Geekbench: Cross-Platform Benchmark

Have you ever wanted to compare your system to a friend’s that runs Windows or Linux? Traditionally, you would just have to compare hardware specs or do what computing magazines do and use software benchmarks such as Photoshop filters or video compression. Primate Labs has solved this inconvenience with Geekbench, a cross-platform (Mac, Linux, and Windows) benchmarking tool.

Geekbench is a fairly comprehensive benchmarking tool, however it does not test the performance of your graphics processor. It supports multi-thread processors, SIMD instructions (both Altivec and SSC), both 32 and 64-bit benchmarks, and it is even available in both Universal and Rosetta versions so you can test the speeds of running Intel vs. PPC apps. Geekbench is very simple to run, there are no fancy settings, you just make sure it is the only program running and then run the tests. On my MacBook Pro it only took a minute to run and I was then presented with a score (2770). The results breaks down all the tests into categories and gives category scores as well as performance on each test.

You can choose to submit your results to the Geekbench website, allowing you to share your results with others as well as compare similar computer’s results. To see what the full results look like, check out my benchmark. If you are curious as to how your Mac performs against other computers, give Geekbench a try. There is a free trial available from Primate Labs. If you want to do Rosetta or 64-bit benchmarking, you must pay the $19.95 registration fee.

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