache pressure is better. Learn more about cache activity.
The graph at the bottom shows total caching activity over time. Choose from the pop-up menu above the graph to change the interval: last hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
Learn more
Best Cpu Benchmark Software
- Learn about kernel task and why Activity Monitor might show that it’s using a large percentage of your CPU.
- For more information about Activity Monitor, open Activity Monitor and choose Help > Activity Monitor. You can also see a short description of many items in the Activity Monitor window by hovering the mouse pointer over the item.
