Geekbench 6.3.0

Overview

Do you want to benchmark your computer? No? Don’t be afraid of the truth. Get Geekbench to measure your computer’s speed and compare your results with the rest of the Geekbench community, plus learn a lot more about how well your computer can perform on certain situations. Features include real-world tests for benchmarking your computer under normal occasions, stress tests to figure out problems with your computer and the ability to measure performance in each CPU core separately.

Installation

Very easy and straightforward installation that requires no technical knowledge. Wait a few seconds for the main installation process to finish and then start using it. No malicious items are included in the setup and neither do additional advertised software.

The program is available to all Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS users. We'll test the Windows edition here.

Interface

Geekbench’s interface doesn’t have much eye-candy, but is decent and organized. In the main window you can see information regarding your system (OS, Processor, Model and Memory) and the Benchamrk Architecture. The latter feature lets you choose between 32-bit benchmarks and 64-bit benchmarks (32-bit benchmarks can be performed on 64-bit OS, but 64-bit benchmarks cannot be performed on 32-bit benchmarks).

Click the “Run Benchmarks” button to start the benchmarking process.

Pros

Geekbench is not like other benchmark utilities, and you can figure that out as soon as I explain how it works. First of all, its benchmark test consists of 3 different workloads (workloads are group of tests): Integer, Floating Point and Memory workload.

The integer workload performs various tests related to cryptography mostly and make heavy use of integer instructions (like most computer software). The performed benchmarks are AES, Twofish, SHA1, SHA2, BZip2 compression and decompression, JPEG compression and decompression, PNG compression and decompression, Sobel, Lua and Dijkstra.

Floating Point workloads perform tasks that make heavy use of floating-point operations, and are mostly related to mathematical concepts and methods. Those included are Black-Scholes, Mandelbrot, Sharpen image, Blur image, SGEMM and DGEMM (Single and Double precision GEneral Matrix Multiplication, SFFT and DFFT (Single and Double precision Fast Fourier Transform), N-Body and Ray Trace.

Memory workloads measure memory bandwidth by performing the following tests: STREAM copy, STREAM scale, STREAM, add and STREAM triad (those tests are called the STREAM benchmarks).

For detailed information regarding the workloads and each benchmark, you can visit these links:

http://support.primatelabs.com/kb/geekbench/interpreting-geekbench-3-scores

http://support.primatelabs.com/kb/geekbench/geekbench-3-benchmarks

Another interesting feature in Geekbench is its Stress Test. This operation runs the program’s multi-threaded benchmarks in a loop in order to place a lot of stress on the processor and other hardware components. The reports of the Stress Test include the following statistics: Iterations, Elapsed reports, Errors Detected, Average Score, Top Score and Latest Score. There are two ways to see whether your computer experiences problems; first, by checking the Average Score and Latest Score and comparing it to the Top Score (if they are by far lower than the Top Score then there’s probably an overheating issue with the processor) and second, if there are errors detected in the respective field of the generated report. Unfortunately, in this case it’s not easy to tell what the problem is.

Cons

None.

Alternatives

Novabench (free), CINEBENCH (free), Xbench (free, Mac only), PerformanceTest (paid) and AIDA64 (paid) are all benchmarking tools with many capabilities. The last one (AIDA64) also has a set of overclocking, fine-tuning and troubleshooting tools and is suitable for more experienced users.

Conclusion

Geekbench is a well-known and accurate benchmarking tool that can measure your computer’s true speed and performance. Real geeks use Geekbench.